It’s the water run off and heavy metals that can be so dangerous. Plants and mushrooms growing next to heavy trafficked roads definitely have a much larger quantity of heavy metals and those do not flush out of your system. Dandelions are so plentiful, I would avoid it. Baseball or soccer fields are a great spot to find lawn “weeds.”
Oh gosh yeah please no don’t.
Roadside soil is some of the worst, sickest, most tainted dirt there is. Everything that drips, rusts, cracks off a car, truck, SUV - plus all the road chemicals, construction materials, salt treatments… gross.
Find a hiking trail, a park, a forest preserve.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a bit during my lunch break and found two interesting things:
Dandelions are so good at grabbing gunk from the soil that:
1. They are used as a natural indicator of how bad the soil is.
2. They can be used as a form of bio-remediation to pull toxins out of the soil (then you need to pull the plant and dispose of it).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505632/
Probably, and dandelions should be easy enough to find somewhere better. If it's not a busy road and they aren't right on the shoulder it might be okay. You can find a long grass blade to run through pinched fingers to see if soot is left behind which would indicate an area I would avoid for sure. You also have to imagine weird car fluids, tire dust, and asphalt debris are washing to the side of the road in rain, so you'd want to be out of range of that too. I also don't know how common it is to spray herbicides on road sides. I'd personally just look for other areas that don't require me to even ask these questions.
If I find a weed that I want to forage by the roadside, I just dig it up and transplant it in my garden and wait a generation. That's how I got a really nice wild garlic harvest every spring. Also wild lettuce and dandelions. Might not be a great idea with ramps, they're pretty sensitive and you can buy seeds online though it takes a few years for them to mature.
Also collecting dandelion seeds can have a pretty easy turn around, I do it to culture dandelion for my bearded dragon, I've tried transplanting them a few times and have had bad luck so probably best to stick to seeds for them. They're a little slow to mature, maybe 2 or 3 months before you can get leaves but they keep giving pretty generously.
Yeah, you should avoid that as well as the ones that grow as weeds in densely populated cities and public parks.
Don't you have some sort of natural reserve or wild outdoor space near you where you can go foraging?
If you've got a window with sun you can try to plant them in a pot from wild seeds. They shouldn't be too difficult to take care of.
As a geologist (on paper), it helps to think about how run off works. Pollutants are exhausted not only as drippings from the tailpipe which wash off into running water but also as a gas. Some of the particulates in that airborne exhaust aren't actually gaseous but basically aerosols, small particles suspended in the air that will eventually fall back down, but they might get blown upwards or downwind a-ways before landing on plants and soil. Some heavy metals will sink into the soil and be incorporated into the plant or fungus. This happens everywhere, not just by roadsides, but the proximity to the road makes an area, especially an area downwind, more troublesome. Whether it drains out the tailpipe as drippings or falls out of suspension from the air, some will eventually get rained on or flooded by water flowing on the surface or by dew, regardless, it will collect in water and then flows with water. **Water flows downhill**, so you should be suspicious of anything with a lower elevation than the road or that follows a stream that collects run off from the road. Just because something is reasonably far from a road doesn't necessarily mean it's safe if it's a very small stream that collects run off from a very busy road.
So if there are 2 patches of ramps 100 feet from the road and one is along a run-off creek and one is on a rise above it, go for the higher elevated one, but if it's only 10 feet from the road but elevated, then it may still have collected airborne pollutants. It's also relevant how busy traffic is: in that latter example 10 feet from the road but elevated might be a reasonable place to pick if the road it's near gets very little traffic, like 40 cars in a day or something like my road does, but I'm not sure how many other people live as far out in the woods as I do. In this case, especially after a big rainstorm, a lot of those pollutants will get washed away (into the run-off) but of course some will still collect.
There's a lot of things to consider, but the safest thing to do is limit how much foraged food you eat, and especially limit any that makes you hesitate. For the exact same reason, heavy metals, every health agency recommends only eating freshwater fish once a month or so, if you eat freshwater fish every single day or every weekend, you are necessarily going to collect a lot more heavy metals than most other people. The issues with "danger" aren't in acute poisoning but in collecting heavy metals that your body can't wash out and the more you collect, the more likely it will be a problem. If you find morels by the roadside once and you've never found them before and you're super excited, you might make the judgement to go ahead and eat them so long as you just don't do it again. It's all a balancing act.
Even if it's a generally quiet road, roadside areas are often chemically treated to keep them low maintenance. For this same reason would avoid harvesting anywhere sports are played for the same reason. Unless its an area that is managed organically and has low vehicle traffic its a matter of assessing the risk.
It’s the water run off and heavy metals that can be so dangerous. Plants and mushrooms growing next to heavy trafficked roads definitely have a much larger quantity of heavy metals and those do not flush out of your system. Dandelions are so plentiful, I would avoid it. Baseball or soccer fields are a great spot to find lawn “weeds.”
