You don't have to live in the country to find edible plants. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
World-famous chefs are encouraging us to look for food in our own backyards.
Wander along Melbourne's Merri Creek and you'll spot plastic bags caught in the trees like deformed flowers and the odd abandoned shopping trolley. At first glance it seems an unlikely place to find the food for your dinner - but that's the idea behind urban foraging.
It's a movement that's been led by some of the world's most well known chefs like Rene Redzepi at Noma in Denmark who serves rose-hip petals foraged from the countryside around Copenhagen and Ben Shewry from Melbourne's Attica where a meal could include wild native saltbrush leaves picked beach side at Ocean Grove.
But foraging doesn't have to involve journeying for hours to find untouched ingredients growing in pristine wilderness.
Edible weeds and plants are right under our noses in our cities' parks, bike trails and creeks.
Which is lucky for Jack Gillard who runs Orange restaurant in Melbourne's Windsor.
Gillard became an urban forager by necessity after Orange's former chef signed the café up to host a foraging dinner for this year's Melbourne Food & Wine Festival and then moved on to another role before the event.
The restaurant manager had to quickly work out how to forage for himself and put an emergency call in to foraging expert Doris Pozzi.
Pozzi is the author of foraging guide Edible Weeds and Garden Plants of Melbourne and taught Gillard how to source ingredients for the meal from dandelions growing in Windsor to blackberries along the Merri Creek.
Gillard's new-found skills resulted in a dinner for the festival showcasing foraged ingredients in dishes like ravioli filled with feta and warrigal greens, Australia's "native spinach", foraged from Melbourne's Yarra trail.
Gillard wanted to show foraged ingredients can be found in an urban environment and that foraging isn't only the domain of fine dining.
"We've taken the approach to be a little more casual than some of the other foraged restaurants you may have heard of along the way," Gillard says.
Compared to Noma and Attica, Gillard says Orange's menu highlights quite simple dishes.
Pozzi says city dwellers can safely forage for free and healthy ingredients by sticking to some common sense rules.
"Don't forage in parks that look neat and tidy, forage in places that look wild," Pozzi says.
Along footpaths and bikepaths Pozzi recommends moving off the paths as far as possible. "It's good to keep away from the main path and the places that councils spray pesticides," she says. Pozzi warns against relying on Google images to identify whether plants are edible. "Don't try to eat something just because it looks edible ... it's not a good idea." Instead Pozzi recommends starting by doing an edible weed walk with an expert. "Instead of seeing a picture with one example of the plant you are seeing a whole lot of different examples at different stages of growth and in different soil situations, they can vary a lot," she says. "[On a walk] you can also use your five senses you can actually touch the plant and taste the plant, smell the plant, so you are getting a much more broad spectrum feel than you would from a photo." Pozzi has seen a "huge" increase in interest in foraging over the past few years and sees the move to urban foraging as part of that. "It's really taken off," she says. "There's been a resurgence in interest and I think it comes down to a couple of different things. One of them is the whole foodie culture we've got now, the other thing is people growing their own veggies and really getting into food at home and I think a natural extension of that is wondering 'Oh what are those weeds that are in my veggie patch?'." It turns out the weeds can be just as nutritious and delicious as the veggies.