Barberries

Common barberries in November; leaves have fallen off the branch.

The ripe barberries hanging along the stream were so tantalizingly scarlet that, even though I'd read that barberries are similar to cranberries and even though I'm not a big fan of cranberry sauce, I had to try barberry sauce. My recipe called for four cups of berries, and I made two trips with two different sons to pluck the ripe fruits from among the thorny bushes. In retrospect, wearing my knee-high rubber boots would have made the picking a lot more efficient; the berries mostly drooped over steep banks, and I was often clinging perilously close to a sudden splash in the water as I picked. There were some berries I simply couldn't reach, but by gingerly bending the thorny, low-hanging branches toward me on the bank, I was able to collect the berries I needed for my recipe.

My oldest son looks into the stream from a bridge.
Some barberries are hanging over the water's edge on the right.

The recipe was from Wild Food by Roger Phillips. I chose it because I didn't really know what else to make with the barberries. I love cranberries in baked goods, but barberries have seeds that must be removed before consumption, and there's just no good way to get the seed out without using the berry in a sauce or jelly -- at least not as far as I could figure out (but read on for subsequent findings). So, with Thanksgiving coming up, I decided to try a barberry sauce.

Barberries don't taste great right off the bush. My reference books all warned me of this, so I wasn't too disappointed when my own experimentation confirmed what I'd read, and I remained hopeful about the sauce. I placed the washed and stemmed berries in a saucepan along with two cut-up whole oranges and covered it all with water according to the recipe. After cooking the fruit and straining out the orange peel,  pulp, and barberry seeds, I reheated the sauce and added a bit of pectin and some sugar. Then it was time for the taste test.

It was ... passable. And really, considering that I don't care for cranberry sauce and don't like marmalade because of the orange-peel taste, the fact that I took a second taste after the first taste (albeit just to ascertain whether I actually disliked it and whether what I disliked was barberry or orange peel) is fair praise. But I was definitely asking myself why I hadn't heeded my gut feeling about those whole oranges. Next time I make this sauce, I plan to add some grated orange peel and orange juice but leave out the rind.

There will be a next time, though. I decided to test the sauce on my mother, who likes cranberry sauce and marmalade, and she said it was good. I thus put it on the table with our Thanksgiving turkey, and my niece and youngest son kept going back for more. I thought it tasted pretty good on the turkey too, I have to admit, and a post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich with some barberry mayonnaise did hit the spot.

I've now done a little searching online, and I've discovered several recipes for barberry pilaf, as well as barberry cornmeal cake, barberry tarts, and barberry pies. Some recipes call for dried barberries, which apparently are available in Middle Eastern grocery stores. All of this piqued my interest considerably because it would seem that any of these recipes would require seedless barberries. Indeed, I discovered that there is a variety of seedless barberry that grows in the Middle East, but I also found a description of what seemed to be a painstaking method of removing the one to three seeds contained in each sunflower-seed-sized fruit: partially dry the berries and then split them with a knife and poke out the seeds with the knife tip or a needle. Hmm. I'm pretty sure I have better things to do, actually.

Barberries weren't the only wild food on my table at Thanksgiving. I also substituted wild spinach (a.k.a. lambs quarters) for half of the spinach in one of my favorite dishes, Boursin-creamed spinach. I would have substituted all of the spinach except that I didn't have that much wild spinach in my freezer.

Because the turkey ran out before the barberry sauce, half of sauce ended up in my freezer. Tonight, as I was writing this, I decided I needed to find something to do with it other than serve it with my Thanksgiving turkey; otherwise, I won't need to pick any more barberries next year or try a different variation of the sauce. I searched online for recipes involving cranberry sauce and found this one for morning-after cranberry-sauce muffins. I doubled the recipe and substituted my barberry sauce (plus a half cup of autumberry jelly to make up what I was lacking in sauce) for the cranberry sauce. The muffins are still warm as I write this, and my eldest son and I have just had a sample. Although it might be a bit too much work to first make barberry sauce and then make the muffins just for the sake of eating the muffins, they are tasty, and I would recommend this use for leftover sauce should you have any. One caution, though, is that the cooking time in the recipe was given as 20-22 min, and my muffins were overcooked at 20 min. I tried 18 min for the second batch, and that seemed to be about right.

