Autumn Forager Resource

[ScottC]

I think it would be good to make a list of wild food that a forager might find when out and about at this time of the year. Along with the name, you can add a picture if you can find one and any comments on what you can do with it.

I'll start off with a few then.

Cattail: This plant lives in wet soil usually on the edge/in water. It grows up to 3m tall and has a distinctive downy seed head that's seen in the spring. The roots are packed full of carbohydrates and can be eaten raw or cooked they can be boiled and eaten like potatoes. It can also be dried and grounded and then used as a thickener for soups. One of the best ways to cook them is to bake them on the embers of a fire for a while until they turn completely black, then break them open and pull out the fibres with your teeth and suck up the starch.

Dandelion: The roots can be roasted and used as a coffee substitute.

Pig nut: The tuber of this is eaten, usually raw. The stem turns 90 degrees just before the tuber so be careful when digging up.

Nettles: Another good ingredient for a wild salad, especially when you use the young leaves. Boil for a few minutes to destroy the stinging properties. Can taste quite bitter on it's own so best incorporated with other ingredients in a stew or salad.

Pine Needles: Chop these up finely and put in hot water to make a vitamin rich tea.

Sweet Chestnut: Delicious incorporated into breads. Don't confuse with Horse chestnut which are poisonous. Sweet chestnut have much more spikes that are smaller than those on the Horse chestnut shell.

Rosehips: A small orange to red fruit rich in Vitamin C. The seeds have tiny hairs that can cause irritation to the mouth and digestive tract if eaten. So get rid of them before consumption. Take the seed cases and put them water for 15 or so minutes, drink the resultant Rosehip tea and eat the seed cases.

Blackberries: A common fruit that tastes great in a pie with crab apples.

Sloe: The fruit of the blackthorn bush. Best cooked deseeded, dried and added to bread and Bannock mixes.

Bullace: A delicious relation of the sloe that tastes similar to the plum.

Crab Apples: The Wild Apple. Tastes bitter uncooked. I recommend incorporating into a pie/crumble with blackberries.

 

[andyn]

Cool,

Thanks for that, some really usefull tips on what to keep my eye out for this autumn

 

[bloodline]

nice one. i didnt know about beech leaves and i think im gonna struggle identifying the pig nuts

 

[2blackcat]

I may be wrong about this but isn't it only the young beech leaves that are edible?

Once they get older aren't they toxic? Which is why there's always a covering because nothing eats them. Beech leaves are a spring food

Could someone with more of an idea confirm this?

 

[ScottC]

You are right about it being a spring food, I had written the above as notes for a larger article on my website and I copied it into here, taking out the irrelevant parts but must have missed the beech leaves.

About them being toxic, well I know that only the youngest leaves should be eaten because they toughen very quickly but I have never heard of beech (Fagus Sylvatica) leaves being toxic.

 

[ScottC]

Pignut is always a difficult one to spot straight away because it looks similar to other plants like cows parsley and hemlock but the most discerning feature is the 90 degree turn in the tuber.

 

[Ed]

Dont worry scott.... with a little time and practice you'll soon have the differences commited to memory. Pignut is quite easy to distinguish between hemlock and cow parsley as it has completly different leaves to the other two .... that and around here (growing on old slag heaps from the mines) the pignut is a very tiny plant where as the cow parsley flourishes and grows alot bigger.

All the pignuts are gone from here though. They are normally up around May time and have gone by the time autumn has come around.


Ed

 

[ScottC]

Haha ok well to my inexperienced mind alot of plants look the same!

I was down in Devon the other week and saw quite a few although I only managed to get to the "pignut" once because the other times the stem broke half way down!

 

[Fire Starter]

Scott - you can still gather pignuts well after the season has finished.I am still feasting on these tasty morsels - the secret is in locating them at their flowering stage and then taking note of the area. After they have died back you can still recognise them lying on the ground with their stem feeding into the soil. They will not be attached but if you dig a slightly wider hole you can still retrieve them. This is also true in the early part of the year before flowering time - it's all about recognising the plant in all its stages of life........Happy Foraging!

