 
Fiddleheads like moist soil.
They like to be close to the water. Fiddleheads
really like to be flooded, so it's like
they don't mind putting their feet in the
water
but they don't want to be underwater all
the time. Now the best fiddlehead areas we
have is when the rivers
rise and flood the area for
about a week
and then recedes - great fiddleheads. If you don't get that condition
and it gets warm and hot without the
flooding and water
they will grow overnight. So boom - up they
go
and you end up with a fern and not a fiddlehead.
Fiddleheads have no known toxins. What it is - picture this: here's the
here's the riverbed water running here's
the
the bed itself where the fiddleheads are
growing and guess what?
Up here is a hog farm. It's raining,
the water's rising and the effluent from the
hog farmer is running. It's going on the
bed. It's going in the river - the river rises.
What's gonna happen on those fiddleheads, or any produce that you have?It would
become contaminated. So fiddleheads do not have toxins.
Now our plant - we disinfect everything.
I mean we have lab tests
every day. Every production goes
through the lab
to see if there's any E. coli on it and
there's nothing, so
most other little producers out there
they don't do that. They don't have the
facilities. They don't have the means.
So if you end up picking fiddleheads, if 
there's a hog farm up above,
you better make sure you want to boil those fiddleheads, because if you don't
gonna get sick.
There's two ways. You can either steam them and if you do steam them
they have a little of a bitter taste like
rapini. If, on the other hand you boil 
them, and
I do prefer mine boiled, 10-12 minutes
or you go eight minutes and it's a little bit al dente.
I prefer mine with butter or
olive oil, uh salt and pepper and
cheese on top of it and I could eat them
three times a day which I do in season.
You can freeze
fiddleheads, blanch them for three
minutes in boiling water,
throw them into cold water
to remove the heat - into a ziplock
with a little bit of water, take the air out -
there you go.
And they would be good for years and years and years. I'm going to tell you, when I say years
we've got fiddleheads sitting in a fridge
which we've been testing. Five years they've
been frozen
and they're perfect but you make sure you
put water in to keep them from freezer burn. 