Edible Campus

George Ellmore, an associate professor of biology and expert botanist at Tufts University, can find all the fixings for a tasty salad or stir fry along untrimmed sidewalks or in the shade of a mailbox. To show off this edible garden hidden in plain sight, Ellmore leads popular tours around the Medford/Somerville campus, in which students and community members get to sample a variety of surprising treats during different seasons of the year. Highlights include humble-looking weeds that taste similar to-or even rival-such familiar favorites as spinach, carrots and radishes.
Transcript:
GEORGE ELLMORE, Assoc. Prof., Biology:
Mmmmm, that looks tasty! What I just picked here is Queen Ann's lace and there are the roots, the domestic carrot that's orange was bred from this plant. Well it is dry and pithy but it is undeniably carrot-like, pretty potent flavor. Here we are in the Fletcher lot of Tufts University so this is not as manicured as some of the more public areas on campus I know it allows the plants to grow taller then they usually do in the manicured areas. Along this hillside here is Portulaca Purslane , tropical areas it grows year round we just get it when we get tropical weather which is July and August. The plant is succulent so it's kind of thick and it holds a lot of juice. You can boil these like spinach, stir-fry them like peapods, eat them raw it's a fresher less green, less bitter taste than spinach offers. In the corners of this parking lot the most conspicuous plants we can see are some sort of wild or Farrell fruit trees. At the base of this wild apple tree there is a lot of shade and the plants that are growing right underneath this tree are different than the lawn plants further out. We find two very nice edible species so there's Chickweed which is a very delicious green, very nice combination of alfalfa sprouts and baby spinach. The other plant that's down here is called Sour Grass it has clover-like leaves but gives you a very tart, sour taste. So after having some good green Chickweed you can punctuate that with a little bit of a sour taste with the sour grass. In this parking lot and over a radius of maybe thirty or forty feet we've had apples, we've had things that taste like spinach, we've had something that tastes like carrot that you can use in baking and soups, and Peppergrass that's a combination of horseradish and radishes. It's just kind of fun there's no way I'm suggesting we get our two-thousand calorie a day diet from this kind of munching. It's a resource that's overlooked. These are Daylilies, there are fields and fields of Daylilies out there although they're big in June, now it's just a few leftovers. The thing that's edible are the buds that haven't bloomed yet, the flavor is like a combination of asparagus and green beans. They're edible raw, they're edible stir-fried, what this will do if you like this makes you a menace for any daylily gardens you see next year, you're gonna be picking the buds, really a choice edible. What happened to the plants we were eating this morning? They've been cut, so the final thought is if you see it, take it.