Autumn olive. (Courtesy photos)

Old man of the woods described as “edible but yucky” by Marilyn Strong. (Courtesy photo)

Hickory nuts from a shagbark hickory tree.  (Courtesy photo)

Yarrow is both edible and can be used for medicinal purposes.

Was autumn olive juice, dandelion wine, hen-of-the-woods mushroom, or chestnut stuffing on the table this Thanksgiving?

Wild edibles expert and environmentalist Russ Cohen spoke at the Harvard Historical Society's annual meeting last week and gave the gathering a taste—literally and figuratively—of what might be found in one's own backyard. The surprisingly good taste of Cohen's autumn olive fruit leather is not just a treat; for many, it is the start of a trip to the backyard and beyond for other wild edibles.

Harvard has its share of local foragers who harvest the local wild berries and who have learned about other local wild foods from field trips with Cohen. The Press talked to three this week who were including local foods from fall harvesting in their Thanksgiving menus.

On her Thanksgiving table, Old Littleton Road resident Marilyn Strong was planning to have autumn olive juice, sumac-ade, and Chinese chestnuts, all gathered locally.

Strong collected and prepared many wild edibles this year that make a case for the rewards of gathering: salads with violet leaves and flowers, tiger lilies, steamed milkweed flower buds, Japanese knotweed sherbet, and stinging nettle pesto. A black walnut baklava from a Russ Cohen recipe was "yummy," but cattails collected too late in the season were "yucky."

Strong also tapped birches for their sweet water. Bees, a semi-wild food source, are important in her work in apitherapy, the medicinal use of products made by honeybees.

Strong, a member of the Boston Mycological Club, said it was a good year for mushrooms. Her finds included black trumpets, chanterelles, witches' butter, and an abundance of hen of the woods, which she shared with friends. Strong organized a mushroom log inoculation workshop with New Hampshire mushroom expert David Wichland a few years ago. Now, she harvests her homegrown shitake mushrooms when they flush.

Shitakes were also on Jacob Gates Road resident Rick Wood's table this year, from logs he inoculated at the Wichland workshop. Woods passed the skill along in his own local workshop this summer. Preparing shitake logs involves drilling holes about every 1.5 inch over a fresh maple log, pounding in wooden pegs already inoculated with shitake spawn available through the internet, and covering each hole with melted wax. The final ingredient is a few years' rest in moist shade.

Wood said his interests in wild foods developed when he took a course at the Tracker School in New Jersey in 2001. To help identify plants, he spent some time photographing them at different stages in their life.

"That was a great education," he said. Wood's photographs with their site locations can be found at his website, www.siteduck.com.

Wood collects autumn olive berries from trees conveniently located in the center of town.

"It may be prepared in a cranberry-like way since it's similarly tart," Wood said. Autumn olive is on the Massachusetts invasive species list and is not recommended for backyard gardens.

Along with morels found with Russ Cohen, Woods said other interesting finds include spice berries, stinging nettle, and salad greens: dandelion, violet, wood sorrel, plaintain.

Strong, who dates her interest in gatherable foods from books by Euell Gibbons ("Hunting the Wild Asparagus," "Stalking the Wild Strawberry"), brought Cohen to Harvard several years ago to lead a walk through the Delaney conservation land, where Cohen pointed out an abundance of edibles from dandelions to stinging nettles.

"Russ is a devout forager with encyclopedic knowledge of wild edibles and how to prepare them," Strong said. "He is in concert with nature and his love and respect of the natural world is contagious."

Joe D'Eramo, who also remembers finding morels on that walk, like gold coins for foragers, discovered a treasure chest in his Warren Avenue backyard.

"We gathered two or three pounds of morels this year," he said in a phone interview.

D'Eramo researches wild foods before eating them. Never taste anything you aren't "100 percent confident about," he cautioned. In the case of morels, which D'Eramo said are easy to identify, the key is that true morels have a hollow stem, while look-alikes do not.

D'Eramo and his wife Deb added purslane weeded from their plot at the community garden to their salads this summer.

"It is supposed to have a lot of omega-3 fats," he said. According to D'Eramo, purslane is added to chicken feed for eggs branded "omega-3 rich."

"It's crunchy and lemony," he said, but "You wouldn't want a salad of just purslane."

D'Eramo has a good eye for wild edibles—he first spotted the Chinese chestnuts that Strong and Wood gathered with him—but almost anyone can find the garlic mustard, an aggressive roadside invasive that the D'Eramos sauté and eat "like spinach."

Strong, Wood, and D'Eramo are certainly knowledgeable about wild edibles, but their mentor, Cohen, gets the last word on safety from his website: "Many edible plants have look-alikes that are extremely poisonous. Be very sure you have correctly identified a plant before eating it. A good rule of thumb is to use three references (books, the web, etc.) to identify the plant, because different references sometimes emphasize different features. Even then if you are not sure, don't eat it."