A Free Harvest

Wild Food

   As a lot of you will already know every day I set off on my bike for my daily exercise doing around ten miles each time, not only taking in lots of fresh air but also spending time watching the nature around me, how the seasons change and with it the very different landscapes that greet me. Traveling the local lanes for the last seven months I have noticed what a great wild larder we have around us, wild plums, blackberries and greengages being a big part of it at this time of year. Many wild apple trees share the hedgerows alongside sloes and elderberry and the amount of walnut trees I've found is unbelievable, so it's not surprising that my rucksack full of bags and food boxes comes with me most days.
   It never fails to amaze me how much food there is out there to harvest, not only fruits but wild herbs and mushrooms for those who have the knowledge of such wild plants. Myself I stick to those wild foods that I know and of course I better mention the many fields full off veg that are being harvested this time of year meaning a lot of potatoes and onions to be found and I for one do glean those vegetables left laying there on the surface, it's a shame to think they are just left there to rot or ploughed into the soil.
   If we lived just 50 or 60 years ago we would have seen many people out doing the same, even gleaning grain from the cut corn fields to use for bread making, it really is so different these days. Now we pop into a supermarket for most of our food all nice and clean and even bagged for us ready to take but does it taste the same ?  With a lot of the veg and fruit we buy traveling many thousands of miles to get to us or force grown in glass houses it seems we are starting to forget the real taste of things. Ask any family who grow their own veg how good does it taste when we sit down to Sunday lunch with their own carrots, potatoes and greens and they will all give you the same answer, it tastes amazing.
   Yesterday I returned from my ride with a large bag of wild yellow plums, really sweet, ideal to be stewed and frozen ready for pies, tarts of crumble. I also picked up possibly a couple of kilo of white potatoes from the grass verge where the trailers carting potatoes from the fields spill so many on the tiny narrow lanes, fresh potatoes only pulled that morning. Also a few apples made it into my rucksack pocket, you may think silly as I have apple trees in my own garden, but how can I pass them without using some, to see the hundreds of rotting apples laying there on the ground is a real shame and again these are perfect to either store or to stew and freeze for the winter.
   I guess from a child I learnt about these things, I remember helping my grandad wrap apples in paper and laying them in wooden trays which he then packed into a dark unused bedroom to keep for future months. Some Sunday afternoons we spent going out picking blackberries, you would in those days see whole families out in the quiet countryside filling ice cream boxes with these wonderful sweet black fruits. My uncle even picked bunches of watercress from the river running through my grandads garden to sell to customers around the village, I would help wash and bunch the cress then take it around to all the customers, it was 10p a bunch and the bunches were about ten times the size you see in tiny packs in our supermarkets. There must have been 30 different families I took it to, all in the same one village, can you imagine that now, I would guess you would find it hard to find two families in our village who even eat watercress these days.
   Maybe it would be good for us all to go back to those years just for a day or two, we would see how hard families found it, every garden full of fresh veg but meat not so easy to obtain. The cheap cuts or things like faggots and liver forming the everyday meal and only on a Sunday would there be meat for a roast, even then it may have just been chicken, which buy the way was cheap then not like today and was local farmed chicken, free range chickens not force feed birds that are produced today in what can only be called barns of hell ! I think if we did get to return to those days just for a short visit then most of us would change the way we live now, I mean are we that lazy that we can't be bothered to wash and clean a few carrots or even peel runner beans, do we really need to pay more just to have these jobs done for us, do our children really know what fresh peas or carrots should taste like, lets just hope somebody shows them soon.
   Well I guess that's my rant over for the day so it's off to my flame, yesterday was spent making seaglass beads and I so enjoyed it, today I need to get a few new sets made to list in my etsy shop. Enjoy your day and have a little think about wild foods, why not go out this weekend and pick some blackberries, its fun, honest.