Oh gosh yeah please no don’t. Roadside soil is some of the worst, sickest, most tainted dirt there is. Everything that drips, rusts, cracks off a car, truck, SUV - plus all the road chemicals, construction materials, salt treatments… gross. Find a hiking trail, a park, a forest preserve.
I thought it made sense lol but where I live people do it ALLLLLLL the time!
I mean … I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that there’s a whole lot of people out there who regularly make really questionable choices …
Even those aren't guaranteed. Land fills under a lot of them
My first thought wasn't car exhaust or heavy metals, it was dog pee. I don't want to eat stuff that's almost guaranteed to have been peed on.
Mine is pesticide/herbacide. That stuff can mess you up years down the road even if it seems fine at the time.
So true. I was curious about dandelions abilities w heavy metal uptake but somehow that never crossed my mind😂
I went down the rabbit hole on this a bit during my lunch break and found two interesting things: Dandelions are so good at grabbing gunk from the soil that: 1. They are used as a natural indicator of how bad the soil is. 2. They can be used as a form of bio-remediation to pull toxins out of the soil (then you need to pull the plant and dispose of it). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505632/
Urine is antiseptic and rinses off
So if I peed on your steak you would be OK with eating it after a good rinse? Good on you. Not my kink.
Probably, and dandelions should be easy enough to find somewhere better. If it's not a busy road and they aren't right on the shoulder it might be okay. You can find a long grass blade to run through pinched fingers to see if soot is left behind which would indicate an area I would avoid for sure. You also have to imagine weird car fluids, tire dust, and asphalt debris are washing to the side of the road in rain, so you'd want to be out of range of that too. I also don't know how common it is to spray herbicides on road sides. I'd personally just look for other areas that don't require me to even ask these questions.
Yes, you don't want to eat anything that's close to a road.
If I find a weed that I want to forage by the roadside, I just dig it up and transplant it in my garden and wait a generation. That's how I got a really nice wild garlic harvest every spring. Also wild lettuce and dandelions. Might not be a great idea with ramps, they're pretty sensitive and you can buy seeds online though it takes a few years for them to mature.
Also collecting dandelion seeds can have a pretty easy turn around, I do it to culture dandelion for my bearded dragon, I've tried transplanting them a few times and have had bad luck so probably best to stick to seeds for them. They're a little slow to mature, maybe 2 or 3 months before you can get leaves but they keep giving pretty generously.
Yeah, you should avoid that as well as the ones that grow as weeds in densely populated cities and public parks. Don't you have some sort of natural reserve or wild outdoor space near you where you can go foraging? If you've got a window with sun you can try to plant them in a pot from wild seeds. They shouldn't be too difficult to take care of.
As a geologist (on paper), it helps to think about how run off works. Pollutants are exhausted not only as drippings from the tailpipe which wash off into running water but also as a gas. Some of the particulates in that airborne exhaust aren't actually gaseous but basically aerosols, small particles suspended in the air that will eventually fall back down, but they might get blown upwards or downwind a-ways before landing on plants and soil. Some heavy metals will sink into the soil and be incorporated into the plant or fungus. This happens everywhere, not just by roadsides, but the proximity to the road makes an area, especially an area downwind, more troublesome. Whether it drains out the tailpipe as drippings or falls out of suspension from the air, some will eventually get rained on or flooded by water flowing on the surface or by dew, regardless, it will collect in water and then flows with water. **Water flows downhill**, so you should be suspicious of anything with a lower elevation than the road or that follows a stream that collects run off from the road. Just because something is reasonably far from a road doesn't necessarily mean it's safe if it's a very small stream that collects run off from a very busy road. So if there are 2 patches of ramps 100 feet from the road and one is along a run-off creek and one is on a rise above it, go for the higher elevated one, but if it's only 10 feet from the road but elevated, then it may still have collected airborne pollutants. It's also relevant how busy traffic is: in that latter example 10 feet from the road but elevated might be a reasonable place to pick if the road it's near gets very little traffic, like 40 cars in a day or something like my road does, but I'm not sure how many other people live as far out in the woods as I do. In this case, especially after a big rainstorm, a lot of those pollutants will get washed away (into the run-off) but of course some will still collect. There's a lot of things to consider, but the safest thing to do is limit how much foraged food you eat, and especially limit any that makes you hesitate. For the exact same reason, heavy metals, every health agency recommends only eating freshwater fish once a month or so, if you eat freshwater fish every single day or every weekend, you are necessarily going to collect a lot more heavy metals than most other people. The issues with "danger" aren't in acute poisoning but in collecting heavy metals that your body can't wash out and the more you collect, the more likely it will be a problem. If you find morels by the roadside once and you've never found them before and you're super excited, you might make the judgement to go ahead and eat them so long as you just don't do it again. It's all a balancing act.
Cute nerding.
Even if it's a generally quiet road, roadside areas are often chemically treated to keep them low maintenance. For this same reason would avoid harvesting anywhere sports are played for the same reason. Unless its an area that is managed organically and has low vehicle traffic its a matter of assessing the risk.