About Stemwork

Stemwork is a working archive of wild edible plants, organised by plant part rather than by species. It exists because most foraging writing stops exactly where the useful part starts. A field guide will tell you that burdock is edible. It will not tell you that the root needs 25 minutes of boiling in two changes of water before the inulin stops tasting like soil, that the leaf is edible only while it is still small, or that the flower stem in June is the best thing on the plant.

What is on the bench

Thirty-two plant dossiers and six method pages, in English and Chinese. Each dossier covers the parts of that plant that are worth harvesting, and says plainly which parts are not. Each part gets a harvest window, a harvest signal, a numbered process, a de-bittering parameter table and a storage figure.

The method pages carry the numbers that the plant pages refer to: blanch times and ice-shock ratios, brine concentrations and headspace, drying temperatures and target moisture, salt percentages and fermentation durations, infusion ratios and the one safety rule that matters, sugar concentrations and the temperature ceiling for candying.

How entries are added

The archive is published on a drip. A batch of dossiers goes live first, and the rest are filed in over the following weeks rather than all at once. Entries that have not been filed yet are not on this site at all — they are not in the lists, not in the sitemap, and their addresses return 404. If you arrive from a search engine on an address that does not resolve, the entry is still being written.

How to correct something

Every dossier has a factual claim in it that someone can disagree with: a window, a temperature, a lookalike. If one of them is wrong, write to [email protected] with the entry address and the claim you think is wrong. Corrections that come with a source get priority, and the entry is amended rather than quietly rewritten.

Safety

This site is a record of methods that are used in kitchens and in field practice. It is not identification training and it is not medical advice. See the terms of use for the full statement on identification responsibility, and read the identification note at the foot of every dossier before you act on it.