Foraging
by Ida Livingston of Davis City, IA
Among my early memories are the countless summer forays into the woods and fence rows with my father in search of berries. In Ohio, it was for wild raspberries usually and wild strawberries if we could find them. I can remember Dad lifting and carrying us kids across large patches of nettles to save our bare legs and arms from their stings as we explored. We came home with our pails of tiny wild berries and a glowing satisfaction in the seek and find trek that left us scratched from one end to the other.
We didn’t forage because we needed to, it was seeking a different satisfaction. My father grew domestic berries for as long as I could remember. The largest patches were as much as a couple acres of strawberries and a couple acres of black raspberries with some red raspberries and yellow raspberries for variety.
In Tennessee, there were no wild raspberries in our area but there were countless acres of wild blackberries. Often, during the hot part of the day in June or July when it was too hot to work in the gardens or field, we’d grab our berry buckets and head up the road to a thicket of at least five acres of wild blackberries. There we would proceed to spend the next 4 to 5 hours wading in brambles so thick we couldn’t see our feet. We brought many gallons of these home to make blackberry juice.We canned over a hundred half gallons of blackberry juice. This would be served alongside popcorn in the evenings later in the year.
Summer is not the only time we can forage and fruit is not the only edible one can seek. Each season has its own wild bounty and what is available varies by region. However there are some principles that apply nearly anywhere for those of us in four season climates.
Seasonal Food Cycle
In our modern era that offers tasteless red tomatoes year-round in the grocery store, our willingness to settle for cheap but instant gratification weakens our cravings and drive to produce our own. In my home we wait for the changing seasons to bring us our tomatoes, melons and more, and by then we have really worked up an appetite for it. In the meantime my kitchen prepares what is seasonally available.
I find the changing seasons and what they offer, both wild and domestic, an interesting study. Spring offers its tonic food; leafy greens, shoots, blossoms, sprouts, nettles, and more. This begins to flush out whatever buildup from the heavy, warming food that winter had served. As the open air sauna (summer) heats up, fruit and vegetables become juicier and more abundant in the heat, bringing us their antioxidants. The fall harvest turns in starchy root crops, storage vegetables and nuts. These stores then carry both wild and domestic harvesters through whatever winter throws at us. Yet winter is not without its own offers. It is a time for the dormant root harvest, whether domestic horseradish or the wild sassafras root, these will thank you to be harvested outside the growing season. Then Spring begins it all again.
Positive Plant Recognition and Use
Correctly identifying wild edibles is very important; not everything out there is edible. There are some dangerous lookalikes. Water hemlock grows from coast to coast in continental US, and all parts of the plant are deadly poisonous. It can be mistaken for wild carrot, wild parsnip, and it looks a lot like the domestic anise plant.
There are also plants so common we assume that they are safe but are not. All parts of the daffodil are poisonous. There is no developed antidote so symptomatic treatment is the only cure. The beautiful but invasive honeysuckle is covered in beautiful red berries in the fall that are not edible for humans.
Even things that are edible sometimes need care with consumption. Milkweed is a common foragable wild edible, young shoots, immature flower clusters, and seed pods are all commonly collected and cooked. But the milky sap from this plant also contains cardenolides, a steroid that affects the contractions of the heart. If one has any kind of heart condition it would not be advised to consume milkweed.
When I moved to Tennessee, our family had a wonderful neighbor whom we loved. She loved to make herbal remedies and share them. Unable to forage herself due to chronic health issues, her husband would often bring in her requests. She made an “elderberry” ointment that her family swore by. But when we saw her husband harvesting the elderberries for her, they were not elderberries at all. For a long time we didn’t actually know what it was, eventually we found out that the trees he was harvesting the berries from were actually called the Carolina Buckthorn, which is not considered an edible. The berries are not highly toxic, but consuming too many can cause gastrointestinal distress.
Spring
I love to watch the green transformation that spring brings. The brown grass with one emerging green leaf that multiplies and lengthens steadily as it responds to the warming sun and the rising ground temperatures. That green spreads into a carpet in every direction, it walks out into the dormant gardens and climbs up into the treetops.
Grass has many edible companions. Dandelions and chicory look very similar as spring greens and are eaten in similar ways. Chickweed loves soft rich soil and is a lovely early salad. Many places have wild mustards. Lamb’s quarter is a favorite of mine to appear in the spring, I will chop the leaves into my chicken and rice. Nettles love a shady woods’ edge and are a wonderful addition to scrambled eggs or omelets. After we’ve had a few meals of these I take our scythe out to cut down a section of nettles that I spread out and dry for later use.
