When the ground begins to warm around the end of March, I begin looking, on my frequent walks around the decaying buildings in the heart of Jackson, for the first shoots of poke salad, which Euell Gibbons lauds as “probably the best-known and most widely-used wild vegetable in America.”

A month later, Jake and I drive to the abandoned lots off West Fortification and pick the blackberries we find there growing in abundance. Near that same spot, in early June, I harvest the sweet little red plums from thorny, stunted trees along the railroad tracks near Pleasant Avenue and black cherries from a tree on Greymont down near the fairgrounds. In the early summer, I gather pears and figs from around abandoned houses in Belhaven Heights down off High Street. And in October through November, all over the city, pecan trees drop tons of nuts, though some years are good…