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.

Berries to Butternuts

Sumac bushes with red berry clusters. These look beautiful, but it turns out they weren't ripe yet.

I hoped to find a thicket of plum trees that afternoon. I'd found the trees in flower on a rainy-day hike in the spring, and I wanted to see whether they were now bearing fruit. Although my expedition wasn't successful in the way I'd hoped, it turned out to be successful in ways I would never have imagined.

Red, ripe raspberries. A treat!

Mystery nuts.

My good luck began with a ripe raspberry here and there along the trail. I also spied many green, unripe blackberries and filed the information away for later. I even found three blueberries (I don't think of collecting blueberries until closer to August). When I got to the knoll where I'd seen the putative plum trees, alas, I didn't find any fruit hanging from their branches. I did notice some green nuts scattered about the ground. I couldn't find the tree they'd come from, and I'm not entirely sure what kind of nut they were. My best guess at the moment is some kind of hickory nut (I didn't see any shagbark hickories, whose peeling bark is quite distinctive, and I don't think I'd be able to recognize any other kinds).

Unripe blackberries.

 I turned back down the trail after the plumless knoll and the mystery nuts, and after at time I came to a spot where a variety of berries were growing in the middle of the trail, so that the trail split like a momentarily divided highway. Somehow, I hadn't noticed the berries on my hike in. Some were unripe blackberries, some were ripe red raspberries, and the rest resembled blackberries except that they had a significant white bloom and were fuzzier, like raspberries.

These look moldy, but they aren't! This is the
handful of bloom-covered berries I brought home
for my kids. These have even been rinsed.

I had just seen the same type of berry on a different trail, where the white bloom made me think the first berry I'd seen was moldy. Then I'd noticed that all the black berries (although not the unripe red ones) had this bloom and that the stems were coated in white as well. So it probably wasn't mold. I next wondered whether someone had sprayed a pesticide here (which seemed unlikely, given that I was on conservation land), but when I picked a berry, I found that the inside (which of course would not have been exposed during any chemical spraying) was also coated in fuzzy whiteness. When I now found the same berries on a different trail, I concluded that the white bloom must be a natural feature of the berry. Because all the raspberry- and blackberry-like berries are edible, I tasted one. It was delicious -- significantly sweeter than a blackberry or raspberry. I collected a handful (I only had a small snack cup that hadn't made it back inside from my car) to share with my kids when I got home and decided to take the kids berry picking the next day.

I took my two youngest boys back
to pick black raspberries the next day.
We even found a few ripe blackberries!

Incidentally, I've now decided that these bloom-covered berries are most likely black raspberries. At first I thought they might be dewberries, but the stems were green, not red. When I read a description of the black raspberry plant, I learned that, although stems on older plants are red, those of newer plants are green with a white bloom. The book didn't mention a bloom on the berries, but I'm guessing black raspberries nonetheless. My source mentioned that many people think black raspberries are the tastiest of all the berries in the blackberry-raspberry family, and I am definitely throwing my vote in the same direction.

These nuts were hanging right into the trail.

After several minutes of berry picking, it caught my attention that some branches were practically hitting me in the face (no, I am not the world's most observant person, mainly because I can become completely absorbed in a single activity to the point that I can hear or see nothing outside of that activity). I then noticed some strange fruits hanging from the branches, which were bent significantly over the trail. Actually, the branch was so much of an obstacle that I must have had to duck to get by on my hike in; the top of the tree had been practically severed and was hanging upside down across the path. How I had managed to pass this spot on my way in without noticing the fruits was beyond me. In fact, I began to wonder whether I had somehow taken a wrong turn on the way back, but a short amount of backtracking confirmed that I'd come the right way (I saw a pair of striking orange mushrooms that I was sure I'd seen before). I went back to examine the tree and fruits, which I now decided were nuts (I took one home and cracked it open, and although it clearly wasn't ripe yet, I was able to confirm this identification).

Nuts in hand.

Most plant-identification guides show pictures of flowers and ripe fruit, not unripe fruit, and I didn't recognize this small nut. But, as I looked at the leaves, I saw that they resembled walnut leaves except that the terminal leaflet was well developed. The leaves were a little straggly looking, probably because most of the trunk was severed (it was amazing that the tree was producing fruit at all), but I glanced up at the branches stemming from the intact portion of the trunk and still thought the leaves looked similar to walnut leaves. I looked at the bark, which had interesting, textured grooves. A possibility began to dawn on me. Could this be butternut? I hardly dared to hope as I looked back at the nuts. They were the shape of small footballs. Very small footballs, but footballs nonetheless. They had four lightly discernible ridges running lengthwise. I imagined the nuts getting bigger, darkening a bit ... and looking pretty much exactly like a butternut.

Bark of the nut tree.

I was beginning to believe that I might really have found this nut, which has been evading me for a year now. The first time I found a walnut tree (at our town playground), I thought it was a butternut, even after I'd tasted it. I had not managed to get the nut out of its shell intact, so its walnut shape was lost. Additionally, walnuts apparently need to age to develop their flavor, so a newly picked or fallen nut tastes considerably different -- and worse -- than an older nut. I could not reconcile the taste of this supposed butternut with Samuel Thayer's description in The Forager's Harvest (see my list of recommended reading). He writes: "Butternuts that have had the hulls peeled while green are a delicacy. Their sweet flavor hints at bananas and vanilla ice cream, and they are very soft."

The nut tree had been practically severed
at the top.