In other cooking adventures, I'm excited to report that I finally, and unexpectedly, got a chance to use the cookbook From Pest to Pesto, which I ordered in May but did not get to try at the time. Published by the Kalamazoo Nature Center in Michigan, the book aims to get people excited about cooking with garlic mustard so that they might help to stem its rapid, invasive spread. Unfortunately, the garlic mustard had all gone to seed by the time my book arrived, so I thought I'd have to wait for next year to try any of the recipes. However, some warm weather in the early fall convinced the garlic mustard to sprout again, and I was able to gather some leaves and roots to make the pesto (check out my April 22 post for pictures of garlic mustard).

It was fairly simple to make, and in no time I had a blender full of garlicky-smelling green paste. My first taste left me sorely disappointed; after the rave reviews I'd read of this pesto, I was hoping for a miraculous transformation of flavor from the pungent leaves to a tasty pesto. How this transformation could have occurred, I don't know; the pesto's main ingredient was indeed garlic-mustard leaves, so what else would I expect it to taste like? In any case, I thought the pesto was fairly disgusting but forged ahead with adding it to hot pasta as directed, just in case.

It turns out that the miraculous transformation occurs in the hot-pasta step. The pasta with pesto was delicious. My two youngest sons and I all happily ate large servings for lunch. I'm looking forward to trying some of the other recipes in the book next spring -- and simultaneously combating the spread of garlic mustard around my house!

Walnuts: Hard Nuts to Crack, but Not to Collect

Ripe black walnut and smashed husk.

All those walnuts that have been hanging teasingly from branches have finally dropped. Well, not all of them -- some trees still have clusters of green nuts waiting to fall. But there are areas littered with brown-spotted nuts, a few inky husks already dissolving into the soil in a rotten black mess.

Walnuts cover the ground under one of the trees
at a local playground. There are several more trees nearby.

This might sound unappealing, but the brown spots and inky goo actually mean the nuts are ripe. Hard, totally green husks are the ones you don't want. I wasn't so sure about that on my first nut-collecting trip. It started out as a nut-checking trip, but when I found nuts all over the ground beneath several trees (this was at a nearby playground), I emptied some plastic grocery bags from my car (the boys and I had just been to the grocery store) and filled them with nuts. I avoided the overly brown ones and even shook a few tree branches to get some green nuts to fall. When I read up on walnut collecting at home and learned that finding a nut already exposed amid an oozing mass of black inky husk counted as good luck, I headed back to the playground to collect all those nuts I'd suspiciously avoided.

My youngest son smashes
a walnut with his foot.

My technique, undertaken at the advice of Nature's Garden by Samuel Thayer, was to smash the husks with my heel, rub my shoe back and forth briefly to loosen the nut, and then pick the nut up with a gloved hand and plunk it in my bucket. In order to be more efficient, I smashed several nuts at once, but not too many because it was difficult to tell which smashed husks still contained nuts. The appeal of smashing nuts on the spot was that I didn't have to do it later and that I could fit many more nuts in my bucket. Of course, it also took more time to collect the husked nuts than it would have taken to just pick up the husks (which in most cases would not have required gloves).

The stain left by the walnuts
is even blacker now. This was
what my hand looked like
immediately after collection.

Why gloves, you ask? Let me put it this way. Even though I was wearing gloves, my thumb, index, and middle fingers -- the digits with which I picked up the nuts -- are still stained with ink a week later. It looks like I've been digging in black soil. The ink is under my fingernails and has penetrated my skin. And yes, yes. Of course I've washed my hands -- many, many times. (Note to self: get better gloves.)

My boys with our bucket of hazelnuts.

