What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We're here with Marie

Phil Yun. She's a forager, she's a writer, a master of cocktails, and she's the author of Forage Harvest Feast.

So today we're talking a little bit more in depth about okay if you live in an urban

environment like most of us do or even if you're in an urban environment on a vacation or a trip or something like that and you want to make the best use of your time from the gardener's perspective, how would you go about forging? I Marie, this is something that if you're new or green to

gardening and plants in general, it just sounds a little bit insane, right? That you can walk around

a city like New York and find food growing for free.

So where would I begin if I was someone that was just starting out?

It's a very good point because I think people look at me and go you forage in New York City and they're being polite but they're like eel gross but I really have a very different perspective of the city than most people do.

And what I do and what I recommend new foragers to do is I lead walks in the city.

So I lead walks in New York City seasonally in the

spring the summer the fall and introduce people literally to the plants that

grow under their feet that happen to be edible because foraging is becoming more and more popular, they are now usually

foraging teachers or foraging classes in big towns, in cities. There is social media which is a fantastic way to connect with

foragers locally, look for hashtags like wild food love or just forager. This is a great way to connect with like-minded people or people who are more experienced and can teach you about the plants that grow in your city backyard.

As far as New York goes, what most people don't realize

about New York City is it has so many green spaces.

And I'm really not talking about the sidewalk. I do not forage on the sidewalk. I go to parks and one of the ways that I discovered parks in New York City was just by surfing Google Earth, literally looking for the big green spaces in this massive concrete jungle.

So I've discovered unusual places like Staten Island. New Yorkers all love to make fun of

Staten Island. It's like the borough that nobody wants to visit it. It's beautiful.

It's filled with green parks. They're very well maintained. It's relatively clean. There's one major exception

Which happens to be radioactive.

Oh no

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