Spring is here, but eating out of the garden is still a dream, especially up where I live. The asparagus is just starting to poke up, and the garlic is growing, but edibles are pretty much limited to chives and oregano.

So we’re still eating last year’s garden, what’s left of it. Besides the potatoes, most of what’s left is in jars — pickles, beets, corn and cucumber relish, tomatoes, jams and jellies — or in the freezer, although there’s not much left in the freezer. A few bags of corn, cauliflower, beans, and even fewer of the strawberries picked last June at farms in Wilton and Greenwich. The freezer — it’s a fair-sized chest in the basement — is empty enough that I’m filling emptied milk jugs with water to freeze and take up some space. (A full freezer uses less energy, and if the power goes out, all that ice keeps everything cold.)

This year’s vegetables are still seedlings, and still in the cold frame. We should have set the broccoli, cabbages, chard and other cold-hardy plants into the garden already, but we haven’t fenced it against the marauding chickens yet. Maybe this weekend. And the tender plants — the tomatoes, peppers, basil — can’t go out till Memorial Day. The real Memorial Day, not that floating Monday that shows up early this year. At that point we can direct seed the cucumbers, beans, pumpkins and squash.

But it will be some time before we get to eat all that, and even longer before we’re canning and freezing again for next winter. So we always start the season off by eating weeds.

Wild amaranth is as good as spinach when it’s young, and purslane is also reputed to be delicious. (Personally, I have fought purslane in the garden for so long I can’t think of it as anything but an enemy. Others, even in my own family, call it salad). This time of year we’re digging Jerusalem artichoke tubers and roasting or mashing them like potatoes. Last year we started sauteing the young flower buds of the milkweed we let grow for the Monarchs. It tastes kind of like early broccoli. Lamb’s quarter, young dandelion leaves, small plantain leaves, violets and catmint all get tossed together with the early herbs coming up — mint and lemon balm along with the chives — for a salad or a saute. Tastes like spring. Later in the summer, red clover flowers, daylily buds, chive flowers and nasturtium get mixed in to whatever lettuce or green is ready to pick from the garden.

There’s something about wild and perennial food that is especially satisfying. Certainly you can’t get more local. We’ve got chokecherry trees by the road, which we share with the birds. The little wild cherries are too bitter and seedy to eat raw but make great jelly — just ask my father-in-law. In June, we hunt for wild strawberries, and although we could eat them all on the walk back home, we try to get some into the freezer. Later there are blackberries, and service berries, and wild blueberries. There’s nothing like eating pancakes with wild strawberries or blueberries — or better yet, both — in the dead of winter.

We collect wild apples, wild grapes, and any variety of fruit that friends and neighbors don’t want. We pay them back with jam or pie. Sometimes it’s mulberries or crabapples. Last year it was pears and highbush cranberries (which are not actually cranberries but make a good jellied cranberry sauce nonetheless).

Of course, with any wild food, you need to make sure you know what you’re eating. There are at least two different plants called highbush cranberry, for instance, both grown as ornamentals. It’s the native bush, the American highbush (Viburnum trilobum), that’s good for jelly. The European highbush (Viburnum opulus) is called edible, but it’s better for grouse than humans. Make sure you identify your weeds, too, and don’t eat from parks or roadsides that have likely been sprayed.

If you can’t wait for your own garden to grow, area farmers markets are firing up. The Saratoga market moves outside today, and will be open in High Rock Park, May through October, on Wednesdays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Two of Schenectady’s three farmers markets open this week: On Thursdays, farmers set up stands next to City Hall from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. On Saturdays, farmers sell in the parking lot off Woodlawn Avenue between Union Street and Eastern Avenue.

For info on the Troy Waterfront Market, open year round, click here. For markets in Albany County, click here.

About the author: Margaret Hartley is Sunday and projects editor at the Gazette.

Are you growing a garden this year? Are you doing anything different — enlarging the garden, developing a rainwater irrigation system, planning on preserving? Share your story with Greenpoint readers. You can comment on the link below or email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.