Ground Cherries

Oh happy day. On my lunchtime walk, I did my normal foraging route. A handful of mulberries here. A wild apple there. A few floral nibbles from an evening primrose plant. A handful of wild grapes that made my mouth pucker. And then... oh happy happy joy joy... I found ground cherries. Just about a dozen ripe fruits. I ate two just now and they were wonderful.

Linden / Basswood Tree

One of my biggest frustrations with foraging has been with recognition of plants in the spring. In the later seasons, many edibles have some extremely obvious recognizable characteristic (e.g. the pods on a milkweed). But often the best time to eat these things are in the spring before they mature. Maybe that is why foraging takes so much time to get good at. You need to go through many complete seasonal cycles to really understand a plant and how to recognize it.

For example:
In Sam Thayer's first book, he raves about the linden or basswood tree. I looked for one all spring to no avail. But finally this past Sunday I found my first one at a park about 10 miles from my house. This is a pretty easy tree to recognize this time of year because of its funny leafy "bracts"... But the best edible part of the tree according to the book is the young leaves in early spring. I'm not sure I'd be able to recognize the tree at that time of year, without those funny bracts to help me out. So after Sunday, my plan was to remember to go back to that park and that tree in the spring again and study it as its leaves come out. Hopefully then I could get some practice recognizing it in that stage.

Today as I was walking to lunch, I found another linden tree around the corner from my office. On my first tree, I tried some of the nuts, which weren't too bad, although they were fairly small. I tried some of the nuts on this tree too, but they clearly were not ripe enough to be eaten.

Foraging Update

Here is a foraging update:

I picked about a pound of autumnberries on Satuday and made a small glass of juice from it. I will most certainly do this again. I have a "food mill" strainer I used to remove the seeds, which I then destroyed (the seeds not the mill, silly) because of the plants are considered invasive, but I read today that you can roast and eat the seeds, like you would for a pumpkin. I'll try that next time.

I also picked several more pounds of blackberries. I've never made jam in my life, but there are so many out there that I think I'm going to try it anyway. I have an old water-bath canner than I've only used a few times to make applesauce. I'll let you know how it goes.

I played around with winnowing plantain seeds this weekend. I found a patch of plantains that had really baked in the sun, stripped the seeds off and then winnowed them with the wind. You don't get much for the effort at the end... just a little handful of tiny black seeds... but they taste pretty good. I think they'd make a good topping for a bagel, like you would use poppy seeds. I make bagels once or twice a year, usually in the winter. I'm going to collect a bunch of these seeds, dry them out, and store them for just such an experiment.

On my walk at lunchtime today I found a perfect little apple tree a hop, skip, and a jump away from the mulberry tree I described last week in this blog. I tried an apple, expecting it to be nasty like most crab-apples are raw. Not this apple. It was wonderful. Why no one picks these apples is beyond me. I picked another for the walk back to work. Maybe I'll make applesauce too!

Blackberries, Autumnberries, and a Local Breakfast

It's all about blackberries these days, folks. I don't know what it is this year, but the crop is very big along my street. The main collection has yet to ripen, but I've already collected at least six pounds of them. Yum. This is one of the few wild foods I have collected my entire life. They grew all over where I grew up, and these seem to be everywhere where I live now too.

My daughter loves helping me collect them. Last night she and I went out a picked a couple of pounds. I noticed one spot where there are a ton of them that I couldn't reach in my shorts and sandals. I think I'll go back tonight in jeans and my work jacket and finish the job. I read up a little bit on how to encourage growth of these and I may go out with some clippers when the season has ended and cut back the spent canes...

All over where I live are "autumnberries" which is a fruit I've read about in Sam Thayer's book. Based on the book, I was expecting these to not be ready for a while, but there are many bushes with ripe fruit on them already. (I was talking to a local arborist who said practically everything is three weeks early this year because of the crazy weather...) In any case, I tried some and they are DELICIOUS! It does depend on the individual tree. I don't know if that's just because some trees are bad, or have bad soil, or aren't as ripe, or what. But if you find a good bush, they are simply fantastic. This weekend I am going to try to make juice from them. I'll let you know how it goes.

