Can You Eat Wild Cardoon Buds? Foraging Cardoon in Northern California

In this video I harvest naturalized (growing in the wild) cardoon buds; then I cook them, and do a tasting. Let’s see how easy (or not) they are to eat, and is it worth the effort. Cardoon is a vegetable from the thistle family, like artichoke. It was brought to North America by early settlers from Southern Europe, and seeded itself in the wild in some areas, like the California Bay Area. In this video we harvest leaf stems from a wild plant, cook it, and let you know how it tastes. Even though foraging - finding edible wild plants, researching and preparing them - takes so much time and effort, it’s good for our health in many different ways. First, you get out there in nature, get exercise, breathe fresh air, enjoy the views. Second it’s the excitement, like mushroom hunting. And then there is a benefit of eating plants that grew not in the agricultural setting, where micro-elements in the soil were exhausted years ago. A wild plant contains wider variety of minerals. Consider it a homeo