Practical Self Reliance

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100+ Things to Forage in Summer

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Summer foraging brings out an abundance of every kind, from edible greens and shoots to berries, fruit, flowers, and even roots.  For the adventurous, there are also wild mushrooms, lichen, sea plants, and more!

Summer Foraging

Summer is the season of abundance! Whether you’re new to foraging or an advanced wildcrafter, this list goes beyond the basics and will help you identify new foods to gather this summer. 

Summer is an excellent time to forage. While many of the classic spring favorites like ramps and morels are finished before the heat of summer sets in, there’s still plenty to enjoy with potent medicinals like wild lettuce, sweet, juicy thimbleberries, and tasty mushrooms like chanterelles. It’s also an enjoyable time to be in the woods. Many of us probably pass by wild edibles while we hike, camp, bike, and work in the garden without realizing it. 

When people think of foraging, they often focus on the easy-to-reach weeds in our lawns, like ground ivy and dandelions. While those certainly have value, foraging goes so much deeper than that.

I designed this list to include more than 100 edible wild foods that you can find in the fields, woods, lakes, and oceans near you this summer. This list goes well beyond other basic lists and even includes a few items I consider to be for advanced foragers only. This list of foods can add exciting new ingredients to your meals and help you bulk up your homestead production. 

I’ve included all my favorite wild edibles and medicinals for beginners, like chicken of the woods mushrooms, purslane, and plantain, as well as less well-known finds like beefsteak mushrooms and mallow. You’ll find edible greens, wild fruits, wild nuts, grains and seeds, water plants, mushrooms, medicinal flowers, and more on this list. 

Summer Wild Edibles

There are so many options in summer that creating this list was a daunting task. To make it easier for you to find things, I decided to divide these wild edibles into sections. For the plants with multiple useful parts or entirely edible, I listed them based on their usage. For example, nettles have edible seeds and leaves, so you’ll find them under edible greens and seeds and grains.

Exactly what you find and when will largely depend on your location and climate. In Georgia, you may find species fruiting in June or July that I won’t see here until August. 

Here are the categories I included in this list:

  • Edible Greens
  • Shoots & Stalks
  • Edible Flowers
  • Trees and Shrubs
  • Wild Fruit and Berries
  • Wild Nuts
  • Roots and Tubers
  • Seeds and Grains
  • Summer Mushrooms
  • Pond, Bog, and Water Plants
  • Sea Vegetables
  • Medicinal Plants

Edible Greens

During the summer, there are edible greens all around you. You can find them growing along hiking trails, in gardens, in parks, in your yard, and even in urban areas. They’re ideal for beginner foragers because they tend to be easy to find, identify, and use. 

Edible greens are one of the most accessible options to get started with foraging! Here are a few of my summertime go-tos:

Chickweed Flowers

Chickweed Flowers

Shoots and Stalks

In addition to leafy greens, a few plants have tasty shoots or stalks. Many of the edible shoots are only available in early spring, but some continue into early summer.

Certain species, like Japanese knotweed, will re-sprout, offering a new batch of shoots when they are mowed.

Thistle Stalk Peeled for eating

Bull thistle stalks

Edible Flowers

All the spring showers bring summer flowers! These may not make up a bulk of the calories on this list, but they are some of the prettiest items you can forage. Some of these wild blooms are excellent cooked, while others offer beautiful color and sweet, delicate flavor that can be used to add beauty to salads, baked goods, and other dishes.

Many of these have some medicinal properties and make good additions to hot or iced herbal tea, cocktails, and other beverages. 

Foraging Pineapple Weed

Pineapple Weed

Trees and Shrubs

Unless they produce fruit or nuts, we tend to ignore the trees and shrubs looming over us as we head out to forage. This is a mistake! So many of our trees offer edible leaves, buds, blooms, bark, sap, and seeds. Here are some of my favorite trees to forage from:

Black Walnut Leaves

Black Walnut Leaves are edible.

Wild Fruit and Berries

Summer is the season for wild fruit! Most of the fruit we forage ripens throughout the summer, starting with the low-growing berries like dewberries and strawberries and moving to larger species like thimbleberries as we move farther into the season. 

Berries, especially, are now some of my favorite foods to forager because the options available at the grocery store come with hefty price tags and lackluster flavor. Many of these fruits are also easy to gather in large quantities, helping to bulk up your diet more than many other foraged items we dabble in here and there.

When there’s an abundance, I love canning, freezing, and drying these crops to use throughout the year. 

Chokecherry Harvest

Harvesting Chokecherries

Wild Nuts

Nuts take a long time to develop and mature, so late summer is usually just the very beginning of nut season. If you live in a southern climate, you may find some of these earlier than I do here in Vermont. However, I felt they were worth adding, no matter where you live, because it’s important to watch for them. If you wait too long to harvest delicious species like hazelnuts, you’ll lose them all to insects and squirrels before you get a chance to harvest any. 

Keep an eye on these nuts in late summer so you don’t miss your harvest window:

Wild Hazelnuts

Roots and Tubers

Roots and tubers are one item we tend to harvest less of during the summer months. This is because plants tend to use their roots and tubers as storage outside of the growing season. During the fall, winter, and spring, the plant uses its roots and tubers to store sugars and starches, so generally, that’s when we want to harvest them because they’re full of flavor and calories. 

In the late spring and early summer, plants take those nutrients out of storage to grow the aerial parts of the plant, including leaves, stems, flowers, and seeds. After flowering and fruiting, most of these perennials will begin to send energy back to their roots and tubers in late summer or fall. Generally, on this list, I focused on roots and tubers that would be tasty when harvested in late summer. 

However, many other tubers are present in summer and could be consumed in survival situations, but they aren’t choice edibles during this season. 