Leafy greens are not the only spring appearance. Many wild edibles have shoots, the most obvious example is wild asparagus that, in some areas, can be found along fence rows and roadsides. I have known those who have collected young tender bamboo shoots to chop into stir fries as well as milkweed shoots. When harvesting from established plants, harvesting two to three pickings should not overly stress the plants, and several pickings can be gathered from wild asparagus. These are lovely steamed and buttered.
One of the most important things to notice in the spring is where the summer fruit is blooming now. As I pen these lines I have been watching the patches of wild plums bloom. I can see them easily this time of year. The trees have not leafed out yet and the clusters of plum trees that make a thicket are white with bloom in early April. I watch for the purple canes of wild raspberries, and the white bloom flagging a patch of brambles I had not noticed before. I tuck these observations away where they may be retrieved when the fruit near to home begins to ripen. If I run out of picking to do in the patches near my home, I will venture farther to these.
Another popular spring edible is flowers. Dandelions and violets can be made into exotic jellies. Dandelion bloom can be dipped in batter and fried into the fritters. Black locust blossoms cluster on a stem, these flowers can (while remaining on their stem) be dipped into a light batter and fried golden. Sprinkled with powdered sugar while hot, these black locust blossoms are a treat to eat right off of the stem.
Every region has their own foragable offerings. Some have broader regions (yes, you, dandelion), some are more limited. There are also many things that are technically edible but are too fibrous to suit us, or are bitter, have an odd texture, or are tedious beyond any scope of practicality. One has to align their palette, priorities and time constraints.
Some things are time sensitive and hard to find – like morels. They need soil temperatures between 50-60° F with warm, moist weather. I wait until I see mayapples up and leafed out before I even try to look for morels. Mayapples are easy to spot and track, they are not an indicator of where to find morels, only that the soil is getting warm enough for them to make an appearance. Different regions have different morel-friendly habitats, in our area morels are easiest to find around dying elm trees. In Tennessee they could often be found around sycamore trees.
Summer
Since you kept track of what was blooming in the spring, finding wild fruit is now much easier. Be sure to get permission before foraging on to property that does not belong to you. Irate landowners can be scarier than bears, sometimes they want to pick their own fruit or they simply don’t want the liability of people they do not know on their property.
Summer is a good time to notice asparagus. They have tall fernlike stems and leaves and are easy to see. If you spot these in the summer, make note of their location so you can revisit the site in the spring and harvest them when they send up their shoots.
Try to avoid picking fruit under power lines or along road edges that have been sprayed. No one wants to consume the lingering chemical residues.
I prefer a bucket tied to my waist. This frees my hands so they can both pick and reduces the chance of spilling my hard earned berries from a dropped bucket. Hot dry weather accelerates the ripening of fruit. Wet, rainy weather promotes mold and spoilage, sometimes even before they are ripe. Extensive dry weather can dry up the fruit even before it ripens. Often trees will cast their fruit if they feel they cannot support it.
Most years we can expect July and August to be fairly dry, this usually causes our wild plums to cast their fruit. Last year was unseasonably wet in July and we had a bumper crop of wild plums. I filled some shelves with canned plums.
Ripening times can vary even by region. Some fruit has subspecies within the species, this can influence the ripening time. Other factors include whether the fruit gets the morning or the afternoon sun. Morningside fruit can sometimes bloom earlier in the spring as they have a warming head start from the early morning rays. The afternoon side, however, can be hotter in the summer which again accelerates the ripening process.
There can be several subspecies within a species. These can offer fruit with minor size, shape, flavor and other variables. We have noticed this in the wild fruit locally. It seems like every mulberry tree has a somewhat unique fruit from the next. There are subtle to dramatic differences in flavor, some very sweet, some not so much. some big and juicy, some small. We also have white mulberries among our wild fruit. The wild cherries here are similar, varying somewhat from tree to tree. These factors are often genetic, but they can also be affected by the trees’ overall happiness with its location; soil fertility, crowding, soil compaction issues, drainage, disease resistance or lack thereof.
Every region has foragable food unique to it. Eastern Ohio found me, even as a small child, picking morels by the bag full, looking for wild strawberries and wild black raspberries and then sassafras in the winter. Tennessee didn’t have the raspberries but they made up for it with interest in blackberries. A lovely surprise was the wild muscadines, a large, thick skinned yet super sweet grape. These are amazing – and huge! Pawpaws, passion fruit, persimmons, plums, wild pecans were just a few of the wonderful things to forage there. Western Ohio had a surprising number of neglected orchards and fruit trees in people’s yards, often they were more than happy to have someone come and pick them before the fruit drew swarms of yellow jackets.