Once I got the nuts home, I submitted them to the same float test I used on the hazelnuts the kids and I collected in August. I was going to refer you to the post about that for details, but it looks like I've kept the hazelnut pictures a secret thus far! You might recall that I checked on the hazelnuts at the beginning of August, though. When the nuts were beginning to get brown and dry, and thus ripe, the boys and I brought a five-gallon bucket to the powerline corridor that hosts the bushes and filled it up with minimal effort. It looked like we had collected a lot of nuts.

To husk the nuts, I placed them in a pillowcase and rubbed them against each other vigorously. This broke a lot of nuts loose from the husks, and I could just pick the husked nuts out of the bag. Others I still had to husk by hand. When all was said and done, I still had a sizable collection of nuts.

My first sample of the hazelnut float test.
I just wanted to see whether it worked
(I cracked the floaters, and sure enough,
they were wormy. I cracked the sinkers,
and they were good. Bingo!).
Once I had all the nuts husked, I used
a larger container of water.

Next was the float test. I dumped the husked nuts in a bucket of water. Any nuts substantially eaten by worms would float to the top, whereas any good nuts would sink (this trick won't work if the nuts have dried for too long -- then even good nuts will float). I just about cried when I saw how many nuts were floaters. I didn't count, but I would say 30% to 40% were bad nuts. My much less sizable quantity of hazelnuts is now in a ZipLock bag in my pantry.

But back to the walnuts. I filled the walnut bucket with water and swirled the nuts around. I picked a couple of floaters off the top. I swirled the nuts again and got another floater, then a couple more. Swirl, swirl. Nothing more. Swirl, swirl. Still nothing.

My two older sons and their trucks happily took
on the job of husking my first collection of
walnuts. This was before I learned that it's easier
to husk while collecting.

Surely I had too many nuts in the bucket, I thought. I emptied some of the nuts into a separate container and filled that with water. Still no floaters. I repeated the procedure with all the nuts, but I didn't get any more floaters.

The moral of the story? Hazelnuts have a lot more worms than walnuts (Walnut shells are a lot thicker, so this makes sense to me).

My walnuts are now drying in a cardboard box, which is absorbing the remaining black inky goo. They'll need to dry for a few weeks, during which time the nuts will shrink a little and become easier to crack. For that job, I'll need my special hard-nut cracker, which I purchased last year when I first discovered my local walnut trees and hoped to find butternuts as well. A traditional, hand-held nutcracker just won't crack black walnuts (I tried), and using a hammer might work for some people, but I'm not willing to put in the practice and smash the fingers that would be required for me to perfect that technique (I tried that, too). My hard-nut cracker is basically a vice that holds the nut while I crank a handle, and the pressure is applied in such a way that the shell explodes from the inside out, leaving the nut intact (I tried this last year on a couple of unripe walnuts, and it worked great).

My elder son fingers some ground cherries.

Although we've been busy with walnuts, we've made a few other discoveries recently. On a trip to Old Sturbridge Village (where "interpreters" depict how New Englanders lived from 1790-1840), we came across a large patch of (unfortunately unripe) ground cherries. Since discovering these welcome invaders in my garden, I've spotted them at the edge of overgrowth in my back yard and nestled in among tall grasses at the edge of a parking lot. Unfortunately, the fruits growing among crowded collections of other plants seem to get bug eaten before the fruits can ripen and drop from the plants. But I'm amazed that these tasty berries with their striking lantern-like husks have apparently been growing, unnoticed, all around me my whole life.

My youngest sons show off
an evening-primrose root.