Every morning, I have a breakfast salad of sorts along with my daily eggs. Here was today's breakfast:

• Omelet with cheese. Eggs were local. Cheese from Vermont, I think.
• Handful of raw lamb's quarter's leaves
• A small bit of wood sorrel
• A bunch of plantain seeds
  
• Half a Kohlrabi from my garden
• A good helping of blackberries from last night's harvest
• A couple of strawberries from the grocery store
• Some cucumber from the CSA we belong to.
• Some green pepper from the CSA.
  
• A glass of organic milk. This probably was not local food.

Breakfast is my favorite meal these days, and I'm happy to report significant progress in localizing my food.

Lamb's Quarters

I first read about lamb's quarters in Sam Thayer's book. This spring I started to look for it, to no avail... until I finally realized several months later that I had been pulling up the young plants in my new garden all along! After I discovered this, I showed my wife a few weeds that I wanted her to let grow in our sunflower bed.

This morning, I cut ten perfect leaves off these plants. I washed them carefully because there is this funky powder on the undersides of the leaves that I'm not a big fan of. Then I ate half with my breakfast this morning and put half in my lunch for today. I usually have spinach like this everyday, but I think I actually prefer lamb's quarters. Nice. Not only is it free, it is good!

Here's a picture I stole off the web of it. (I need to get my camera going, so I can get my own photos going, but I suspect the person I stole this from won't be too angry... When I get my own photo I'll replace this one.) I seem to have two varieties of this growing. The first looks just like this picture. The second is a fair bit smaller, with narrower leaves, but still with the goosefoot pattern, and still with the funky blue-green powder under the leaves. The leaves of both varieties taste the same, but the smaller variant has seeds on it already. I tried eating these and it left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Thayer recommends cooking lamb's quarters, but I've never done this. In general, I vasty prefer uncooked vegetables. I despise cooked carrots, but love them raw. I love raw snap peas, but if you cook them, I'll stick out my tongue. Etc. So I'm in no rush to try this.

This wild food has been a very pleasant surprise. It's easy to get. It tastes great. And it looks like it is as healthy if not healthier for you than what I am replacing (spinach).

Mulberries

Several weeks ago I discovered a red mulberry tree about a ten minute walk from my office. At the time I wasn't sure what it was. The only other tree of this type I had ever seen was in the yard of the house we stayed in when we lived in France. Madame Duchesne told me "C'est un mûrier" and said something about the fruits being edible. But since it was winter at the time, I never really saw the fruit and I forgot all about it.

Now, I have heard of mulberries before (we all know the song, right?) but didn't know much about them or even what they looked like. When I saw this tree however, I went back to the office and determined what it was using the internet. Not a hard plant to identify, and I'm a little embarrassed I didn't know it.

Ok ok. Making a long story short... Today I walked to the tree again, and the some of the berries are starting to ripen. Not many, yet, but enough for me to try a handful. Yum. I'll give it another week or so and then go back with a container...

First Post

This is a blog I've started to keep track of my experiences in my newest hobby: wild foods. I'll also talk about my efforts at buying local foods, gardening, and personal food independence in general.

My interest started late last fall (November 2009) when I had an "aha" moment about food and decided there were many things about my current food supply that scared me: pesticides, environmental destruction, food security. On and on the list goes. So I started doing so research and decided as a first step to try my hand at a small garden, and also to start trying to buy local foods.

In my research, however, I ran across the idea of wild foods when I saw a book on the topic by Sam Thayer. (He since has published a second book, and I highly recommend both.) This really sparked my interest. This could really be fun! I also purchased several other wild food books and a few field guides and it's been a big learning curve for me, seeing as I knew nothing about plants (and still know precious little) when I started. But that's the fun in a new hobby, right?

As you read here, keep in mind I am pretty much a complete beginner in these things. So take everything I write with a grain (or pillar) of salt. Please correct me where you feel I am wrong. I hope you and I can exchange information and ideas...