What I do for Money — Weeds Edition
Selling in-season edible wild plants can be extremely worthwhile
If you think $25 CAD for a kilo of fresh cut organic baby romaine lettuce is high, you’ll probably think that $30–40 per kilo of fresh cut edible “weeds” is completely ridiculous.
But welcome to my reality!
We’ve already written extensively here about the incredible surprise world of wild edible plants. Here’s just one example to induct you into the mystery:
Up until about the time of the first hay harvest, which I would place around about the 1st of July (give or take), I was doing really really well harvesting and selling plants most people in North America have simply forgotten are edible. In other countries and cultures (especially, it seems, around the Mediterranean) people are still routinely harvesting wild greens — and I’ve even seen it written that in Greece a lot of people find the idea of *buying* any greens to be ridiculous because they grow naturally all around us without being cultivated. There’s a little more info on that here:
Speaking for the vantage point of several weeks later than the above pieces were written, around the time of the first hay harvest was a natural shifting point in the season when all the wild greens here became either less available or less palatable or both.
But I had about a month period where the harvest was simply fantastic. I was selling especially lamb’s quarters for $30 a kilo on a regular basis, unwashed and harvested directly into the bags they were delivered in. It was like a kind of small miracle, honestly. To go out and fill up three or four small bags (somewhere between 1–2 kilos) in as little as fifteen minutes. But that was when the picking was at its peak, and the plant at its tastiest and most usable. It takes time and experimentation to learn when that is — and of course, it takes a willing buyer, which I have.
The highest price I was able to get away with for wild edible plants was when the flower buds of milkweed were still green. You can use them almost like broccoli at this time (and the also provide several other good products throughout the season, I should add) and I had a couple weeks I was able to sell for $40 per kilo at between 1–2 kilos a shot.
One other category I should mention is wild mint. Now, even though it grows like a weed, I don’t put it into quite the same category as some of these others — because it’s an aromatic. Essentially, it falls into the category of cooking herbs or fine herbs (most of which I harvest cultivated from my garden). I sell these all at a price of $50 per kilo, but usually never more than 100g or 200g at a time. Five dollars again and again adds up though.
Unfortunately, the wild harvest isn’t all that great right now at this time in the season. I’m only getting a little bit of fireweed and miscellaneous bits of things I find here and there. I expect my “next big score” will be when the milkweed produces its pods — hopefully in the next couple of weeks.
I’m working on a much more detailed article about how to start a wild foods business which will be published in Small Farm Canada magazine in probably the September/October issue. If I’m allowed to cross-post it to Medium, I definitely will!