I also decided to give evening primrose another try, now that it's the root season. My family tried evening primrose roots, roasted, back in the spring and didn't care for them. They were spicy raw and still made the back of our throats itch when they were cooked. I subsequently read of someone whose favorite way to eat them is as primrose pancakes (similar to potato pancakes). I thus collected approximately a pound and a half of primrose roots on a walk to the post office the other day. I diced them up finely, along with a couple of wild carrots, a small yellow onion, a Russet potato, and some parsley and chives from my garden, mixed them up with a beaten egg, some cornmeal, and some potato starch, sprinkled in some salt and pepper, and fried them in vegetable oil to make veggie fritters. I'm not really sure whether that's what the other person does -- no recipe was provided. The result was certainly much more palatable than my previous attempts at eating evening primrose, though. I still thought the back of my throat itched a little, but dipping the fritters in ketchup seemed to solve the problem. All three of my boys cleaned their dinner plates, and my eldest son asked for seconds. I guess I can't ask for much more than that! And the whole meal probably cost me under $2.

Either peppermint or spearmint. I can't tell them apart (yet).

While collecting the primrose roots, I also found some peppermint (or maybe it was spearmint; I'm not well versed in the differences), which I collected and turned into tea at home. I also found garlic mustard sprouting out of season (this is usually a springtime plant -- a pesky and invasive one), so my middle son and I collected a few cups of that, too. I never did get a chance to try any of the garlic-mustard recipes in my cookbook From Pest to Pesto, which I ordered at the end of the spring. I was hoping to try the basic pesto recipe, but when I got the book out at home, I discovered that I needed not just garlic-mustard greens but a bit of root as well. I've stashed the greens in my refrigerator until I can get a bit of root.

Quickweed.

My youngest sons and I also took a tour around a nearby community garden at the suggestion of a friend. We found numerous edible plants there (and I don't mean the ones growing in people's gardens), but a couple of new ones that I'll mention in particular. There was a whole field full of quickweed, which I had only seen in pictures until then. My book says quickweed is bland and best mixed with stronger-tasting greens, so it might not be something to get too excited about, but it certainly could be collected in quantity from this location! Apparently one should collect young plants in the summer. I don't think I could recognize the plant without its flowers at this point, though, and right now all the plants have flowers, anyway (and young plants don't have flowers).

Purslane laid on our picnic blanket.

We also found plentiful supplies of purslane, which I did find at our train station last year but have not come across since. Apparently, purslane is the bane of gardens everywhere except the one at my house. Supposedly, if you chop off a bit of root and leave it lying on the ground, it will re-root itself. It is thus frustratingly difficult to get rid of. It retains large amounts of water, so it is also highly drought resistant. Nonetheless, when I tried to encourage some in my own garden by planting a bit from the train station last year, it never took off. It's too bad because purslane is extremely rich in nutrients and also quite tasty (it has a lemony zing to it and is pleasantly juicy).

Photo Gallery

When hazelnuts are ripe, the husks usually turn brown.

These hazelnut husks are still partially green, but the nuts are ripe. If a bush has any ripe nuts, all the nuts should be ripe.

Unfortunately, although I was checking on them frequently, I missed the elderberries this year. This picture shows the bare stems where the berries used to be. I posted pictures of nearly ripe berries previously. The elderberries grow in the same place as the hazelnuts. I still haven't tasted them -- maybe next year.

My oldest and youngest sons picking hazelnuts.

Unlike hazelnuts, black walnuts should be picked from the ground.

Our bucket of black walnuts.

Sheep eat wild plants all the time! Here my boys are feeding a hungry lamb some unidentified weeds at Old Sturbridge Village. The lamb appeared to be ravenous, if the way he gobbled up their offerings was any indication.

Another shot of the boys feeding the sheep.

My oldest son and the sheep.

My two oldest boys admire the numerous ground-cherry plants at Old Sturbridge Village.

Close-up of the ground cherries. The fruits are enclosed in the little green lanterns (which turn straw-colored when the berries are ripe; see my previous post).

My two oldest boys (middle on the left, oldest on the right) pose as 1800s New Englanders. This picture absolutely cracks me up.

An evening primrose rosette. This is the stage (i.e., without a flower stalk) at which the plant should be when you collect the root. Plants with flower stalks have used up most of the energy in the root, and it will be fibrous and difficult to chew. Evening primrose starts as a basal rosette (like the one here) the first year. Its second year, it sends up a flower stalk.

