Timber is far from the only product you can harvest from your woods. If you know what to look for, you can find and foster edibles, materials for crafts, seeds for plant propagation, and more. These non-timber forest products can be for personal use or for additional income. Keep reading to learn about the range of goods your woods might offer.
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Understory Plants and Fungi
The understory of a healthy woodland is much more than a carpet of green—it’s a diverse mosaic of plants that you can harvest for food and medicinal purposes at different times of year.
If you gather what nature provides, don’t take it all—leaving some unharvested will help it continue to feed you (and wildlife) for years to come. Careful stewardship of woodlands is essential for sustainable harvests.
Before eating anything from your woods, you need to be completely sure you have identified it correctly. To the untrained eye, many tasty plants and fungi in your woods can look similar to toxic ones. For more about foraging, check out the books and other resources by Samuel Thayer, a Wisconsinite recognized internationally as an expert on wild foods.
You can also intentionally grow some understory foods yourself. For more about that, check out the USDA’s resources on forest farming, which is an agroforestry practice that involves cultivating crops under a managed tree canopy.
Veggies and Medicinal Plants
Here are some of the edible plants you might find in your woods. Click the name of each plant to learn more about identifying, harvesting, and preparing it.
| Plant | Harvest season | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Black cohosh | Fall | This medicinal root is often used to treat symptoms of menopause. |
| Fiddleheads | Mid spring | Harvest before the fronds open and cook before eating. |
| Ginseng | September and October | To protect its future availability, make sure to get a harvest license before collecting any wild ginseng. If you cultivate ginseng, make sure to register with DATCP. |
| Goldenseal | July | Harvest after fruit has matured. The whole plant, especially the root, is used for traditional medicine. |
| Mayapples | Late summer | Eat raw, in jellies, or in desserts. Only eat the ripe fruits. All other parts of the plant, including unripe fruits, are toxic. |
| Ramps | Mid spring | Eat raw or cook any way you would prepare garlic or onions. |
| Stinging nettle | Mid spring | Skin contact causes irritation and burning. Steam, blanch, or dry the leaves to remove the sting. |
Some invasive plants, like garlic mustard, are also edible, so you can use them in a home-cooked meal to reward yourself for getting them under control in your woods!
Berries
Many berries that you may find growing in your woods are edible. The list includes wild blueberries, black raspberries, common elderberries, serviceberries (also known as shadbush or juneberries), chokecherries, and more! Most of these berries ripen in summer. A good field guide will help you tell edible and tasty berries from inedible or toxic ones.
Mushrooms
The wild mushrooms available in your woods depend in large part on the species of trees present. If you have pine, hemlock, fir, spruce, beech, oak, birch, or aspen trees, you’re in luck. For example, hen of the woods often appear near oak trees in the fall. Morels are associated with dead and dying elm and apple trees and are found in spring. But if your woods are dominated by maples, don’t expect to find a bounty of edible mushrooms. For help identifying mushrooms, check out the resources compiled by the Wisconsin Mycological Society.
To grow mushrooms intentionally, you can purchase spores (the “seeds” of mushrooms) online and “inoculate” hardwood logs that you cut from your woods. If you follow the right process, you can harvest mature mushrooms over several years from one inoculated log.
Tree Crops
Depending on the tree species in your woods, you might be able to harvest nuts, fruits, ornamental materials, or sap to turn into syrup.
Nuts
Many species of trees found in Wisconsin’s woodlands produce delicious nuts that you can gather or cultivate.
- Shagbark hickory nuts are mostly found in the southern portion of the state and come from the same family as pecans. You can harvest them from the ground in October or November.
- Black walnuts are mostly found in the southern portion of the state. The nuts ripen in September or October. Processing black walnuts is labor-intensive but well worth it.
- Hazelnuts in Wisconsin include the American hazelnut and beaked hazelnut, both of which grow as shrubs. Many people in the Midwest are starting to grow hazelnuts commercially.
- Acorns from oak trees require multiple soaks in water to reduce their bitterness. After that, you can roast them, grind them into flour to use for baking, or make acorn oil.
Tree Fruits
Fruit trees such as apples, persimmons, pears, cherries, peaches, and native plums can form a part of an agroforestry system. Pawpaw is another fruit tree gaining popularity among Wisconsin forest farmers.
