Just got back from exploring the back thirty...up the steep wooded ravines and "down the rushy glen." Wandered the creekbeds, sandy flats, and ferny hillsides. Found trout lilies blooming and great swaths of skunk cabbage, two beaver dams, a very grumpy but fortunately rather distant porcupine, a scolding woodcock and a leaping deer. Found woolly-stemmed fiddleheads, red-stemmed fiddleheads, skinny little spotted fiddleheads, but nowhere in my thirty-acre wanderings did I find a single brown-papery-scale-covered grooved-stem ostrich fern fiddlehead.

*sigh.* Our elderly neighbor assures me that we have edible fiddleheads on our land. He should know, as he's been wildcrafting for decades and often harvests mushrooms, balsam tips, and other lucrative goodies on both sides of our boundary line. However, he recently had a stroke, so I know HE didn't beat me to them. So where ARE they?!?

Can anyone tell me what plants I might find near them, or any other hints or tell-tale signs? I feel like a complete fiddlehead-hunting failure!

--Cuilionn