Blackberries and other hedgerow food.

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Spana

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #45 on: August 18, 2010, 15:44 »
We've been gathering mushrooms everyday for the last two weeks and they are wonderful this year.  Some years they taste like disinfectant to me altho OH cant taste it and eats them anyway .  ::) This year they are just scrummy.  We dont put artificial fertiliser on the fields only the rotted muck from the cattle years so I have no qualms about eating them.  We have them for breakfast  with scrambled eggs.
Also  made mushroom  quiches, ratatouille and beef, mushroom and tomato casseroles for the freezer.  All made with our own produce apart from the flour and butter in the quiche pastry . :)

Haven't found any puffballs this year.  I like them raw, just cubed and mixed with salad.  Think they go slimy when cooked but are bit like a bland cream cheese when eaten raw.

Loads of blackberries , wild plums, perry pears and all the hedgerow fruits to come :)

  

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Mosslane

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #46 on: August 26, 2010, 21:34 »
Just made a batch of Rosehip syrup. Very nice, very syruppy. Only made 2 small bottles so think might have to do another batch when the rest of the hips are ripe :D
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it....

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Pip Judgeford

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #47 on: August 26, 2010, 21:59 »
And Down Under we are carefully propagating hawthorn, damsons, wild roses and trying to track down a sloe..  so we can plant our own 3 metre lengths of shelter belt and call them hedgerows!  I think the romance of wild harvest and the British countryside is there, but the sheep/dairy country is divided by 5-wire fences not hedges!

Yes I did track down a sloe - from someone who was clearing 2 hectares of blackthorn (planted in the 1950's by someone wanting to make sloe gin commercially) in order to  plant NZ native trees.  They had had such a wicked (and not in a good way) time clearing the 4 metre high blackthorn thicket that they made me swear always to grow mine in a pot so it wouldnt sucker and create a huge problem somewhere else.

I love wild harvest - the flower vase currently holds a swoon-worth of fat golden gorse flowers.  Roll on Aumn harvest!

Pip

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Mosslane

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #48 on: September 01, 2010, 20:38 »
All of this was collected no more than 50 yards from our door. These have been stewed down with some crab apple and a lemon and sieved to give me 2lbs of pulp. This will be added to 2lb of blackberries tomorrow and made in to my version of hedgrerow jam.

various berries 008 (600 x 450).jpg
various berries 009 (600 x 450).jpg

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Pip Judgeford

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #49 on: September 03, 2010, 21:20 »
Back to mumofstig's question: "can you tell me where you forage for sugar? Like the fruits, it is very expensive in the shops this year"

You got me thinking it would be very cool to make hedgerow jam out of honey not sugar.  It would keep the food local and if honey was your own or swapped/gifted then the jam would be 100% outside the usual commercial world.

And yes I have tried using honey.  Managed to track down an old seville marmalade recipe which used honey (pre the sugar trade?).  You have to use less water, as honey has a water content where sugar does not.  Its a bit of guess how much less but my reasoning was honey is 20- 30% water so I needed 20-30 % less water.  It set fine, mind you sevilles are high in pectin.  But so are not quite ripe blackberries, hawthorns, crabapples...so it might just work.  The lighter the honey, the less honey taste you would get in your jam.  Our is bush honey so pretty tasty.  Clover or whatever honey would work better.

If anyone want to give it a go, do let us know how you get on!

=Pip

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Lastcast

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #50 on: September 05, 2010, 13:34 »
Picked and ate these Parasol Mushrooms a few days ago, they grow in the field I know, weather permitting for a couple of months late summer/ autumn. They are the only fungi I trust myself to identify and eat !!
Parasol.JPG

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tosca100

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #51 on: September 05, 2010, 15:54 »
Encouraged by this thread, I've been out today and foraged blackberries, crab apples, rowan berries and haws, boiled them up with some hard plums I had and a couple of wrinkled apples from the fruit bowl. Will now sieve the bits out and add local honey and tomorrow will attempt to make leather thingies. :)

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Mosslane

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #52 on: September 05, 2010, 16:07 »
Sounds good, let us know how it goes  :) Never tried that method of preserving.

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hamstergbert

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Re: Blackberries and other hedgerow food.
« Reply #53 on: September 05, 2010, 16:28 »
When it comes to collecting wild fungus, even those with a little experience can fall foul of misidentification - as witness this report

Lets be at least a little bit careful out there, folks, and if you can't get onto a proper course best to buy your fungi from Finefare!
The Dales - probably fingerprint marks where God's hand touched the world



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