Foraging for Food

[karstopography]

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Took a little jaunt around the lot. Those redbud blooms are tasty. Some have quite a quantity of sweet nectar.

Wild Onions are blooming, so are the Rusty Blackhaw. I hope I get a good crop of those delicious little fruits come fall. The loquats took it on the chin during last year’s historic freeze, but are bouncing back. This tree doesn’t have much fruit yet, but they are exta good.

I found some oyster mushrooms also. Very excited about these.

[svalli]

Year ago I found a good place close to our own forest plot for picking funnel chanterelles. My family picked a lot of wild berries, but did never mushroom hunting, so I have asked help from friends to identify edible mushrooms. Funnel chanterelles are safe to pick for novices like me, because there is no poisonous mushrooms, which look alike.
Last night just before sunset we went to check, if the mushrooms are already growing. I picked some and left the smaller ones to grow. Have to go back in a week or two to pick more



Sari

[bower]

Those are definitely one of my favorite mushrooms. Easy to dry and also makes fantastic pickles.
We do find here, that sometimes other small brown mushrooms are growing in the same patch with the funnel chanterelles. When I taught friends to identify them, I also taught them to dump out the bag on the table when you get home, and do a QC check of what you picked. I still do this every time myself, and I did once find a small 'imposter' had found its way even into my own bag, possibly growing underneath a bunch that I picked in a hurry. So it is always worthwhile to double check, even though they don't really look alike, mistakes can happen especially when picking large patches.

[worth1]

It flips people out when I'm walking from work and eat the red yucca flowers in the summer.
Red yucca is really an agave not a yucca.
They are planted everywhere here for landscaping.
They are one of the few agave that don't die after blooming.

[karstopography]

@worth1 I don’t remember eating a yucca flower, but I understand the flowers, the flower stalk as it emerges and the ripe fruit are good to eat. As I remember it, there’s a few of these on the dunes out at the local beach.

@Bower We have fungi galore here with all the rain after a long drought. I’d go foraging, but the mosquitoes are feasting on my blood a quite a bit more than I find desirable. I mentioned to my son that we ought to go on a foraging trip this Holiday weekend. I’ll dowse myself in DEET or picarin and that’s will work long enough to hopefully gather something.

Btw, I’m the guy people want to take a stroll in mosquito infested areas. I’m an absolute mosquito magnet, my wife, my son, everyone notices it. They won’t get a one and I’ll have a hundred.

[bower]

@karstopography same thing here with heat plus finally some rain, the bugs really pop and that includes a few mosquitoes, not many though at this time of year. We have a ton of spiders with very large webs this time of year, you need a stick to walk around the garden or the woods for those but maybe they got most of the troublemakers. I hope so.
I saw a big bolete by the clothesline couple days ago and thought about taking a crack at it to see what it was but in the end, it didn't spark joy The boletes are in general a buggy lot and a very short window to get them while good.
I also passed on the couple of golden chanterelles that finally turned up next to the old veggie garden, as I wasn't in a cooking frame of mind.
Our best seasons for mushrooms have a good bit of rain and cool but not below 50 cold in September, day-night range in the 60's or occasional low 70's max for highs and lows mostly around 50 F or a nudge below. Not many mosquitoes. The funnel chanterelles really like a cold night to get them started, and they can often be found right up to the end of season in good or even prime condition. In dry years they can be very scarce, not even a jar of pickles scarce. And then when you get a good wet August or September you can have an incredible year with more than you could pick let alone eat in a year. I have dried them in large quantities and used for years, so @svalli if you find they are really plentiful, stock up. They keep incredibly well when dried, and quite easy to use in cooking, I like to just crumble them into a soup or stew and they hydrate well enough in the cooking time.
I once found a packet of dried funnel chanterelles (aka winter chanterelles ) in my cupboard that was dated ten years old! We had none at the time. Open zip bag and take a sniff - they were as fresh as something you just picked. We ate them up and they were great.
Apparently these funnel chanterelles are a great source of vitamin D. That was according to a study from Finland iirc. Very tasty.
Anyway it is good to get lots when they're bountiful, because they really do keep well, and may be scarce in the dryer years.

[Danny]

Don't know enough about mushrooms to forage them, but sure do love to eat em ! You guys are so lucky.

[svalli]

@Bower I know what you mean with those imposters. I had one in my basket and found it when cleaning the mushrooms and luckily it was easily identified as the stem and the gills were different. I have now learned to pay more attention when picking. I was hurrying too much when trying to find as many mushrooms as I could before sun was setting.

