For shaded gardeners who want to grow edible plants, this shadowy designation of how little sunlight the space receives is often second most recognised. “I have a garden, but… it’s very suspicious.” There’s a rather long list of edible plants that can grow in the shade, and in spring ostrich ferns stand out. These native perennials are the source of edible fiddleheads. In addition to the lamp, the Ostrich Fern Fiddlehead is one of the darlings of the spring farmers market, flashy grocery stores and, of course, a single post can exponentially boost your desires.
Like a lamp, the fiddleheads of ostrich ferns are harvested in the wild. Collecting just a handful for your own spring dinner can be sustainable, but these are wild native plants that have experienced a surge in interest and are in demand in the spring. When the wild are prey to commercially-scale appetites, they and their environment escape.
Cultivating fiddleheads to eat (or sell) is very easy (and the result is much faster than a growing ramp). And even if you never eat their closure, their tall feathers adorn the spaces of large and small gardens during the long growing season.
Photo by Marie Virjon.
The ostrich fern is Mattschia Stolchiopteris. Native ranges include the temperate (cold) parts of Eastern North America and Europe and Asia. They colonize the area and make it easier to collect many fiddleheads when foragingrs begin to appear in the spring. The plants grow from the upright rhizomes that form underground runners, creating new plants. (I saw my own test patch of Ostritch Fern in the Brooklyn Quadruple Layer a few years later.) However, the fern roots are close to the surface and are susceptible to damage from trampling.
Collecting crociers, or fiddleheads, means that the plant has fewer leaves and less food production to maintain this perennial throughout the growing season. The leaves feed on fern rootstocks. When plants are depleted, they run out of energy. If this treatment is repeated seasonally, the ferns are infringed. (And in urban parks, cutting the fiddlehead also hijacks the aesthetic value of the plant.
