Marine Park Coastline (Kids 12 & Under)

This vastly underappreciated park offers all the best wild foods of the rich seashore habitat, a great place for everyone to celebrate the peak of spring. The sandy soil is poor, limiting tree growth, but benefiting plants that can take advantage of the full sunlight, nutrient-poor soil, and relative lack of competition, and Violet Brill, America's go-to gal for foraging, will show you renewable and invasive species you'll love.

The fields of south of Ave. U provide such tasty wild foods such as curly dock (no relation to Moe Dock or Larry Dock -- Nyuck! Nyuck! Nyuck!), garlic mustard, field garlic, wild asparagus, daylily shoots, common mallow, hairy bittercress, and winter cress. We'll also find plenty of the medicinal plants, including mullein, which has been used for coughs since the days of Hippocrates, and pineapple-weed, a pineapple-scented relative of chamomile that's used for tea and is good for indigestion.

Notes:

• Participants should be dressed for the weather, and be aware of very bad subway service. Trains are often cancelled due to track work. 
• No sandals (there are mosquitoes, thorns and poison ivy). 
• Everyone should have plastic bags for veggies and herbs, paper bags for mushrooms, which spoil in plastic, containers for berries from late spring through fall, water and lunch, and extra layers when it's cold. 
• Digging implements and pocket knives are optional. 
• Dogs are permitted. 
• Children are encouraged to attend.
• There's no smoking whatsoever at any time.