Before finding the mushrooms myself, I used to trade garlic to dehydrated funnel chanterelles with a friend, who does a lot mushroom picking. Funnel chanterelles are the easiest mushrooms to dehydrate. I put those in my dehydrator with no heat and just let the fan run to get them to almost dry and then set the temperature to 35°C to get them crispy, before packing to jars. I still have some couple of years old dried ones in the pantry, so these new ones are stored in the FoodSaver jars to keep them good for long time.

Sari

[NarnianGarden]

That is one reason I don't like to purchase forest mushrooms from the market place.. Even reputable (and officially recognised) sellers can make mistakes...

[worth1]

Now I read commercial mushrooms have salmonella.

[Danny]

We buy a lot of mushrooms and use them raw in salads and cooked in many dishes. I can only imagine the flavors of some of the ones you guys are talking about, but they sound yummy.

[karstopography]

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Walked around my lot just now and scrounged up some Chanterelles. A couple of oyster mushrooms are also buried under the chanterelles.

[worth1]

I'm pretty sure the landscaping company planted edible sumac where I'm working.

[karstopography]

Looks like a big crop of Turk’s Cap this fall. Tons of flowers on numerous plants. Turk’s cap apparently came through the drought better than the competing plants and now appears to be reaping the rewards. The fruits have really grown on me. The fruit is sweet and in the apple or pear realm of flavor. Each fruit is the size of a jumbo blueberry.

Turk’s cap is a related to the plants that give us chocolate, cotton, okra, marshmallow, durian, jute, balsa wood, roselle, and many others. On my lot, Turk’s cap grows at the edges of every thicket of yaupon, another useful plant. If I could time travel, I’d like to go back to when the indigenous Karankawa lived on this land just to see what all they did with the various plants. Karankawa indians were said to be tall and well built, a sign that they surely ate well.

[svalli]

I went mushroom picking again and thanks to the rains the funnel chanterelles were now much bigger.

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I picked also some lingonberries. I got only about four quarts, but that should be enough to make jam. We use it like cranberry sauce with meat and especially with venison roasts.

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Sari

[bower]

Lingonberries are called partridgeberries here. They are one of my favorite berries, so the cranberries can be a substitute in a pinch but never quite as good. We eat them with meat as well, but also use them in dessert or as jam on bread.

[rxkeith]

i had ordered three lingon berry plants from maybe jungs several years ago. i planted them around a boulder that wasn't
going to be moved without heavy equipment being involved. they took several years to spread, and grow, and then we moved.
i still haven't had any fresh lingon berries yet.

we did manage to pick twelve gallons of wild blueberries, probably could have picked twenty, but there wasn't enough time in
the day. thimble berries were also good, along with blackberries, and dew berries. it was a very berry year here.


keith

[worth1]

I remember as a kid growing up foraging the roads and woods for gooseberries black berries huckleberries muscadines and the likes.
The muscadines were around a quarter in size and the sugar content was over the top.
As a matter of fact all the wild berries and such had a huge amount of sugar.
The muscadines made a marvelous wine.

[svalli]

Lingonberries are called partridgeberries here. They are one of my favorite berries, so the cranberries can be a substitute in a pinch but never quite as good. We eat them with meat as well, but also use them in dessert or as jam on bread.

I agree that cranberries taste better, but the wild ones here grow in wetlands and are not as abundant as lingonberries. I have not picked them since I was a kid and it was a long walk to some remote bog following my father.

Bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) and lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) are the most common berries to be picked here, because they grow in most forests. We have a lot of bilberries by our lake cabin and this year we had time to pick only 15 liters of them. We have a 7 acre wooded lot and usually there has been people picking bilberries farther away from the shore and cabin. The lot is wild wooded area and we cannot prohibit people from foraging berries and mushrooms on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Finland It seems that this year nobody else than us had been picking bilberries on our lot, since there were still a lot of them, but those were already overripe and too mushy to be picked.

This year I picked also some bog bilberries (Vaccinium uliginosum) and made jam from them. These are much milder tasting than bilberries, so people do not usually pick them even bog bilberries have higher vitamin C content than the more common cousin.

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Sari

[bower]

I have only ever seen a few of those local bog cranberries, they are not enough to be worth picking in our area either.
Blueberries (V. angustifolium) are by far the most common berry picked, followed by partridgeberries (V. vitis-idaea). In some parts of the island, mainly further north, bakeapples (Rubus chamaemorus) are plentiful. One of my aunts and her family lived on the Northern Peninsula for years, and they always had a lot of them. Also in the north, when my Mom was growing up they picked Squashberries (Viburnum edule). I have seen a few patches of these in our local area. They are uncommon enough that I wouldn't mind planting a patch if I could find some again. She really enjoys those old tastes from her childhood.