Foraging in the Wild

What are some things you may remember your grandparents or great-grandparents foraging for outdoors - or maybe you know someone now who does - for food?

Poke is one - some like the young, tender leaves

Blackberries, other fruits (muscadines, apple, pear, etc.)

Nuts

Mushrooms - as long as you know WTH you're searching for and eating

What else?

Blackberries and the muscadines. Also bream, crappie and bass. Occasionally we had catfish from the wild. But usually if we were eating catfish, there was a lot of ketchup bread because we didn’t have the 3 previous fish.

Dandelion, cattail, American bueatyberry are all edible.

I had a weird uncle that likes to eat poke salad and boiled squirrel brains.

Have you ever ate much of that?

We had a guy in the deer club that used to gather white oak acorns and make bread from them. Seemed like a lot of trouble to me.

Decent amount.

Not much of anything but blackberries around here. I sure wish we had morels and fiddleheads here though

Maypops, blackberries , muscadines, wild plums

Granny used to make poke salat all the time. She also made blackberry cobbler. She used to take me on hikes in the woods and we would dig sasafrass roots and she would make a tea out of them.

Pawpaw used to make blackberry jelly and muscadine jelly both were awesome. I remember them cooking them up out back of the house.

They lived through the depression, so they knew more than most people how to live off the land and they weren't ones to let anything that was edible go to waste.

I've eaten a lot of persimmons when I was a kid. I've also eaten a lot of tree nuts.

I've always been curious about ramps, but I've never tried them.

I'm wanting to start growing ginsing once I get the cabin finished. I think my mountain side will be a great place to grow it. According to a book I read about Lookout Mountain ginsing (sang) used to grow all over that mountain. We already have a bunch of muscadines and I plan on transplanting some in the front yard and building an arbor for them to grow on.

Most of the foraging my granny and paw paw did had medicinal purposes. Rabbit tobacco, ginseng, wild honey, yellow root, vetch, oxalis, several more I can't remember. They had a natural cure/remedy for tons of common ailments.

Wasn't including fish and game in this. We know about hunting and fishing.


Great stuff. I forgot about cattails and dandelion. Have had both. Cattails are kinda tasty.



Some of those I remember from reading the Foxfire books. Always loved those books.




I never knew the Maypops were edible.

Huckleberries. They grow along the bluffs around here.

Wild plums are awful tasty as are ripe persimmons. There aren't any wild plums on our farm anymore, but I do graze on persimmons in the fall.

Not for nourishment but chewing on the stem of a sweet gum leaf tastes sorta like peppermint.

Ramps.

Do they have ramps in AL?

I've never heard of ramps here in Alabama but have smelled and found them while on a camping trip in northeast Georgia. Doggone strong aroma.

I don't really have anything to add, but have always been extremely interested in foraging/gathering.

We'd pick enough wild plums for a years worth of jelly. Can't find a wild plum anymore. In the summer, Mom would give me a bucket and tell me not to come back home till it was full of dewberries. We had dewberry cobbler several times a week when they were ripe. Same thing for scuppernogs and muscadines in the fall. We'd fill five gallon buckets home from the woods at my grandparents. I delivered a bucket to an older man in town one day, and the next Sunday at church he told me he ate them like he did when he was a kid until his mouth as raw from sucking on the husks.

We'd also pick up pecans on the weekend. Our trees and all over the county. Probably an attempt to keep us under their thumb, to a degree. We always had a deep freezer full year-round, and every Christmas my mom would give me a gallon bag of shelled and cleaned pecans to give to my teachers. They always acted like it was a great gift, but l thought it was kinda goofy. Either they were being nice, or sto-bought pecans were expensive back then too.

We only messed with walnuts once, though. We had yellow hands for weeks.

Ramps are popular in the spring in WV. Some have ramp dinner/festivals.

https://wvexplorer.com/recreation/agritourism/ramp-dinners-festivals/

Attending a ramp festival or two always has been on my to-do list, along with going with someone to find and dig them.



I've been keeping my eye on a couple of pecan and walnut trees around here that are on public property or private owned by someone I know. Going to see if I can pick them up this year.

Friend of mine in Minnesota is a walnut fanatic. He got some green ones this year and pickled them, and also is making some kind of walnut booze.

'Huntress says I graze around our house more than our livestock does! I'm constantly finding and eating berries and other wild fruit. I know where the best patches of sassafras are, and which are white sassafras and which are red, and if you walk around our fencelines and treelines, all of the cat briars always have the tops and tips chewed off...that was me, too!

Interesting article...

http://bittersoutherner.com/foraging-the-south-pfitzer-hosey-forson/

The tender shoots of catclaw or smilax, is really tasty.

I was in northwest Illinois this week on work and the property had some wild apple trees. Small apples with a tart flavor. They were wonderful.

Tender, new growth of greenbriers tastes like asparagus. I eat them when I find them.

I’ve eaten and used wild onions to cook. I also enjoy a little honey suckle nectar. I used to impress my friends at the beach by eating coquina clams. I also remember going to a little creek in north alabama to collect either watercress or water chestnuts for a salad with my grandma.

better watch out!!



Investigators said they got a 911 call from the club about the woman, but the caller said the woman wasn't a threat.

Chatsworth police officers found 87-year-old Martha al-Bishara on the property when they arrived.

Police said they ordered Bishara to drop the knife and then shocked her with a Taser.

Family members shared photos of Bishara inside her hospital room with WSB-TV’s Richard Elliot.

When Elliot stopped by her home Tuesday, her family said she was doing well.

“She’s recovering, you know. Still a little sore from what she’s gone through,” nephew Solomon Douhne said.

Police used a taser on an 87-yo woman cutting dandelions with a knife?

Damnation. I'd be madder than two wet hens if I was her family. That's a complete lack of common sense.

Yea she must have got inside the 21 foot rule!

Maypop ia what HAWAIIAN PUNCH is made from... was very surprised to learn that.

I forage almost everyday on my morning walks. I love gathering up wild plants, berries and mushrooms for food, jellies and medicinals. I'm really big into Mycology and mushroom foraging. The Chanterelles and Boletes are flushing wide open in Alabama right now. I make natural medicines using lots of foraged wild plants like Maypop, Mullein, elderberry, white oak bark, Violets, etc.... I made Sumac lemonade just today.

I love chanterelles in soup. Elderberry pie, jelly and wine are great too. We ate a ton of poke salad when I was a kid. We found wild honey bees and transferred them into hives. Of course I’ll never forget all the berry picking....huckleberries muscadines blackberries elderberries dewberries . Was great growing up that way and wouldn’t trade it for anything

You serious Clark? I noticed we've got vines hanging full of fruit in several spots around one of our hay fields Saturday.

I’ve foraged for the following:
Huckleberries
Wild blueberries
Blackberries
Dewberries
Mulberry
Pecan
Walnut
Wild plum
Chanterelle mushrooms
Hen of the woods mushrooms
Morel mushrooms
Sassafras
Muscadine

Was just talking about this with my dad and mom. They both graduated from WVU and said they both have gone to some festivals. Said you could smell em' sitting there, smell em' being cooked, and dad said you could smell em' when you were sweating them out walking around