For some reason, it seems like beginner foragers often feel that plants are a safer choice than mushrooms. This isn’t always the case. Foragers have died after misidentifying roots and tubers. Always be 100% certain of your identification.

Queen Anne's Lace Flower and Root

Queen Anne’s Lace Flower and Root

Seeds and Grains

Modern foragers so often overlook wild seeds and grains. Today, we all have easy access to relatively cheap grains like flour and rice, but before the advent of modern agriculture, most of our ancestors relied on some wild grains and seeds as the bulk of their diet. 

Contrary to information provided by followers of the Paleo diet, humans in the Paleolithic era ate plenty of grains; they were just nothing like our industrial ones. Recent research shows that humans started making the switch to more grass-like plants 3.5 million years ago, setting the stage for grains!

While we don’t face the same struggle for survival today, we are missing out by ignoring the wild grains that grow all around us. Gathering these grains can provide us with a deep connection to the past, add new flavors to our diet, and provide important vitamins and minerals lacking in modern American diets and the grains we eat from industrial agriculture. 

Foraging Wild Grains and Seeds

Wild Foraged Grains and Seeds. Clockwise from Top Left: Goosefoot (wild quinoa), plantain seed, dock seed and prosso millet.

Summer Mushrooms

Mushrooms are always a favorite with foragers. Maybe it’s because they’re generally easy to harvest, and many are easy to identify, making them suitable for beginners. It could also be the profusion of colors and flavors wild mushrooms offer that’s so unlike what we find in the grocery store. Or maybe we humans just like mushrooms. Whatever the reason, summer is a great time to look for them. 

While some of our spring favorites, like morels, usually finish fruiting before summer rolls around, there is still an incredible bounty of other mushrooms to find this season, including coveted favorites like chanterelles and lobster mushrooms. 

Some of the mushrooms I included on this list are purely for medicinal usage. Mushrooms like reishi and turkey tail are potent medicinals but too tough to be enjoyable in culinary recipes. Some, like black trumpets and chicken-of-the-woods, are gathered solely for their wonderful flavor and texture, while others, like lion’s mane with its reported brain health benefits and mild seafood-like flavor, offer the best of both worlds.

Many of the mushrooms I included are suitable for beginner foragers and offer no toxic lookalikes. Others are ideal for intermediate foragers and are easily discerned from lookalikes with a little bit of knowledge. 

The last section offers mushrooms that are suitable only for advanced foragers. These mushrooms are difficult to identify, have deadly toxic lookalikes, or must be prepared in specific ways to be edible. It’s fine to identify these mushrooms for fun, but never use them unless you are 100% certain of your identification and know how to prepare them properly.

Summer Mushroom Foraging

Here are a few of the mushrooms you might find this summer:

Beginner Foragers

Intermediate Foragers

Advanced Foragers

Summer Mushrooms

A basket of late summer mushrooms all in one spot.  Photo includes three types of chanterelles, hedgehogs, pigs ears, chicken of the woods, artists conk, coral mushrooms, saffron milk caps, lobster mushrooms, and early matsutake. Plus, witches butter on a log in the background.

Pond, Bog, and Water Plants

Summer is a great time of year to be in the water! Thankfully, several edible water plants are available at this time. These plants provide different products, including greens, shoots, tubers, and seeds. They’re a joy to collect on hot days.

Here are a few of the plants you can harvest from pods, bogs, and wetlands:

  • Arrowhead or Duck Potato (Sagittaria latifolia)
  • Cattail (Typha latifolia)
  • Lotus (Nelumbo lutea)
  • Sweet Flag (Acorus calamus)
  • Watercress (Nasturtium officinale)
  • Flowering Rush (Butomus umbellatus)
  • Water Mint (Mentha aquatica)
  • Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) 
  • Asiatic Pennywort (Centella asiatica)
  • Water Lilies (Nymphaeaceae spp.)

Sea Vegetables

There are hundreds of edible sea vegetables that you can forage. Whether you live on the coast or are just visiting, getting to know life in the ocean can be a fun challenge, and is a great activity for kids. 

For the purposes of this article, I focused mainly on those available in coastal New England and of significant culinary interest. A quick Google search will turn up recipes for these tasty, umami-flavored sea vegetables. 

In many states, like all six New England states, it’s perfectly legal to harvest seaweed without any permits so long as it’s for personal use. Some states have harvest limits, like New Hampshire, which allows 9 bushels per person per day. That’s still a massive amount of seaweed. Just be sure to check with local regulations.

Always harvest your seaweed safely and respectfully. Go on low tide days and avoid areas with big waves. Never harvest more than 25% of seaweed in a stand, and try to only harvest the tips. Some floating seaweed may still be fresh and suitable for eating, but avoid seaweed that has washed up on the beach.

Here are a few of the many types of edible seaweed you can gather this summer:

  • Dulse (Palmaria palmata)
  • Laver (Porphyra umbilicalis)
  • Sugar Kelp (Laminaria saccharina)
  • Sea Lettuce (Ulva lactuca)
  • Irish Moss (Chondrus crispus)
  • Bladderwrack (Fucus vesiculosus)

Medicinal Plants

While many of the plants listed above have medicinal properties, we primarily know and use them in a culinary setting. These herbs, on the other hand, function primarily as medicinals. They don’t bring much flavor or bulk to our meals during this season, but they can help keep us healthy and have some amazing benefits. 

Many of these medicinal plants can be dried or preserved in tinctures, salves, and other medicinal preparations for year-round use. 

Self Heal flowers

Self Heal flowers

Foraging Lists

Looking for more lists of wild edible plants to fuel your foraging passion?

Summer Foraging List

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