The whole crew is outside. Kids are playing on the playgym.
Dogs running around. I’m pulling weeds outta my flower beds.
The 3yo baby starts screaming and grabbing her mouth. We all respond. The older Grand-wreks say she ate berries. What??
Nothing edible is making berries. They point to a vine growing out of the brush.
Mother is panicked. The lil’wrekker and Hamza are taking pix and googling it. Mid-daughter is trying to call poison control.
I grab the baby up and run her in the house. I have syrup of ipecac. I dose her. She immediately vomits the contents of her days food, all the way to breakfast oatmeal. I see the remnants of what looks like pepperberry.
They are not really poison but they can be hot and give you a funny feeling in your throat. I’m sure she got them all up and out.
When her Mom and the rest of the crew come in she’s sitting on Pop-pops lap eating a pop-sicle.
She explains to everyone: “I eated ‘outside’ candy. Nana gave me stuff that made me ‘spitzle’(vomit) and I nearly ‘dided’(died) now I’m ‘alibe’ (alive) again.”
I told DIL the berries wouldn’t have killed her. She might’ve gotten a bad tummy ache, is all.
In 2 beats all the other grand-wreks want popsicles too.
So… we had a long conversation about not eating ‘outside’ candy, EVER.
I’ve wondered how anybody decided what wild-growing fruity things are good to eat. Look how long people thought tomatoes were poisonous. Do you feed them to dogs or feral cats first and see what happens?
There’s a public park not far from where I live with an unusual tree that I’ve not seen elsewhere. It is heavily laden with berries at a certain time of the year. The berries look exactly like boysenberries but are darker purple. (Like wild blackberries, but more elongated like boysenberries.)
I have no idea if they’re good to eat. I’m not about to try it. I never heard of any kind of berries that look anything like boysenberries, blackberries, or raspberries growing on a tree! I wonder if anyone has tried eating them, and if so, with what results?
I was with my mom and dad and some random guy who was interested in buying a small wooded patch of lakeshore my dad owned … and I wantered back with berry juice around my mouth and on my fingers. Half an hour later, one pumped stomach and the result of Deadly Nightshade berries … which I am apparently immune to as the only ill effects was one seriously pissed off baby Aru. I don’t really remember, I was just turned 5 and memory formation tends to make stuff that young blur. <I have probably 5 or 6 memories that are firm from before first grade/6 years old>
May we safely assume said Pepper Berry plant has been dug out down to the roots and burned?
Senegold, mulberries are fine. The berries are almost tasteless, and really not worth the bother, but they can be made into anything you’d use berries for. The only real value, IMHO, would be wine.
Mulberries are messy. Kids play in the vicinity of the trees, then track purple goo that stains all over the house. Birds like mulberries. They eat a bellyful, then head over to the nearest clothesline to crap purple all over someone’s clean wash.
But mulberry trees grow rapidly, fill out nicely, and provide lots of shade. That’s why many homeowners rejoice over planting a fruitless mulberry tree.
~VOW
Now you’re going to have a lot of trouble getting those kids to go berry-picking when the blackcaps are ripe.
Watching other primates, where there were any around, would be more useful.
Some of it was probably also trial and error by very hungry people. And some of it may have been accident – whoops, the kid ate those berries! hey, that kid’s doing fine. Maybe the rest of us can eat them too.
What really puzzles me is how people figured out the things that are good to eat if put through considerable processing first, but poisonous if you don’t, say, boil them three times and pour off the water.
If you’re going to try to destroy everything that might even mildly harm a kid, you’re going to spend a whole lot of time, and quite possibly do serious damage to your local ecology. And the non-local, for that matter – there are things important for migrating birds to eat that aren’t good for humans.
(If the particular plant’s in the baby’s sandbox or equivalent, yes, then I’d get it out of there.)
Huh; I find mulberries quite tasty (but, note, there are different species so YMMV), and I’ve even steeped and drunk the leaves as herbal tea. But, same as with mushrooms, it’s not necessarily “never eat the outside candy” — consider also your herb garden and nut and fruit trees— but definitely never eat anything you cannot positively identify.
"All right, Kids, listen up! The area of Grandpa and Grandma’s yard where you can play starts at the Pepper Berry bush at the far left, and it extends to the Castor Bean hedge that goes almost to the pond. Stay out of the pond! Uncle Son-of-Wrek spotted the cousin of the Loch Ness monster there last week. We’re calling it Wrek-Ness, and it eats little kids.
"The line from the pond goes behind Ft Covid and extends to the Oleander bushes.
"Please leave the Holly bushes alone. Auntie Mid-Wrek shoved one of the berries up her nose when she was five and we had to take her to the ER so it could be removed before it started to grow in her brain and pop out of the top of her head.
"So let’s recap: don’t eat the Pepper Berries, they can kill you. Don’t eat the Castor Berries, they can kill you. Don’t eat any part of the Oleanders, they can kill you.
“Go play, have fun, and later we’ll go out to Grandma’s garden to kill wild pigs, and then we can pick strawberries for dessert tonight.”
~VOW
~VOW, girl…you are hilarious. We need more parodies from you.
As for removing the pepperberries it would be a major operation. They are a prolific underbrush.
(Remind me to tell you about the “Affair of the Kudzu eradication” Mr.Wrekker tried a few years ago. :eek:)
The kids will be taught what to leave alone outside, if they stay long enough. And it appears I’ll have them all summer.
I may just call all berries “outside candy” now. I’m already calling Bigfoot “Big Toe.”
Glad everything came out all right.
Thank goodness you had ipecac! Didn’t I hear long ago that it was taken off the market for some reason? Not because it was dangerous, more like people were using it for the wrong stuff, like bleach or Drano consumption? Vague memory. I think I had some when the kids were tiny. Never had to use it, thank heavens!
Nellie, I had a brief minute thinking if the stuff was too old to use. I’d had it forever. It came in a first aid kit that came from a credit union we joined.
But, I dosed her anyway.
Luckily, it worked.
The lil’wrekker looked it up. She says somewhere on the interwebz it says to make the patient to drink baking soda mixed in water as an antidote for unknown berry poisoning. :dubious:
I had a neighbor and classmate named Eleanor. Nobody liked Eleanor. She constantly lied about everything and stabbed people in the back. And drooled. Eleanor would eat anything anyone gave her. “Here, Eleanor, eat this.” And she always would. Anything. Wild berries, moldy food, mud pies, insects, anything.
We moved away from there after 7th grade. I still wonder what became of Eleanor.
If a food looking plant is surrounded by bleached skeletons, don’t eat it. Also why it was popular to have 12 children. One of 'em was the taste tester.
An African-American family moved in behind us. She was talking gardening with Wife and asked about a red-stemmed green and if the leaves boiled up nice-like. Wife was Polish as well as South-Side, so NO!!! It was rhubarb, the stems are tasty but the leaves contain loads of oxalic acid, which will cause your calcium to solidify in crystals in your bloodstream. I didn’t test it because the only time she responded that loud and fast was when I asked if the tiny, purple berries on a weedy shrub were tasty. Something about ‘deadly’ nightshade. :o