My collection of evening-primrose roots, with greens still attached, and my digging tool (an "asparagus knife") beside them.

My middle son with an evening-primrose root.

This whole field is filled with quickweed.

Purslane, the bane of every garden but mine. Gardeners should get smart and eat it!. Or they can give it to me!

Grapes!

Concord grapes.

I'd been watching the grapes get ripe, but I assumed I wouldn't get any. That was mostly because a friend used to have a tree that was covered in grape vines, and she told me that every year the grapes hung in tantalizing bunches and that every year the squirrels and chipmunks got all the grapes before the people got a single one. Still, I'd been watching, hoping.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I went out to pick autumnberries after the kids went to bed. On the way, I took a spontaneous detour at a trail we frequent (it's the one with our "picnic rock," a boulder perfect for sitting atop with a picnic lunch). I thought I'd see how the grapes were doing.

I had to reach through a tangle of vines
and branches to pick these grapes.

I could smell them before I could see them. Then there they were, hanging underneath a mess of invasive vines and prickers. They weren't the easiest fruits to pick -- I had to gingerly reach into the spaces between the vines to pluck each cluster. Many grapes hung far in the back where I couldn't reach. I picked what I could and went a little farther down the trail.


The grapes at the top of this tree
were far out of reach.

Soon the strong, musky smell of grapes filled the air again. I looked to my left and saw a tall mass of vines -- there must have been a tree underneath there somewhere -- and beautiful purple grapes hanging far at the top. Oh, how I wanted to be able to fly! Alas, I had to make do with the fruits hanging at trail level. I picked until my small bucket -- chosen to accommodate the much tinier autumnberries rather than grapes -- was full. Reluctantly, I left the rest of the fruit dangling, unpicked, until I could come back.


My husband pulls
a grape-laden
branch within reach.

A couple of nights later, I was back on the trail with the my family in tow. This time we brought the hook my husband made for me last year. It's a carved walking stick with a hook at the top, and it's ideal for pulling high, fruit-laden branches into reach. Although wings (or a ladder) would still be required to reach the grapes shown above, we did find other grapes hanging from branches that arched over the trail. My husband pulled the branches down with the hook while my oldest son and I picked what grapes we could now reach.

My two youngest sons and I found still more grapes along another trail in a neighboring town. It was a new trail for us, and in addition to the grapes, we found barberries  (still getting ripe) and several apple and crab-apple trees. Numerous autumnberry bushes had already given up their berries to the birds. I collected more grapes and returned another day for the apples.

Some of these grapes I put in my steam juicer, which still had juice dripping from its collection bucket the morning after I put in the grapes. I'm wondering whether crushing the grapes would have sped up the process. I made three large jars of grape jelly (with a little added sumac concentrate) and several smaller jars of grape-autumnberry jam. I used juice for the jelly, whereas for the jam I cooked the fruit briefly to get the juices running and then ran the fruit through my food mill to separate the puree from the seeds.

Autumnberries a friend and I collected with our kids
in a little more than an hour. Those Zip-Lock bags
are the gallon size.

Speaking of autumberries, I'm happy to report that the birds have not eaten all of them after all. Yes, many of the bushes from which I picked last year were bare weeks ago, but I have still found several bushes loaded with sweet-tart fruit (as I've mentioned previously, the berries on many autumnberry bushes are astringent, so it's important to find a good bush). The boys and I have been picking lots of autumnberries lately, and I have a good supply of autumnberry jam (possibly my favorite jam) as well. Autumnberry fruit leather is up next.

Golden apples that contributed
to my not-quite-right apple jelly.

The apple jelly didn't turn out quite as well as the grape and autumnberry concoctions. There was a hint of astringency that sugar, lemon juice, and a cinnamon stick just couldn't mask, and I ended up pouring the juice down the drain. It tasted ok -- but I knew I wouldn't eat the jelly when I had better-tasting options. I'm not sure whether it was a certain variety of apple that contributed the taste (I picked a few different kinds) or whether the small pieces of stem still on the apples, or perhaps the brown calyx on the bottom, needed to be removed (although I just can't imagine that those really contributed anything in the steam juicer). Crab-apple jelly is supposed to be delicious, so I'm sure the error lay with me and not with the fruit generally.

