Fiddleheads?

[RichieC]

Anyone here harvest wild fiddleheads for personal use or sale? How do you identify the right kinds of ferns.

We have massive quantities of ferns. Thousands and thousands of them on our place, and access to probably tens of thousands more on a neighboring 200 acres. These are sort of mid-sized ferns, not the really massive one. They are the same sort which grows on some roadsides here (southwestern NH)

I have eated the fiddleheads from these, and not gotten sick or anything. But I don't really care for fiddleheads, and so I don't really know if they are any good or not. Sort of like when I make grape jelly. I don't like it, how am I supposed to know if it is any good?

I would love to pick some of these fiddleheads to bring to the farmer's market, especially since all we usually have that early is lettuce, radishes and a few forlorn beets. But I don't want to poison/gross out anyone by selling the wrong stuff. So how can I tell if I have the right ferns?

Thanks for your help.

[uncle Will in In.]

Eat a big batch of them before the Farmers Mkt. If they kill you, you can forget about selling any.

[minnikin1]

The way I understand it, the wrong variety won't necessarily make you sick right away. It is a carcinogen and causes cancer.

Ostrich fern is the only edible one of know of. I bought mine, just to be sure.

[ET1 SS]

I harvest fiddleheads.

I eat them and I sell them at market.

Most of my land is forest some of which has ferns. Fuzzy ferns which are bitter and not good for eating.

Down nearer the river, you descend an embankment, into the flood plain, and on that flood plain is the fiddlehead ferns. When they first pop up, they are bright green and only the brown husk is fuzzy. The ferns have no fur at the time. The heads are curled very tight, and are very easy to pinch off when they are one inch tall, up to maybe ten inches tall.

Most of that swamp stinks from the beaver poo and otter water that it is soaking in. But as the water recedes from each bank, then the fiddle heads will pop up.

Fiddleheads need to be blanched in boiling salt water for 30 seconds, before you freeze them for long term storage.

Whenever you go to eat them, boil them for ten minutes. Do not steam them, they were growing in beaver poo and otter water, likely with salmonella or whatever grows in aqua-mammal slime and feces. Boil them for ten minutes.

Drain the water, and fiddleheads are great!

Fiddleheads can be sauteed in butter

Sauteed in pork lard

Soaked in vinegar

Mixed in with an omelette

A Ceesh [okay I can't spell it - the greens and egg fried pie thing]

[pixelphotograph]

The bracken fern is the bad one. Probably the one you have lots of. They take over and can be a problem for animals as well as humans. Dont eat bracken fern fiddleheads.
http://www.rook.org/earl/bwca/nature...idiumaqui.html

[Cascade Failure]

I could be wrong but, I believe the only non-carcinogenic fern is the ostrich fern.

Fiddleheads and balsamic vinegar...now that's a good snack!

[freelove]

As others have said, ostrich ferns are the fiddlehead ferns. This is a google image search so that you can check your ferns against the images. You could also try a search of fiddleheads.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=e...ch+ferns&gbv=2

freelove

[pixelphotograph]

Originally Posted by freelove

As others have said, ostrich ferns are the fiddlehead ferns. This is a google image search so that you can check your ferns against the images. You could also try a search of fiddleheads.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=e...ch+ferns&gbv=2

freelove

Yes but in the spring my bracken ferns put up fiddleheads that look identical to ostrich fiddleheads.
You dont know unless you have the fern in a certain spot each year and you know that is a ostrich fern or bracken fern.
Just to clarify that.

[Cabin Fever]

I believe that the Ostrich fern will have only one fiddle head per stem that comes out of the ground. A Bracken fern will have several fiddleheads per stem. In other words, their are branches on a Bracken fern stem and each branch will have a fiddlehead.

[ET1 SS]

The fiddleheads that I harvest.

The root ball may have only four or five of these leaves, or it may have ten. They get bigger each year. As the root ball gets bigger so does each individual fiddlehead. They are succulent like a cactus. but some of them I harvest will be as big around as a pencil, while others are as big as your thumb.

On my land I have both types so they are easy to tell apart.

Up on the dry land, the forest ferns will have more white fur on them.

Down in the flood plain, the fiddleheads will not have as much fur.

As a couple of my customers have asked me about where to pick [they tell me that they stop while hiking and see ferns so they have picked them, and they were bitter], I say: "if you are standing on firm dry ground when you see them, then they are the wrong kind; If your waders are in slushy mud from the receding river, and it has been about a week since the last snow fall, then what you are looking at may be a fiddlehead".

[RichieC]

My thanks to everyone who replied.