Discovering & Foraging Edible Wild Food
Gathering wild edible food for many is a rewarding lifetime hobby.
There is a great deal of satisfaction in finding fresh food for the table.
Eating food just harvested that day can spoil you on buying food that has sat on the grocery shelf for several days and lost much of its sweetness in the process. Just getting outdoors to find something for dinner is usually just part of the fun and your trip can be linked to many other outdoor hobbies that you enjoy. Keeping your eyes open for edibles while you are hiking, bird watching or looking for wildflowers eventually becomes second nature.
Most of us recognize and identify the fruits and vegetables we see in the grocery store, but there are tricks to recognizing their wild equivalents and being comfortable with consuming them. Consulting books on foraging is a tremendous aid in both recognizing the wild cousins to grocery store food but knowing when and where to look for them. Knowing friends that forage or joining foraging groups might also be the way to get started. Usually, foraging friends have acquired several things they like to gather and just knowing from them what is readily available near you can give you ideas of what you might want to target.
Discovering new wild food can be exciting. When taking a morning walk while visiting my step daughter in Michigan, I spotted numerous vines of wild grapes draping from nearby trees and bushes. Linda encouraged me to pick them and we spent the evening squeezing out their juice to take home. The wild grape juice made some of the best grape jam I have ever tasted. When traveling through Canada we stopped at an RV park for the night. When I walked through an undeveloped portion of the park! discovered large patches of wild huckleberries growing on 2-foot tall bushes. We filled all the pots and pans we had with the ripe tasty berries and froze them when we got home. They freeze well and were most welcome with my morning cereal.
My wife Linda and I enjoy a 2-mile hiking trail in a wetland near our home.
We began to notice a large variety of edible food growing along the trail and began forming a list of the many different fruits, berries nuts and other edibles we saw. Eventually we tallied 29 edible foods that we were comfortable with and we are sure there are many more growing that we failed to identify. Not all of the things we found grew in quantities that would justify a separate trip to this location for harvesting and not all of the foods we discovered would be ready for harvesting in their prime at the same time, but a few were worth coming back for when we knew they would be ripe.
Eventually you discover locations for favorite foods where they grow in harvestable quantity and plan your outdoor outings around this knowledge.
Not all foraging trips need to be to distant locations. Quite often in your own neighborhood you can discover desirable fruit laying on the ground unharvested. The people that planted the trees may have moved away and new owners may not be interested in the fruit. A quick knock on the door, might make a new friend plus provide some good dining in the future.
The friendship might develop after you offer them a piece of the pie that you made with their fruit.
Even visiting a u-pick commercial location has value. The fruit is less expensive and also a lot fresher than at the store. Just keep your eyes open.
Tonight's dinner might benefit from your foraging discovery.
