Kevin's Watch

Have you ever gathered any wild foods?Wild grapes,blackberries,and hickory nuts are favorites around here.I have often thought of taking up 'mushrooming' but I am afraid someone would end up sick or dead .Do you have any experience with wild foods?What is foraged for in your area?

Picturing Sunbane as Ewell Gibbons...

Julie

I pick honeysuckles, but that's about it. I almost picked an apple from a tree in my backyard once, but then I realized the ground around the tree was where the dog liked to poop.

when younger, used to get apples, pears, scallions and rhubarb. at work we get pecans.

Can't say I've ever really foraged. Used to get rasberries when I was 6 or so.... but that was more like stealing than foraging, per se.

My family (at the behest of my loving mother) used to pick wild strawberries and grapes (concord, with the pit in 'em). Every year we made jellies.

We had apple trees the were somewhat wild. Not sure if that is considered foraging, but every year we made applesauce. What a tedious process that was!

I don't, but I have a friend who makes a wonderful wild raspberry jam.

My dad took me shrooming. The good ones are pretty easy to identify, don't be scared. Also, have picked wild blackberries, wild blueberries. Sneaking into an orchard and pigging out on Gala apples counts, right?

in the area of Lexington where my father lives there used to be an orchard and so everybody in about a 6 to 7 block radius has some kind of fruit trees in their backyards...peach trees, apple trees (several varieties), grape arbors, mulberry trees, cherry trees, and there's blackberry bushes growing along a berm at the end of several streets that goes on for about a mile, bordering along a railroad track. all this to say that it was our DUTY as neighborhood kids to FORAGE!!! nevermind that we had to jump fences and sneak to do so!! that's all the foraging i've ever done, except in the country with my great aunt blackberry pickin.

I did pick up pecans when I was a child for my mother and I would help her crack and pick them out. But, I'd much rather pay the high price and buy nuts that are already picked and shelled.

I have taken my son to berry farms and apple orchards. We even went and picked out his pumpkins for halloween and a tree for Christmas on a farm one year. That's not really the same is it??

But... I can top any foraging story...
I have been shopping at Filene's Basement in Boston and I lived to tell about it...

Julie

Mulberries when I was a kid, and blueberries when I'm in Maine during the right season.

Beware the mushrooms. I've heard enough validated stories of mycologists killing themselves by accidentally picking the wrong species to be wary. I suppose that if you're keenly aware of what species grow in your area, and stay away from the ones that look similar to poisonous ones, you'd probably be alright.

Does clam digging or mussel- and whelk-gathering count as foraging?

Alynna Lis Eachann wrote:Beware the mushrooms. I've heard enough validated stories of mycologists killing themselves by accidentally picking the wrong species to be wary. I suppose that if you're keenly aware of what species grow in your area, and stay away from the ones that look similar to poisonous ones, you'd probably be alright.

Ah, that's just because mycologists don't stick to blue boys, they gotta go for the exotic ones.

I've picked buckets and buckets of huckleberries, they make the best pies!

We also get raspberries...

Picking chokecherries like a right of passage here. Apparently we are the "Chokecherry capital of the world" We even have an annual fesitval They are about as appetizing as the name suggests. The only chokecherry things I eat are the jellies made by local Huterites; they'll kill you right off the plant

Mulberries and kumquats, apricots, but more like stealing as well.

And I'm very careful about picking mushrooms...

--A

Honeysuckle, wild blueberry, and the weird plum but-not-plum things.

Also, bunnies.

blackberries, raspberries, apples, things like that.

My sister got ill from eating some unsavoury ones once... poor girl.

there was a pear tree on our street when I was a kid. Officer McGonigle in fact. all of us kids got the Green Apple Quickstep at one point or another from eating too many pears. c'est la vie.

Turiya Foul wrote:Honeysuckle, wild blueberry, and the weird plum but-not-plum things.

Mirabelles?

Being a damp, cool and temperate country Denmark has many mushrooms in the autumn. Having done my masters in systematic mycology I feel relatively safe when foraging, but I always try a new species myself, before I offer it to others. I served a dinner for 5 people once with a species I hadn't tried before. I knew it was edible and I was sure that I had identified it correctly. However, 4 hours after the meal I began feeling nauseous, and my immagination ran wild. I started phoning people and asked them to barf their guts out before the "poison" was taken up by their organisms. And all I had was an innocent little tummy flu!

Imagine their thoughts as they stuck urgent fingers down their own throats...

--A

Heh! Luckily two of them were colleagues and they were there when the fungi were identified. So they told me to put a sock in it, calmed down the remaining two and gave me a slap on the wrist