From "Searching in Sweden for Berries, Herbs and Understanding/For over a decade, Eva Gunnare has been trying to restore people’s relationship with nature — by teaching them how to forage" (NYT).
It was fun seeing a new article today about foraging, because I did some foraging over the weekend in the Upper Peninsula. I ate many blueberries, bilberries, raspberries, serviceberries, and thimbleberries.
Meade is a much more dedicated forager than I am. I tend only to eat the berries directly and can't spend much time in the sun, whereas he goes out again and again, loading up on berries. And he also cooked blueberry pancakes for me and took these enticing photographs of berries:
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Dare I say the Prof has been a-garnering?
Althouse - an endless succession of beans and nuts. And tasty foraged berries.
At last a complete meal (it was missing complex carbs). Next step berrywine.
Delicious.
I miss the elusive huckle…
Does eating the perch I catch off my dock count? Or does that lack cachet?
"It was fun seeing a new article today about foraging, because I did some foraging over the weekend in the Upper Peninsula."
Good practice for living in the world the greenies envision. You might want to work in some time for target practice, though- once everybody is foraging, there won't be enough to go around and you'll need to be able to protect what (if anything) you're able to find.
Let the good times roll.
"Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum
Call me for dinner, honey, I’ll be there"
Remember Euell Gibbons, the wild foods advocate? Deep down, we are still hunter-gatherers, right?
Meade been berry berry good to Ann.
"Foraging is a learned skill that involves searching ‘the wild’ for food or provisions. It’s a skill that many of our ancestors relied upon for survival, though it’s also still used by many communities throughout the world today." I seriously doubt picking semi-wild berries in a cultivated public park qualifies.
i LOVE foraging for food!
The next town over (Elgin, IA) has had a farm wagon right by downtown* FULL of tomatoes,
with a BIG sign saying: FREE TOMOATOES! That's the way to forage!
downtown* Once you're in Elgin Ia, you can't miss downtown, just go Into the town and You're Downtown!
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each”
The longer passage (from Thoreau):
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet drink and botanical medicines. In August live on berries, not dried meats and pemmican, as if you were on shipboard making your way through a waste ocean, or in a northern desert. Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Miasma and infection are from within, not without. The invalid, brought to the brink of the grave by an unnatural life, instead of imbibing only the great influence that Nature is, drinks only the tea made of a particular herb, while he still continues his unnatural life,—saves at the spile and wastes at the bung. He does not love Nature or his life, and so sickens and dies, and no doctor can cure him. Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each seasons influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your especial use. The vials of summer never made a man sick, but those which he stored in his cellar. Drink the wines, not of your bottling, but of Nature’s bottling; not kept in goat-skins or pig-skins, but the skins of a myriad fair berries. Let nature do your bottling and your pickling and preserving. For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick. Men have discovered—or think they have discovered—the salutariness of a few wild things only, and not of all nature. Why, “nature” is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health. Some men think that they are not well in spring, or summer, or autumn, or winter; it is only because they are not well in them.
Just be extremely careful with picking wild mushrooms.
Amanita ingeston is most often fatal and frequently gathered by non-experts.
@Althouse & Meade, just remember that bears — black bears and grizzlies alike — love berries, too. And they do not, as a rule, enjoy sharing with humans (or any other critter). Please take precautions.
Foraging for fun is one thing, for your daily sustenance all year is why humans invented agriculture and animal husbandry.
Hey, no photos of the pancakes?
that's the best use for blueberries
Wild black raspberries, mushrooms, asparagus, rhubarb. That's the extent of my foraging.
"I tend only to eat the berries directly and can't spend much time in the sun"
My wife is also a natural redhead and carries a warning label, "Do not expose to direct sunlight."
Thoreau... Wasn't he the one who eventually admitted his all as one approach failed with a weed ridden garden and him going back home? Wrote pretty words, though.
I've just stuffed my freezer with enough elderberries to make three 3gal crocks of elderberry brandy once I add the six bottles of white rum and some sugar. Should be ready by December 2024.
They grow in humid ditches by the roads here.
That's added value foraging.
At one point in life I ran a surface mine in upper lower michigan. There was an old area of about 640 acres covered with raspberrys. I would go out in a 4wd and eat and collect all I could, the berries were at 80 degrees in the July summer, warm in your mouth. Our lawyers said we could not let people in due to liability and establishing a right to collect them, so they generally went to waste. Except for me and our employees.
Maybe that's what all these urban thieves are really doing - foraging.
For big screen TV, Gucci bags, Rolex watches and more. You know, things that grow on trees and shrubs.
I do remember once, when we were first married, my wife and I taking the canoe to fish in a beaver pond. in New Hampshire, and catching no fish, but along the shore, blueberry bushes hung over the water, and we paddled under them and gathered up a nice mess of them. My dad called it a "mess" of blueberries when we went "a-berrying," as Thoreau called it, in the Endless Mountains of PA.
tim in vermont said...
"Does eating the perch I catch off my dock count? Or does that lack cachet?"
Of course! I like to eat the black rasberries that grow along the walking path.
On a week-long fishing trip on a wild river in Alaska, many years ago (dropped at the head of the river by a float plane, and we rafted and camped as we came down) we found a very nice bank covered with big, delicious blueberries like those. We picked and enjoyed a bunch. Our guide, a pleasant, heavily-armed gent who looked somewhat like a grizzly bear himself, pointed out that the well-trod paths we used to access the berries were unlikely to have been made by humans. We decided to move on.
We hadn't actually seen any grizzlies (or other humans) at that point; later we had some closer adventures with the bears. I don't think they would have killed and eaten us for messing with the berries, but if they wanted to they could have used the blueberries as a nice garnish.
Oli, yep! His words definitely were way superior to his actual actions. They are such lovely words that I like to think of them as aspiring toward who he wanted to be more than on who he actually was. Which is a fine task for words.
I just did some foraging at Sam's. Twelve items, $214. No berries.
"Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk..."
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