Wanna go look for wild leeks?!?

I asked this question so often after maple syrup season that Josh started rolling his eyes in response. The maple sap started running early this year, and with the hot spell in mid-March, the season was over. Two weeks ahead of nature's schedule. What normally follows is the sprouting of wild leeks - up through the ground that we had been marching across to collect sap for the past month.

I had to wait two whole weeks, and I was not patient. Finally, when the green leaves appeared like a carpet across the forest floor, I grabbed my knife and bucket and started harvesting. It was with a twinge of irony that I brought home my first bunch. In my living room is a $35 grow light set-up, under which I have 300 leek seedlings growing. For the next 110 days those leeks will need watering, lighting, transplanting, weeding and many other forms of spoon-feeding and hand-holding before they reach the point when I can pick them and eat them. And yet here in my backyard I have a smaller version of the same thing. All I had to do was look out my window and wait.

Last night when Josh and I finished yet another wild leek-inspired meal, he turned to me, his eyes alight. "When are we going to go look for fiddleheads?!?"

Let the wild harvest season begin.