Ornamental Materials
To tap into your creative side, you can harvest branches from conifer trees (boughs) to make wreaths, garlands, floral arrangements, and aromatic oils. Balsam fir is the most common species used for wreaths. Florists and wreathmakers also buy boughs from landowners, so this can be a nice source of supplemental income.
You can harvest boughs in late fall (early October to early December) once the trees are dormant—wait until after at least two hard frosts. Make sure to leave a portion of each branch so the tree can regrow it.
The bark from paper birch trees is a versatile material you can gather in mid-June to early July to make baskets or crafts. Since removing the bark can kill the tree, try to only harvest bark from trees that you plan to cut soon anyway.
If you enjoy woodworking or know someone who does, you can harvest burls from many hardwood tree species, including cherry, maple, oak, ash, willow, and walnut.
Maple Syrup
For many Wisconsinites, harvesting and boiling maple sap into syrup is a long-running tradition. In fact, Wisconsin is the fourth-leading U.S. state for annual maple syrup production! Maple syrup production can be a fun family activity or a large-scale business, depending on how much time, energy, and money you want to invest. It’s a good idea to start out by tapping only a few trees and seeing what the process is like before committing to large-scale production.
Sugar maples are the trees that people most commonly tap to make syrup, but red maples are also often used, and any other species of maple can work, too. If you want to get adventurous, you can make syrup from birch or walnut sap—but maples are easiest because their sap has the highest concentration of sugar.
To learn more about every step of maple syrup production, from identifying maple trees to filtering and bottling the finished syrup, check out our tutorial videos for beginning producers.
Firewood and Fence Posts
Wood can be a non-timber forest product, too. Two common home uses for wood are firewood and fence posts.
Some species make better firewood than others, depending on their heat value, ease of splitting, smoke production, and fragrance. For example, white oak and hickory are great choices because they have high heat value and produce light smoke, while aspen, poplar, and pine are less desirable due to their low heat value and moderate smoke. When choosing which trees to cut for firewood, prioritize cutting unhealthy, crowded, or crooked trees to support the overall health of your woods.
Firewood is commonly sold in face cords (8 feet by 4 feet by 16 inches), but it can also be sold as full cords (8 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet). To prevent the spread of invasive species like spongy moth and emerald ash borer, always use firewood near where you harvest it (never transport it more than 10 miles unless it has been treated to kill pests by a DATCP-certified vendor).
You can make fence posts out of study, rot-resistant wood like northern white-cedar, black locust, or oak. Ash and pine can work in some cases, too, but they aren’t as durable or strong.
Seeds for Planting
Public and private tree nurseries often seek to buy seeds from landowners to help with reforestation projects.
As of 2024, the Wisconsin DNR nurseries purchase 20 species of tree seeds in August and September, including sugar maple, oak, pine, spruce, tamarack, and more. Only collect tree seeds from trees growing in your woods, not from landscaping trees in your yard or other cultivated trees.
The best way to harvest and process seeds depends on the species. Some should be collected while still on the trees, while others should be collected from the ground. In general, cones are ready to collect when they are mature but still closed—they disperse their seeds when they open. After collecting seeds, clean off any debris, store seeds in a cool, dry location, and deliver them to the buyer as soon as possible.
You can also collect seeds to sell or propagate from understory plants like ginseng, ramps, and goldenseal, as well as ornamental woodland wildflowers like trillium, bloodroot, and trout lily.
Carbon
Throughout their lives, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their wood.
You might not think of carbon as a crop, but there’s a growing market for it. Several programs now pay landowners to manage their woods for carbon storage as a way to reduce the harms of the changing climate.
Further Reading
Resource libraries
- USDA overview of agroforestry practices
- USDA overview of forest farming
- Savanna Institute resource library
- Extension non-timber forest products publications
- Extension firewood publications
Relevant organizations
- Midwest Forest Farming Coalition
- University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry
- Association for Temperate Agroforestry
State regulations
If you have questions about non-timber forest products, agroforestry, or forest farming, contact:
Tony Johnson
Natural Resources Educator
anthony.johnson@wisc.edu
608-386-8900
Page last updated June 2025.