Hen-of-the-woods mushroom, growing where an oak tree
used to stand.

Jams and jellies aren't the only wild foods that have been in my kitchen lately, though. A woman introduced herself to me after church last week because she'd heard about a guided foraging walk I'd done. It turns out she's interested in plants, too, and that she happens to have a hen-of-the-woods mushroom growing in her lawn. When she saw how excited that news made me, she kindly offered to bring me some. I asked whether I might be permitted to actually see the mushroom in its native habitat (which is growing on rotten oak, usually red oak). My new friend kindly agreed to show me the mushroom the next morning.

Underside of hen of the woods. The bottom is covered in
tiny tubes.

It wasn't hard to find; it was protected by a green wire fence a few inches high (so that anyone mowing the lawn would be sure to steer clear). In fact, there were two mushrooms, one considerably larger than the other and ready for harvest. My host (whom we will call S) placed her hands gently under the base and pulled the mushroom from the ground. From above, the mushroom closely resembled the ruffled feathers of a hen (hence its name); on the bottom, the white underside was composed not of gills but of closely spaced tubes (see picture).

When this mushroom first began growing in her yard a few years ago, S happened to be working with a bunch of mycologists. After she described her new lawn guest, which was perhaps the size of two fists at the time, the mycologists urged her to bring the specimen into work. By the time she got around to it several days later, the thing had grown so large that it didn't entirely fit in a large department-store bag, and it weighed more than 30 pounds! When her colleagues saw the mushroom, they suggested that she might actually want it to grow in her lawn.

Harvesting hen of the woods. We guessed
that this one weighed at least 10 pounds.

And the mushroom has indeed worked out well for her. She has plenty for her family, and she exchanges some of it for a gift certificate at a Boston restaurant. This year she also hopes to trade some for a share of grass-fed beef. And she still had enough to share with me.

For this, I am extremely grateful. My two youngest boys and I were eager to taste the mushroom as soon as we got home. I sauteed a little in some butter at high heat, and we all thought it was excellent. It definitely tasted like a mushroom -- the flavor was much more similar to button or cremini mushrooms than to the chanterelle I tried in Maine recently. But it was meatier and better than any store-bought mushroom. A couple of days later, I made a tortellini dish with a cream-cheese sauce, ham, peas, and hen-of-the-woods mushroom, and much to my surprise and pleasure, even my mushroom-hating oldest son asked for seconds. He said he likes this mushroom and wants to hunt for chanterelles (but I think the season's over this year).

Shagbark hickory nuts were scattered all over
the road.

Instead of hunting for mushrooms, my oldest son and I hunted for hickory nuts this past weekend. Alas, the season seems to be over for those, too. I had found some shagbark hickory trees on a bike ride in the spring (see my March 8 post), and I wanted to see whether it was time to harvest the nuts. We had to ride our bikes for quite a while before we got to the trees, which were at the intersection of the trail and a road. It was immediately clear that we were too late; the road was littered with cracked nut shells. The sight was simultaneously disappointing and exhilarating, for although we wouldn't be returning with any harvest, we could imagine the harvest we might get next year (incidentally, the wild hickory nuts I tasted on a summer foraging walk with expert forager and author Russ Cohen were hands down the best nuts I've ever tasted). It was also exciting because as recently as March, I wasn't even sure these were hickory trees, and in July I'd somehow managed to imagine that a hickory tree (although not a shagbark hickory) might be a butternut tree. Now I'd found and confidently identified shagbark hickory nuts, which I considered to be quite a success in of itself.

Butternut leaves have a large terminal leaflet
and have larger leaflets toward the end of the leaf.
Walnut tress, which are related and look very
similar, either have no terminal leaflet or have
a teeny, tiny one, and the largest leaflets are
in the middle of the leaf.