Fall
Generally when we think of a fall forage, we think nuts. This is true enough. Walnuts and hickory nuts are common in the eastern and midwestern United States. We always gathered many buckets of walnuts when I was a child. They were dumped in our driveway where foot or wheel traffic knocked off the hulls, then we bagged the whole walnuts.
In midwinter, when we were going stir crazy and driving our parents nuts, we found ourselves seated in front of a block of wood with a hammer and a bag of walnuts. Shelling walnuts was on a really special list of jobs that we disliked. I can remember my brother Emery – when no adults were around – testing to see if he could hit a walnut hard enough to have the pieces of shell hit all four corners of the room. This job was reserved for only one room, those who hate stepping on Legos would find that stepping on a piece of walnut shell barefooted takes the experience to another level.
The nut is not the only part of the walnut that can be harvested. The hulls have multiple uses as well. I keep a box of dried hulls and when I make baskets that need a stain, I boil some walnut hulls, strain out the liquid and dilute it to the color I want my reed and then while the stain is still hot, dip my baskets in the stain. There are those who consume walnut hulls for its antiparasitic properties. A friend once said that lightly brewed black walnut hulls made into tea was a tasty beverage with cream and sugar. It sounded ridiculous enough that I tried it, and found that she was right!
In Tennessee there were also wild pecans. Some were big and some were small. There was a large wild pecan tree that released bushels of little pecans about the diameter of my finger every year. Usually we were in search of trees that gave much larger pecans and these weren’t too hard to find.
Nuts are not the only fall harvest. Fox grapes ripen in late summer and early fall. These are small, strongly flavored wild grapes that we had a bumper crop of last fall. Khoke came in with many buckets full of these. We canned almost 90 quarts of wild grape juice concentrate. They produced like I had never seen before in response to our uncommonly wet late summer.
Persimmons really need a frost to be good. There are some that come ripe sooner but one must be wary of a smooth skinned persimmon. Even slightly unripe, they are astringent, drying out your mouth like alum does. The only cures for accidentally biting an unripe persimmon are, #1) several minutes of oral discomfort, #2) find a wrinkly ripe persimmon and eat it. A ripe persimmon is the only antidote for an unripe one.
Persimmons are super sweet and do not spoil quickly. If the wildlife don’t get them, they can keep on a tree or on the ground below it for 2 to 3 months. My father had disrupted the wild life where he was logging in Tennessee one winter and the persimmon tree there had edible persimmons throughout December.
Fall also begins the season for root foraging. There’s an old saying that you can harvest horseradish in any month with an R (September through April). This is when the main strength of the plants is held underground. Likewise for any wild harvest, you want to harvest roots when the top is dormant.
Winter
The winter season continues the time for root harvest, if the ground is not too frozen, that is. There is little edible fruit. Sometimes there will still be some foragable wild rose hips. These are very high in vitamin C. The beautiful blue cedar berries have a strong pungent smell that does not seem appetizing. Unless one is gathering a small amount for spice as some people use it to help cook wild game, they are generally avoided.
My childhood had many winter days coming to the woods in search of sassafras trees small enough that I could pull or dig them out. These were taken home and washed. We kept a kettle with some of these roots in it and drank sassafras tea all winter long. The older generations claim that sassafras tea was a blood cleanser; a tonic. It does thin the blood if taken too much, but it has the most wonderful smell and flavor and for this I hunted it.
Winter time is also when I harvest willow or red dogwood for basket making. The bark clings tightly to the wood in the winter and is lovely in basketry. In the spring, the sap flow of the wood causes the bark to slip off if you were to try to harvest and weave with it then.
Perhaps the most popular wild winter harvest is maple sap that is cooked into syrup. This is done in late winter when the temperatures begin to swing with highs in the 40s and lows in the 20s. Too cold and a sap just freezes and the flow stops. In our area of southern Iowa, this season begins usually in the middle of February. In Tennessee, that flow began often in January, and farther north it begins later accordingly.
Hazards
Realize that when you are trekking the neighborhood for its bounty you may find yourself making memories that include more than just the bounty you bring home. Longtime friend Tim Ramey came by one day and recounted an adventure he’d had a few days previous. He was out to see if there were any morels yet at a favorite trail of his. Knowing he had a wide but shallow creek to cross, he took along his mudboots. He wore boots to ford the creek then put his shoes back on once across. He just left his boots beside a bush to retrieve on his way back. On the return trip, he put the boots back on to cross the creek. About midstream, a wasp that had crawled in while he was hiking, did not appreciate the newly cramped quarters and decided to make some room. Suddenly a wet foot did not seem so objectionable.
