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The sweetest strawberries I ever ate were growing beside a road near Fort Simpson, NWT. They were wild and very small, but with so much flavour, I still remember them 20 years later.

Foraging for wild edibles—also called “wildcrafting” can yield some of the tastiest, most nutritious food you’ll ever pop into your mouth. In Canada, Aboriginals once ate entirely off the land, feasting on berries, greens and seeds as they came into season, along with fish and game.

Today, that bounty is still out there: fiddleheads (unfurled ferns) emerge on riverbanks in April and May in Atlantic Canada: Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Find wild ginger and wild leeks along Ontario’s Bruce Trail as spring turns to summer; and cranberries carpet the sub-Arctic forests of the Northwest Territories in late summer, about the same time that tiny, tasty, scarlet huckleberries ripen in British Columbia.

You don’t even need to be out in the boonies to find wild edibles, though. In Toronto, ON, Canada’s Big Apple, you can freely pick juicy black mulberries and purple Saskatoon berries in parks and along streets in June and July.

Of course, some plants are inedible, even poisonous, so best find a naturalist to guide you. At Smoothwater of Temagami in Ontario, guests find stinging nettle, daylilies, milkweed and rose petals, then chef Caryn Colman turns the edibles into a memorable meal.

At Blue Mountain, ON, the House of Verona takes guests on hikes and points out wild edibles, including apples and clover. For an adventure that combines foraging and canoeing, join biologist Charles Burchill in the backwoods of Manitoba in search of mint, water parsnip and sundew.