Property provides acres of land for foraging

ALDEN, Ill. — The oak forest, meadows, wetlands and prairie at The Blue Farm offer opportunities for guests to learn how to forage for food, attend a class or participate in a group retreat.

“When we bought this place, I had never been around here at all and we saw one house — this house,” said Alisha Mowbray, who owns the 80-acre property with her husband, Kevin.

“When we pulled up the driveway, you could not see the pond because it was totally overgrown,” she said during a Learning Circle for Women Farmland Owners, organized by The Land Conservancy of McHenry County.

“The house was cedar shake, both siding and roof, and it hadn’t been lived in for probably 10 years, except for the thousands of mice and lady beetles.”

The purchase of the property occurred in October 2019.

“We started renovations about a week before the pandemic shut everything down Mowbray said. “So, we had stuff already on order and there were no jobs, so we had the full crew here.”

At the time of ownership transfer, the property went into a mix of conservation and agriculture easements.

“There are two 11-acre fields that are in an agricultural easement, so that needs to be agricultural use or left alone,” Mowbray said. “The rest of the acres are in a conservation easement.”

Every conservation easement is different and the regulations are determined by the person putting the land into the easement.

“For this property, it can be divided once into two 40-acre parcels and each of those 40-acre parcels have a three-acre building envelope where the owners can do whatever they want to,” Mowbray said. “Another regulation on this property is no ATV tracks, but we can use a UTV for managing the property.”

Mowbray, who is a real estate agent from the Oak Park area, had never heard of a conservation easement before purchasing the property in McHenry County in the far northeastern corner of Illinois.

“Part of the reason we could afford this land is the conservation easement because a lot of people didn’t understand it, but we were fine with it,” she said.

Now Mowbray is on the easement committee for The Land Conservancy of McHenry County.

“And Kevin has been doing work with strategy for TLC, so for us it’s been a win, win, win,” she said.

A few years ago, Mowbray started offering foraging classes at the farm.

“I had started foraging here, mainly because I love to cook,” she said. “It is easy to learn to forage if you can walk the same property every day.”

The No. 1 rule for foraging, Mowbray said, is if you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it.

“Double that for mushrooms — if you don’t know what mushrooms you’re picking, you should not be picking them,” she said.

Be aware of your surroundings, Mowbray stressed.

“There are very few plants that can kill you and the two around here are deadly hemlock and snake root,” she said. “Other than that, the only things that can kill you are mushrooms.”

A lot of plants that Mowbray forages are weeds that people see all the time and they don’t realize are edible.

“In general with greens, if you are eating them raw, you want to harvest them before they start to flower,” she said. “When the plant is small and growing, the sweetness is in the greens, and when it starts to flower, the sweetness goes in the flower.”

One of Mowbray’s favorite plants is mayapples.

“Mayapples neither ripen in May, nor are they apples,” she said.

“They grow as male or female, and the females have two leaves, the males have one leaf,” she noted. “The berries start bright green and really small and you want to wait until they are soft and yellow.”

The berries, which are ready to pick in August, taste like tropical fruit.

“The pulp is edible, but the seed will make you sick, so don’t eat the seed or the skin,” Mowbray advised. “The berries are hard to find because the squirrels and chipmunks love them.”

It is important to be aware if plants are invasive.

“Autumn olive is one of my favorite fruits, but they are extremely invasive, so you do not want to put the seeds in your compost bin,” Mowbray said.

“Autumn olive plants were brought over from Asia in the ‘30s by the Corps of Engineers to manage erosion and they are also called silverberry because there are silver speckles on the berries,” she said. “You have to taste as you go because you’ll have two plants next to each other that taste totally different.”

The Blue Farm has seven springs and two creeks.

“This area is a seep, which is like a wetland, but it is all coming up from underneath,” Mowbray said.

“It is a very unusual type of geography, the water stays at ground temperature and it doesn’t freeze so you get some really interesting plants and this becomes the Nippersink Creek.”

Mowbray offers additional classes such as cheese making and pizza making at the farm, as well as farmstays and events for small groups.

“We just made the decision to take this building which is now a garage and storage and convert it to an event space,” she explained.

“We are going to focus on parties of 30 or less,” she said. “We want people who want to be here and appreciate the value of this property.”