Urban Forest Food?

Getzendaner park

Remember me mentioning the local park?

33 acres, corralled by the interstate to the west, a hospital to the north,

the ancient cemetery to the east and the Waxahachie Creek at the southern end.

Lots of playground equipment, picnic tables, grills and

6 miles of a concreted hiking, biking trail, dotted with exercise equipment.

Plenty of trees, birds and squirrels.
The trail is always crowded with walkers, joggers and bikers.

Funny that the walkers, joggers and bikers all have ear buds in.

Sounds great to most people, clean comfortable nature.

If you dare to venture off the concrete path

you're transported into another world......

The mini forest.

 Full of snakes, chiggers, poison ivy, bees, birds, butterflies and

 believe it or not.....Food

I speak of the alternate bike trail.

It's littered with downed tree limbs and no bike could possibly get through.

I've been on this trail before, but not in my present state of mind.

It was just a whim to even be there, no planning, it just happened.

We had no walking sticks, I was in a skirt, no hats, no insect repellant....

Nathan's always up for an adventure,
so....
We walked the trail, climbing over and around the limbs and downed trees.

Along the way we stopped to photo all of the interesting trees, flowers, lizards....

and the food!

The vegetation was so lush and thick,
 birds were singing, butterflies were happily kissing the flowers
and the bees were busy collecting pollen.

If it wasn't for the distant sound of the interstate
you would never have known you were in an urban setting.

We found several patches of blackberries nestled under the giant trees,

walking onions hiding in plain sight alongside the grasses

and honeysuckle happily twining itself up and around the fallen limbs.

Pecan and Walnut trees were everywhere

and we even found a Mulberry tree.



Not quite ripe blackberry...



Honeysuckle









Wild onions

There's no telling what other edible plants might be hiding

in this little piece of nature, and perhaps I should look for a field guide

and educate myself.

You never know what the future might bring,

being able to identify food in nature might come in handy.

The creek was beautiful and judging by the high banks

there's been more than one heavy rainstorm that's found it's way through there.

Maybe it even has fish at times? I don't know, it was pretty shallow but

our rainfall is down so maybe at other times it's deeper.

I've found some of these same plants on our property

and probably have missed a whole lot more than I've found.

What's in your urban forest?

By the way, we didn't get chiggers, bitten by a snake or poison ivy.

Till next time,

 Bonjour