What's more, I confidently identified several butternut trees along the bike trail as well. I've been finding butternut trees here and there for a couple of months, in fact, although I haven't been lucky enough to find any butternuts. Butternut trees do not produce nuts until they are mature, which is at about 20 years of age. They are also susceptible to butternut canker, which has been killing off the trees for decades. Perhaps they are also finicky nut bearers. Although many of the trees I've found are probably young, at least some of them look like they might be mature. I'm hoping it's just a bad year for butternuts and that I might have more luck with these same trees a different year.

Nearly-ripe walnuts.

There is a playground near this bike trail, and when we got back to our car we kept going to check out the walnut trees that grow all around the playground (playgrounds seem to be a favorite growing place for walnut trees; our town's playground also has many of them). The branches were hanging heavy with nuts, and many of the branches hung over mowed areas where it should be easy to collect the nuts when they fall (it would be less easy to find the nuts hidden among undergrowth in the woods). We vowed not to let the walnut trees pull a hickory on us; we'll be back to check on the trees soon.

Ripe ground cherries. The little
"lanterns" are closed when the
fruits fall from the plant. I just
opened them to show you the fruit.

I'll mention one final exciting find from the past couple of weeks. This one was in my own garden. Somehow, several ground-cherry plants managed to reach maturity without my even having noticed they were there. On September 6 I wrote about finding two plants in my garden; well, I've since found two more, and the fruits have been ripening and falling off the plants a couple at a time. The kids and I have been nibbling here and there as the fruits ripen, and we've shared with a few lucky friends who have been in the right place at the right time. I can tell you that I'm going to have to encourage these fruits in my garden next year; I want more than just a nibble! The taste is similar to a tomato, but much fruitier and sweeter. You can buy ground-cherry seeds from some seed suppliers, but you can also find the plants growing wild. In fact, I've found numerous plants at the edge of a parking lot I've been visiting recently (for autumnberries, apples, and hopniss). Unfortunately, all of the ground cherries I've found on the ground at this parking lot seem to have been devoured by others (and I don't mean by people) before I got there, but it would certainly be possible to gather some nearly-ripe fruit for the seeds or possibly transplant an entire plant (I haven't tried this, so I don't know how delicate the plants are).

I'd just love to find enough ground cherries to collect them in quantity. I'm sure amazing cullinary feats could be performed!

Photo Gallery

Ground cherries as they look when they fall from the plant.

Shagbark hickory shells. The squirrels and chipmunks beat us to the nuts.

A butternut tree on the side of our bike trail. Butternut trees have yellower foliage than other trees.

This tree was heavy with small, golden apples. Unfortunately, the juice I made was a little astringent, although I mixed these apples with other varieties, so I can't be sure of the culprit.

For example, these crab apples could have been the problem. They were tiny, about the size of wild cherries.

Crab apples up close.

This bush, on the same trail as the crab apples, was covered in grape vines. Fortunately, the grapes were a lot easier to pick than the ones pictured earlier (there were no competing vines in the way).

My first collection of concord grapes. I collected many more bucket-fulls. Even after making a batch of jelly and a batch of jam, I still have a large container of juice in my freezer.

My husband holds down a branch while my oldest son picks grapes.

The crab-apple-and-grape trail also had some nice benches and eating spots. My youngest boys and I brought a picnic lunch, which was very nice until all the bees started trying to get in on it.

Another picture of the underside of the hen of the woods, just picked.

The autumnberries were so beautiful just after the rain. They were hanging in long, tantalizing clusters, some a foot long!

Proud autumnberry pickers (my two oldest sons and a friend). My oldest son made his own batch of jam from his own autumnberries that very night (we picked berries just before dinner).

Shagbark hickory. Note the long strips of bark peeling off the trunk.

The trunk of a different shagbark hickory tree.

Walnuts waiting to drop.

Nothing to do with foraging, but having fun outside. My two youngest sons are riding a dinosaur.