If your foraging hike is a long one, remember to take along a water bottle. You can meet other foragers while you are out. Bears love berries too and if you meet one, just leave your berry bucket; they will be happy for all the picking you have saved them and not have to chase you for it.
In Tennessee, the locals all warned us to watch out for snakes. Our hills and valleys were crawling with copperheads and rattlesnakes, not to mention many nonpoisonous species as well. It was claimed that snakes will crawl up among the brambles and wait for birds that are attracted by the berries. In all the years we picked blackberries, no one in my family had ever seen a snake anywhere but the ground, even that was rare. Typically snakes are smart enough to know that nothing good comes from an interchange with humans and they are usually exiting the scene as quickly as possible.
One hot summer day, my youngest sister, Abby, and I were picking in a blackberry patch about a mile from home. She was 7 or 8 years old, and had somehow made the mistake of coming in sandals. Picking berries just a few yards away, she suddenly called to me that she had been stung by a bumblebee. Coming nearer to me, I could see the verge of tears and I cast about looking for plantain as that is the most accessible home remedy usually. But we were in a thicket much too dense to have plantain and I knew I needed to come up with something. So I fell back to the power of placebo and told her how lucky she was to get stung in the blackberry patch because the second best thing to plantain was fresh blackberry juice, just squish a blackberry on the sting and it will stop hurting very soon. She did it and we both resumed picking. A couple minutes later, she piped up and told me it worked, her foot didn’t hurt anymore and didn’t seem to be swelling. Now for the rest of my life I get to wonder…. did it work because of the blackberry, or simply because she believed it would?
Use It
Wild fruit usually tastes stronger than domestic fruit. Some people find this off-putting. The wild plums in this area have a tart, sometimes astringent skin but the pulp is sweet. My husband loves these pitted plums made into fruit cookie bars, their sweet tart flavor is a real standout. These wild plums make some of the best jelly I have ever consumed. Stronger tasting fruit seem to make the best flavors for jelly.
Often wild fruit is ripening at the same time my garden is demanding attention. Usually I just can the fruit simply, packing them in jars with water and waterbath them at the time they require. These are now ready for later in the year when I have more time to open and easily make them into jams, jellies or other fruit-based products.
In the years we have more morels than we can eat, I dehydrate them and store them in gallon jars. These are reconstituted later in the year to serve on pizza or any number of dishes.
There are other wild edibles that I harvest. Sometimes when I am canning pickles and I want them particularly crunchy, it helps to can a grape leaf with them. Instead of defoliating my domestic grapes, I will seek out wild grapes and take some leaves from them. When I wish to harvest raspberry leaves to dry, I harvest them from fresh young wild raspberry shoots, sparing my domestic plants. When harvesting herbs of any kind to dry, I try to make sure that I am at least 3 days past a rain so that the properties within the plant are not diluted by the flush of water.
Don’t Take Them For Granted
When we are busy, it is easy to put off foraging, but realize the season is finite. It begins with a few, has a peak availability, and then tapers off. Berries can be picked twice a week once they begin. But once the season is over, it is done for the rest of the year.
If there happens to be a bumper crop, it is best to take advantage of it while you can. Not every year is a good year. If it is raining to excess while berry or tree fruit are blooming, it can disrupt pollination and there may be little fruit. If it is too dry between bloom and fruiting, then the trees may cast their fruit because they cannot support them, or the berries may dry up on the canes. There are also years when a late spring freeze will damage the fruit bloom and they cannot bear.
Be mindful of new growth. As you make paths into a thicket of brambles, try to be considerate of the new canes that are growing. These new canes are what bears the fruit next year. If they are damaged this year, it compromises the wild fruit in this location next year. When burning off fields or brush-hogging, think about sparing a few patches of wild fruit to forage later on.
Guerilla Gardening
There are waste places; the aftermaths of fires, clear cutting or other natural and unnatural disasters. I am a supporter of reintroducing environmental beneficials, even if I will never benefit from them. A bucket of walnuts thrown in several directions on a clearcut ridge will impact forest regrowth for generations. I collect my wild peach and plum pits and scatter them in places where they would likely thrive, whether I will ever revisit the site or not. It is a way of giving back a little when I have been given so much.
