The telephone company cut down my mulberry tree at the northern estate. However, I have a volunteer one here in the south now. It’s only a year old and didn’t produce this year. I’ll give it another year or two to see if it’s any good. I have some prickly pears I should harvest out back and probably some blackberries if I’d go look for them.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed wild black raspberries, blackberries, mulberries, and red haws. I haven’t seen a good red haw tree in years.
The only ones I trust myself enough to eat are feral raspberries and strawberries. I like the taste of blueberries enough that I’d try them if I knew what they looked like, but I don’t see them in the wild often enough to know how to distinguish them from other spherical Little Black Berries of other species.
My foraging is limited to grocery stores and my fridge. Although when I was a kid, at our country cottage, picking wild strawberries was a frequent activity and they were delicious!
Years ago, i was hiking in Switzerland with two friends, and we came upon a patch of wild strawberries. I pointed them it, and proceeded to pick them.
“How do you know those are strawberries?” They said. “The leaves look like strawberry leaves, the flowers look like strawberry flowers, and the fruits look like tiny strawberries” I replied. “Uh, it’s not safe to eat wild plants, you don’t know what they are.” “They also taste like strawberries.” I said. But they didn’t trust my ID. So I ate all the delicious alpine strawberries myself. I now grow alpine strawberries in my back yard. I can’t grow regular ones, because the chipmunks eat all the berries as soon as they turn white. I have no idea why they don’t also eat all the alpine strawberries, but i get a lot of them.
When I was a kid we’d nibble on ripe crab apples on walks.
There were several mulberry trees around where I grew up and once a year we’d save enough to have mom make a mulberry pie instead of just eating them all as we picked them.
Our neighbors had 40 acres about 50 miles away and they’d invite us once a year or so. Sometimes it was when the dewberries were ripe and we’d pick those as we walked around their land.
And in Switzerland there are reminders every year about making sure to wash any wild strawberries due to the chance of picking up a tapeworm from wild foxes. Normally not such a problem for wild mushrooms, as those are usually cooked.
OK, it makes sense to be wary of wild mushrooms. A lot of mushrooms look very similar, and some of them are intensely poisonous. But strawberries? Nothing in the world but a strawberry looks remotely like a strawberry.
Mangetout as a YouTube channel which features some awesome foraging videos. One in particular has him collection stinging nettles and making a soup that looks so delicious it freaked me out.
Check out Atomic Shrimp, you’ll be glad you did.
Hah, MrDibble linked to it as well.
So, I’m riding around mowing yesterday and my gf waves me down, holding a plant in her hand. I stopped and she hands me the plant and says, “Try this, what’s it taste like?”
I bite off a leaf and start chewing. It’s bitter to the point I think it might make me sick, but I forge ahead and eat a bit more. I tell her it’s awful. She takes the plant back and smells it. Oops…she thought she’d picked some garlic mustard, an edible weed.
I did not die, no diarrhea. She located and picked some real garlic mustard and it was nice in our dinner salad. Never figured out what noxious weed she offered me first, though.
Jeebus. Be careful with that, especially if your girlfriend goes foraging for wild carrot, aka Queen Anne’s Lace. It has a lookalike. Water hemlock. And all that that implies.
Never more than wild blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries for me. I have a client who is always telling me about the mushrooms he finds but that makes me nervous.
Pokeweed doesn’t grow in the west so I’d never seen it until I moved east. Then I ID’d it growing in our compost yard. My husband asked me what it was I was keying out on the kitchen table and I told him I thought it was pokeweed. “Is it edible?” I said, yes, people eat it, and he promptly grabbed it and gobbled it down before I could say you’re supposed to cook it first.
He got quite sick. Cook it first, and just use the baby leaves.
My grandmother was a great forager. She made many jars of elderberry syrup every year, her favorite. She had many secret mushroom spots (all fungiphiles have secret mushroom spots), and also gathered watercress, blackberries, pine nuts, and all sorts of other stuff.
I ate wild crabapples as a kid.
In the NC mountains people find and sell ginseng. They even had a TV show about that.
I should have noted earlier that I also have found morels growing on my property. Exactly once, about 6 or 7 years ago, in an area I’ve been visiting regularly since the early 1960’s. About a dozen of them sprang up one morel season, got properly ID’ed and harvested and eaten by me and the Mrs, and have not been seen since. We last checked about 5 days ago.
ooooo! you just reminded me. We go hiking in Austria every summer and depending on altitude you get wild raspberries and wild strawberrries.
The strawberries are far too small to do anything meaningful with them but they are a hikers treat. There are so many different little sub-species with varying flavours but the very best ones are so utterly sensational. A tiny little thing, perfectly ripe can taste like nothing else on earth, sooooooo aromatic and perfumed, almost like a sarcastically strong artifical strawberry flavour.
There is a favourite little patch of mine on a side-trail up the Grossglockner alpine road.
And of course we are unlikely to get to the mountains this year but no matter, they’ll be all the sweeter when next we can.
That surprises me, as they are typically held off the ground by the plant. But yeah, we were in a cow pasture, I suppose I could have picked up all manner of parasites.
right. I was 100% certain they were strawberries, even before nothing that they tasted like strawberries. Delicious strawberries, I might add.
I’ve nibbled on crabapples. They are bitter and taste terrible, in my experience. Other than a selected domestic eating crabapple (that has far larger fruit than the wild crabs) I’ve never tasted one I would want to eat.
Years ago I used to stay at a cabin the family of a friend owned in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan. There was a spring-fed lake down the road we’d snorkel in and found thousands of crayfish walking around the bottom. We picked up a net, scooped up a couple dozen, and boiled them like a shrimp boil. They were very tasty, kind of a cross between shrimp and lobster.
Over the years we found fewer and fewer crayfish (not because of us-- we only harvested small amounts a few times). Then my friend told me that one time he was up there on his own he went to the lake and saw a guy in full scuba gear come out of the lake with a huge sack full of crayfish. Mystery solved :mad:
So there are crayfish in Hawaii, eh? Huh.
When I was in grad school, there were a number of decorative crabapple trees on campus. One of my friends always looked forward to that time of year, because he loved them, even though to me they were mouth-puckeringly sour. Shrug, different tastes.
There are lots of kinds of crabapples, and they form all manner of hybrids, so YMMV.
Asparagus. Along the irrigation ditches in central Utah was abundant asparagus. I would go out with a bag to collect. But, always my stomach filled up first. Snap off, and eat. So tasty.
Not knowing the history, I imagine they were planted along the ditches. What foresight. Delicious!