When I finally figured out that I'd found a walnut tree rather than a butternut tree, I was sorely disappointed. Afterall, I can buy walnuts in the store, and I'm not even a big walnut fan (as a side note, I have now tried properly aged wild walnuts, and they do taste significantly better than the cultivated kind available for purchase). I have been searching for the butternut tree ever since. So to think that I might finally have found one (nevermind that it had to practically hit me in the face before I noticed it) -- well, I was so excited that I began talking to myself. (Should I admit this? I talk to myself. My mother does it too; I used to think she was crazy, but now that such a belief would require me to admit that I'm crazy, too, I've dropped the charge).

Walnuts high up in the tree.

I pocketed a nut and headed back to my car. On my way home, I stopped by the playground to see how the walnut trees were doing. The nuts were considerably larger than the possible butternuts were. That gave me pause. The two trees are relatives; do their nuts develop at the same time and pace? The playground trees have ample sunlight, whereas the maybe-butternut tree was in the shady woods. Could that make a difference? Well, I'll keep an eye on my tree and let you know how it turns out. I'm still cautiously excited. (Post-publication note: it wasn't a butternut tree; see my next post.)

Sumac flowers.

After hitting the playground, I stopped by my favorite parking lot to check on the sumac and milkweed. The sumac is still in flower and hasn't made berries yet. Most of the sumac I've seen is still in flower, but last week I did find some bushes with bright red berries. The color looked perfect, but when I sucked on a berry (you can't eat them -- they're too hard to chew), it didn't have any flavor. I'm not sure why -- I guess it was just wishful thinking -- but I collected eight berry heads anyway and tried to make some sumac-ade with them. We made many pitchers of this refreshing, tart

Sumac berries.

drink last summer. Unsurprisingly, the flavor wasn't good; my husband described it as kind of like treebark-flavored water. Next time I'll be sure to put more stock in the taste test (I'm not sure why I conducted a taste test if I wasn't going to take its results into account).

Milkweed plant with small, immature pods
(look in the center of the photograph).

Although it will be a while yet before I'm collecting sumac from that parking lot, several of the milkweed plants had small, immature pods, at the perfect stage for collecting. I'd never tried a milkweed pod before, but I have enjoyed milkweed shoots and flower-bud clusters, and so I was looking forward to trying the pods. Interestingly, although there are a lot of milkweed plants around this parking lot, only those plants in one particular place had pods yet. I collected enough for everyone to have a small serving at dinner. Then I picked a bagful of day lilies and headed home to try a recipe for salmon-stuffed day lilies. The flowers, stuffing, and boiled milkweed pods (which tasted like the other milkweed parts except for the soft pre-silk inside, which was creamy and vaguely cheesy) were enjoyed by everyone except my oldest son, who didn't like much of anything that day and whose opinions should therefore be discounted.

Black locust leaves?

A few other recent adventures are worth sharing. Back in May I found some trees with deeply furrowed bark -- so unusually furrowed that I wanted to know what kind of trees they were (see my May 23 post). I passed the same trees on my way to the black raspberries, and now that the leaves are out, I'm thinking these might be black locusts. Black locust trees are considered invasive in Massachusetts, so it should be easy to find one -- except that it hasn't been. I've been looking for them because their flowers are supposed to be beautiful, delightfully scented, and delicious (one book recommends black-locust fritters). Although black locusts might ordinarily blossom in early July, all the rain and warm weather has accelerated things this year, so I'm guessing the flowers have come and gone. I'll keep an eye on these trees next year to see whether my identification is correct.

Unripe serviceberries?

Another tentative identification this week was what I'm hoping turns out to be a serviceberry bush (also known as shadbush or juneberry). The fruits reportedly have a delicious pear-like flavor. They resemble blueberries or miniature apples and, like those two fruits, have a crown on the bottom. The ripe berries range from reddish purple to blue, purple, and black. I saw the berries and took a picture, then made this tentative identification at home, so I'll have to go back to the bush with my plant guides to be sure.

Unripe riverside grapes.

One final discovery I'll mention from the past week are riverside grapes. A friend used to have trees covered in grape vines, and she always lamented how the animals seemed to take all the grapes before the people could get any. So I'm only tentatively excited to see the developing grapes, but I do hope some will still be around for picking in the fall. I've noticed a number of grape vines in various places during my explorations.

So, no plum trees, but plenty of other exciting discoveries this week!

Photo Gallery

Here are some more pictures from the week.

I think this is false Solomon's seal, but I didn't dig up the root to find out. The roots are edible, but they don't sound very tasty. The best thing Samuel Thayer has to say about them is that "Solomon's seal rhizomes would at least be a good source of calories for someone lost in the woods." The shoots, on the other hand, reportedly make a good vegetable. The berries, which turn bright red when they ripen in the fall, are sweet like molasses but have a strong acrid aftertaste. Thayer says the berries are edible, but I should note that another author, Teresa Marrone in Wild Berries & Fruits, says they are inedible. I tend to thoroughly trust Thayer, however. The level of detail and personal verification of facts in his books is convincing.

Milkweed pods boiling for dinner.

The underside of riverside grape leaves is considerably lighter than the top. The young leaves (when shiny and a bit reddish) make a good wrap for rice stuffing, and a friend of mine recently sauteed the leaves to reportedly delicious effect.

The terminal leaflet in this walnut leaf is missing; a butternut leaf would have a well-developed terminal leaflet.

Close-up picture of two walnuts from one of the many walnut trees surrounding our local playground.

Indian cucumber with unripe, green berries. There are two berries, so this plant is two years old. The berries are inedible, but they turn blue when they are ripe. (The root is edible and tasty; see my February 21 and May 31 posts for more about Indian cucumbers.)

The deeply furrowed bark of what I hope is a black locust tree.