You can find edible plants virtually anywhere you go – if you know what to look for.

Here are five common and easily identifiable plants that you can find in almost every region of North America, depending on the time of season.

1- Blackberries

When I was a kid, a bunch of my friends and I had a fort out in the woods. Luckily for us, we were surrounded by a bunch of wild blackberries. Wild blackberries are 100% safe to eat and easy to recognize. They have red branches with long thorns, jagged green leaves, and white flowers with 5 petals. If you find wild blackberries, you’ve found gold. These things are SO much better than anything you will ever buy in stores. The berries ripen around August to September.

2- Cattails 10 Wild Plants You Can Eat

Probably one of the least known edible plants is the cattail. Cattails are usually found near the edges of freshwater wetlands. Most of a cattail is edible. You can boil the roots or eat them raw. You can also eat most of the stem of the plant. The best part of the stem is near the bottom where the plant is mainly white. Again, you can either boil or eat the stem raw. You can also boil the leaves and eat them as you would any other greens. While the seed head may look like a corndog, it’s not edible. You can, however, save the heads and tear them apart to use as tinder in your fire making.

3- Clovers

Clovers are edible, and – lucky you – they’re found just about everywhere there’s an open grassy area! Clover are easily spotted by their distinctive trefoil leaflets. You can eat clovers raw, but they taste better boiled or sauteed. While you can eat the blossoms, I typically don’t eat the brown ones because they’re usually bitter. If you’re going to eat the blossoms, make sure you get the young pink or white ones – they taste a lot better. You can also use the leaves and blossoms to make a tea, or pan roast the blossoms until they’re nice and crispy.

4- Dandelions

Probably the easiest wild edible to recognize on this list is the dandelion. They’re found everywhere! In your lawn, in the woods, and sometimes even growing between the cracks in concrete! In the spring they show a bright yellow buds, but will soon go to seed and show that fluffy puffball you used to make a wish on and blow when you were a kid. You might not have realized it then, but you were actually seeding future generations of dandelions. The entire plant is edible – roots, leaves, and flower. You can eat the entire thing raw or cook them to take away the bitterness. You can drink the water you boiled the plant in as a tea and use the flower as a garnish for your dandelion salad. Dandelions are packed with Vitamin A and Vitamin C, and beta carotene.

5- Wild Onions

Wild onions, wild chives, wild ramps and wild garlic all can be found in fields or forests. Some will have flowers, some may not, but any plant you find that smells like onion or garlic is edible. If the plant doesn’t smell like onion or garlic, do not eat it as there are similar looking plants that may be toxic. The whole plant is edible and may be chopped into salads, soups, chili and stews. There is some evidence that eating wild onions, wild garlic or wild chives may reduce blood pressure and lower blood sugar. This is another one of those plants that my friends and I used to eat as kids. At first it was on a dare, but later they became welcome snacks when we were playing fort or riding our bikes in the woods. The ones we found never had flowers, but the shoots looked just like scallions sticking up out of the ground (and tasted like them, too).

This is by no means an expansive list and is dependent on the season – blackberries, for example are not available year round.

But if you find yourself in a survival situation when these plants are in season, they can be a vital source of food and are easily identifiable.

To learn more about edible plants you can find just about anywhere, check out Survival At Home.