This was a lesson we did with the recent Rowe Elementary School 5th/6th graders at House In The Wood. We have a few wild edibles that are ready in the Fall like rose hips, grapes, hickory nuts and elderberries. We also have some that are ready in the Spring and Summer like raspberries, blackberries, chamomile, and various greens like lambs quarter. We also have various mushrooms at camp that are edible like the giant puffball.
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| Elderberries make jam and fruit wine. |
Elderberries are found on a bush. During the summer the bush has tiny white flowers. It takes a lot of elderberries to make either jam or wine as they are very tiny. they don't taste very good until they have been processed into something else like jam or wine--they need the sugar.
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| Wild grapes grow on vines over trees and bushes. |
Wild Grapes can be eaten off the vine--they taste pretty good--but there is a large seed and very little grape. Suck off the grape meat and spit out the seed. You must be careful when harvesting grapes as they grow all over our Buckthorn trees and the berries look similar. One will make a tasty jam and the other will give you a bad case of diarrhea!
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| Rose hips from the rose bush. |
The fruit of the rose known as a "Rose Hip" is often found in commercial herbal teas and it is a good source of vitamin C. I have only seen them made into a tea. When I taste them, they taste a little like citrus but they are mostly seed. I think that if they were just boiled in tea water with a little honey they would taste just fine. I will try it late this week.
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| Puff Balls located in the forest near the Bird's Nest. |
Giant Puff Balls are edible. Slice them and saute them in a pan full of garlic and butter and you have a pretty tasty treat. There is NO other mushroom that looks anything like them so it is fairly safe to harvest and eat them. We did not do it because by the time we had a moment to harvest them, they were brown and ready to produce spores--no longer edible.
All rights reserved 2013 by Valerie J Wright
