We don’t have a lot of cultivated land. We’ve grown some herbs and concord grapes. We’ve used the herbs in cooking, and I use the grapes to make grape pie. I can usually get two out of the grapes I have at hand.
Update… 90 lbs of shallots to the church food pantry yesterday, and lesser amounts of tomatoes, cucumbers and green beans.
I’ve made honeysuckle sorbet (a la Crook’s Corner) from wild honeysuckle I harvested on my property. I’d say that counts.
My wife and I live on 23 acres that used to be part of my wife’s family’s farm. Her siblings and my father-in-law each live on their own chunk of the property. The lists below are not exhaustive. There are several things I am sure I have forgotten.
The cultivated items that we raised and harvested on our land:
Rhubarb, red raspberries, sweet corn, carrots (orange, red, purple, yellow),
basil, oregano, peas, green beans, lima beans, potatoes (russet, purple),
pumpkin, butternut squash, watermelon, cantaloupes, onions (white, yellow, red)
jalapeños, bell peppers, taro (colocasia elephant ear tubers), broccoli,
cauliflower (white, yellow), lettuce, cabbage, asparagus, strawberries,
garlic, hollyhock blossoms, tomatoes (Roma, cherry, Better Boy), blackberries,
American persimmons, pawpaws, apples, cherries, peaches, pears,
nectarines, grapes (Niagara, Concord, Valencia), turnips
The found items from the woods and fields:
Walnuts, black raspberries, wild strawberries, dewberries, gooseberries,
morels, puffballs, wild onion, linden leaves, maple sap icicles, elderberries
Things I tried unsuccessfully to grow:
Blueberries and kiwi
Things I am growing, but haven’t eaten yet:
Prickly pear fruit (I have some growing in a pot on the patio, currently blooming.)
The soil at my house isn’t great so most of my gardening is limited to containers on my patio. I got a raised bed for Christmas and have added a few more containers every year. I have tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce, carrots, poblano peppers, basil and mint. I’m thinking about getting a second raised bed as the strawberries are trying to take over the first one.
I’m not sure what the issue is with strawberries, but many people have problems with them if they stay in the same bed for more than a few years. If you transplant them periodically, they do OK. If you leave them in the same dirt, they often die out. If I started seeing dusty grey mold on them, I knew it was time to move them. In a planter or pot, you might need to replace the dirt every three or four years to reduce pathogen build-up, if they seem to be growing poorly.
The only specific things I remember eating from a garden are tomatoes and pumpkin seeds. The pumpkin seeds were mostly from a failed attempt at growing a lot of pumpkins as a cash crop one year. We grew other veggies too but I don’t remember them.
From the neighborhood I occasionally found feral strawberries, but rarely, because you had to know where to look, otherwise you wouldn’t be looking at the ground on purpose. We had a box of strawberries from the previous owners in our property proper that we got a few from too occasionally.
We had feral black raspberries both on our property and around the neighborhood. In fact, black raspberries are the only edible fruit that I see in significant numbers in the wild all along the eastern US that I am confident that I can correctly identify. Whenever I see them when walking in the wilderness and they are ripe, I always pop a few in my mouth.
For the ones on our property, we were able to pick lots and lots of them. My mom would occasionally create turnovers/tarts from them, and there was just something about making them with fresh raspberries that made them amazing. Either commercial ones/commercial paste cuts down on the amount of actual fruit, or the freshness somehow comes through in the baking. Only very rarely do I eat any other fruit-based bakery item that tastes so much like you are eating the real thing only sweetened and baked.
Wild strawberries (at first. Died out)
Raspberries
Dill
Tomatoes
Asparagus
Rhubarb
Potatoes
Bell peppers
Zucchini
Green beans
We had a garden, but stopped awhile ago.