LogFAQs > #961208430

I am familiar with what local plants are edible and which are poisonous. There's plenty of edible weeds and trees around here such as dandelion, burdock, plantain, mulberries, eastern juniper, prairie rose, and pineapple weed. But some edible plants can be trouble in large quantities, such as dock and sorrel, which are high in oxalic acid and can cause kidney stones, and others can become toxic if they have started to mold, such as clovers which can become infected with a mold that produces dicoumarol, an anti-clotting agent. And then there are nettles which are highly nutritious but have a nasty sting which can be destroyed by cooking or drying; it's also unsafe to eat once it flowers because it develops cystoliths that may cause kidney stones.

There's also some deadly poisonous plants like poison hemlock (which looks similar to wild carrot) and black nightshade (which has tasty looking black berries). Most of the other toxic plants around here like buffalobur have sharp needles or spines and wouldn't be edible even if they weren't toxic.

And there are plants that are poisonous unless they're cooked correctly or only certain parts are edible, such as elderberries and choke cherries (the flowers & berries are edible if cooked, the rest of the plant contains cyanide!), ground cherries (the fruits are edible raw or cooked, the rest is poison) and poke (the young leaves & stems are edible if boiled in several changes of water, raw plant material, any part that's older or turned red, and the berries and roots are deadly poison).