I also have some flexibility with my schedule, and have weekends free to roam. I've mastered the camp's 1600 acres of trails, and almost all of the trees in the area. I'm working on herbaceous plants, and will hopefully start on fungi and ferns in the near future. I have been more adventurous with tasting plants in the wild, just nibbling to see if some of them are edible. I like sourwood, sassafras, white pine, and small yellow poplar leaves.
I dug up a bunch of sassafras sapling roots one morning, washed off the dirt, and laid them out to dry. Then peeled off the bark (where the tasty sap is) and froze a bag of it to make sassafras tea someday soon.
I collected white oak (Quercus alba) acorns, too, intending to make acorn bread out of them. I roasted them in the oven to kill any insects, then broke them open with a hammer, removed the nut in the inside, and soaked the nuts for about 6 days, changing the water twice a day. This is how you remove the tannins (carcinogenic, toxic for humans). That's where I went wrong - I thought that the nuts had to be dry to grind into flour. So I dried them, and now they are good for little more than a maraca. Better try again next year...I also had an adventure trying to dye a couple ratty shirts of mine with pokeberries (poisonous berries that I discovered as a weed this summer with the farm crew - see my post on foraging for some funny pictures). I made a mixture of pokeberry juice and water (2:1) and boiled my shirts in it for a little more than an hour. They were brilliant at first - I hung them out to dry for a day, and then soaked them in cool water with vinegar, to try and set the dye. Instead, it almost all washed out. I guess that pokeberries are finicky. You need to dye only certain types of fabric, and boil the vinegar along with the pokeberry juice to get it to stay.
