I was out walking this evening and came across patch after patch of ripe wild Raspberries. Tasty too! For the past few weeks I've been picking Blackberries in my own yard but they're past their peak at this point. The wild blueberries are out in force in my area now too. Also, every year in September I spend a couple weeks picking wild grapes with my two sons. One loves to eat them, the other loves to just pick them. I like to make at least a dozen jars of wild grape jelly in the fall. It takes quite a bit of sugar to balance out the tartness, but the jelly does have a unique flavor. Any other foragers out there?
Yes. We have wild blackberries that are going by too. A few morels early spring. I made some crabapple jelly in the fall. I just started maple sugaring this early spring.
That jelly looks great! I'll have to try making some in the fall if I come across enough of them. It never even crossed my mind that you could do anything with the fruit; I always assumed people had them as yard trees because of the pretty springtime flowers. Maple sugaring sounds fun too. I found out recently that in early spring you can harvest birch sap too, so that could be a worthy endeavor as well.
The crabapples have a nice flavor. I add the recommended sugar and taste it as it boils. Apple jelly on thick toast in the winter is a treat. Maple sugaring is addictive too. Not much is needed to get started. Around here the city plants crabapple trees on public streets and parks. Driving around in the fall, I see loaded trees everywhere with apples going to waste. Look around, you may see a bunch.
Around here, I have seasonal foraged red and blue huckleberries, salal berries and blackberries. I was looking for red huckleberries but they are hard to find this year. Normally Mom has lots in her yard but not this year. The salal are starting to ripen and I will have quite a few in my own yard. The blackberry is all in bloom so it will be a month before we see berries for it. Another is salmonberry which is almost over here. I don't usually pick them as I find them rather seedy.
Your maple syrup went into a couple of things, but the hit was in a sauce of lime juice, maple syrup, and cherry tomato sauce, used to bake bluefish in.
they are a common berry here on the west coast. Evergreen leaves and dark purple blueberry type berries. here is is a link to some info on them. Salal — Wild Foods and Medicines Because they are hard to pick off the branches, I snip the whole branch of berries off and collect them in a bucket. when I get home, I sit with the scissors or clippers and clip each berry off. To process, I cook them until soft and then put them through a food mill to get the pulp and juice. Picking them off the stem results in crushing them and getting very stained fingers.
Thanks for the lesson Woodwidow! I've heard of various other berries that we don't have here, but I had never heard of salal berries before. I will check out that article. Are they only wild, or have people been able to plant and cultivate them?
I have them growing in my yard but they planted themselves. As they are all over the place, sometimes the challenge is keeping them out of the yard. In the wild, the leaves are picked for sale to florists to use for greenery in bouquets. Makes me laugh to go down to the grocery store and pick up a flower bouquet that has two or three branches of salal with them. Salal pickers are part of the non-timber forestry industry around here. By the way, we have a dog that just loves salal. Every chance she has, she picks and eats all the lower berries on the bushes.
Awesome that you have all those berries around you. In the article you posted, the author stated like they taste similar to grapes to his/her palate. Do they taste "grapish" to you? Wonder if salal would grow in Va... Might not be wet enough here.
They aren't a sweet berry but have lots of pectin in them. To make jam, I just have to add sweetener to taste and then cook for about 15 mins and they start to jam up. I would say the taste is a cross between blueberries and grapes. You would have to have wet rather than cold and dry winters, I think, to grow salal. Our winter temps hover about freezing and only dip below a couple times throughout the winter. Two winters ago, it was quite cold and dry and a lot of salal bushes died. I would send you some plants but I think we would have border issues.
Do you mostly make jam out of them, since they've naturally got a lot of pectin? Or are they good fresh/preserved frozen as well?
Our winters fluctuate, some are pretty wet, some sry. But we usually have quite a few cold spells below freezing for days, so they probably wouldn't like it too much. Unless there was a certain microclimate where they could survive. They sound like an interesting berry. We mainly have blackberries around here. We pick some and eat, but we're not super crazy about them, and their flavor can be hit or miss depending on the weather/year
Jam or syrup is about the best to make from them. The skins are tough and they usually have bits in the ends. They contain lots of micro seeds, really tiny, so if you want a clearer jam, you could process them like you would jelly by straining them through a muslin filter. I don't like too much waste so I put them through the food mill to extract the juice and pulp. Here is a thread I did a few years ago about processing salal Summer Jam
We have a sour cherry tree in front of our place in VT. We'd get a few cherries every year. Bumper crop this year! I think we had a good 5/5.5 cups total once pitted. Made a cobbler which wasn't bad. But the smoothies I've made with them have been excellent!
Here’s a new one for me. Back in January I bought and moved into my current house. There is a gigantic hickory tree about 8 feet from my property line that’s been dropping a large amount of nuts lately. You can hear them drop periodically all day long. They’ve been landing all over my wood piles. I collected the best looking ones so far and removed the husk. I’ll give them a couple weeks to dry and try them out.
Just started my first batch of wild grape jelly for the season. I ended up with 4 different kinds of grapes that the kids and I picked from various local spots. Got as far as boiling them down and I’m letting the juice drip overnight through a strainer. Tomorrow I’ll add sugar, return to a boil, add the pectin and jar it all.
So I went back to this same spot to check the progress on this years' berry crop. The many hundreds of feet of berry bushes along the paved road are looking healthy and should have ripe fruit next month. After digging further though I realized that these are NOT raspberries, but the invasive Wineberry from Asia. Basically an Asian raspberry, and it does taste about the same to me anyway. I did find a lone Mulberry tree on my travels tonight, so I'll be checking back on that as the summer progresses. I never ate Mulberries and I'm interested to see how they taste.