 

[Keith_Beef]

You can eat the leaves of dandelions in salad, but they tend to be a little too bitter if dark green. The best leaves are those that have been covered by a mole hill, and are very pale and much less bitter. Or simple take the youngest leaves.

Of course you'll only find them earlier in the year, but dandelion flower heads are also edible.

Hawthorn leaves are edible, and supposedly nutritious.

Holly bark is edible, bitter, and a good tonic. Chew a small piece, or brew it to make tea.

Hazelnuts and walnuts are easy to identify, but I think walnuts are not widespread in the UK.

Beech masts (the nuts of the beech tree) are edible, but there's not a great deal of flesh inside the skin. Much better, I think, to feed these to the pigs, and eat the pigs.


Keith.

 

[match]

Holly bark is edible, bitter, and a good tonic. Chew a small piece, or brew it to make tea.

I would advise against using holly bark as a tea - the whole of the holly family is toxic, ranging from mildly to verybdepending on the part. Canada Holly used to be used for a tea, but this is NOT one of the common evergreen hollies, but is deciduous - Ilex verticillata. Its deciduous nature means that its toxicity is lower as it does not accumulate toxins continually over the years in the way evergreen holly does.

Either way holly can be diuretic, a strong purgative and emetic and a source of excess caffeine (which has well-known overdose effects). Best avoided in favour of something a bit tastier!

 

[Keith_Beef]

I would advise against using holly bark as a tea - the whole of the holly family is toxic, ranging from mildly to verybdepending on the part. Canada Holly used to be used for a tea, but this is NOT one of the common evergreen hollies, but is deciduous - Ilex verticillata. Its deciduous nature means that its toxicity is lower as it does not accumulate toxins continually over the years in the way evergreen holly does.

Either way holly can be diuretic, a strong purgative and emetic and a source of excess caffeine (which has well-known overdose effects). Best avoided in favour of something a bit tastier!

I mentioned using a "small piece".

I've taken small pieces of English holly for years, and drank mate made from patagonian holly in Chile with no ill effects.

Many plants are toxic in large quantities, but in small quantities are harmless. Rhubarb and strawberries both contain oxalic acid, for instance.

I appreciate your concern, but "moderation" is the key word, I think.


Keith.

 

[stevo]

just about the beech leaves (fagus Sylvatica) I am sure that they arn't toxic in Autumn, they just become much more stringy than the fresh spring leaves..... Try them, you'll know what I mean!

My favourites in autumn are wild plums....bitter ones, put them in your pocket to warm them, the heat will destroy some of the acids and make them sweeter....dont let them burst though!! Also Oak acorns......make flour from them and then make pancakes, bread, cakes......anyone interested in the method of producing flour....give me a shout!!

 

[Marts]

I'm sure this list will grow, but edible fungi I found emerging last weekend in London:

Russula claroflava

Boletus edulis (Ceps)

Amanita rubescens (Blusher)

Pleurotus ostreatus (Oyster)

Now we just need a lot more rain to bring them through in large quantities

 

[FeralSheryl]

Ok these are reasonably well known but for the record...

Here's a recipie for making Acorn Flour. You really do have to get rid of all that tannin though, so it's a bit of a mare. You can also make a coffee subtitute by roasting the acorns. Acorns are a great source of Protein and Carbohydrates.

Don't forget Beech Mast (nuts). It's well worth the effort extracating the little nuts from their shells. They contain a lot of oil and have been considered as an alternative to Olive oil. You can simply enjoy the nuts as they are or use the meat in Stews etc.

This site offers some interesting info on both Acorns and Beech Mast. It is an American site so some of the other nuts covered may not be available in our Woods.

Curiously I've never taken any pictures of Acorns or Beech Mast. How remiss of me. So, with my apologies, I've none to add here. Therefore, here's a bowl of Rosehips I picked on Sunday instead. A few chopped up finely (seeds and spikey stuff removed of course) and added to a cheese and tomato Baked Potato is very good.

And Cobnuts. Crunchy and creamy tasting about now. Hang on to them for a few weeks to ripen some more for the full hazelnut taste and texture. If there are none around to pick yourself and you haven't tried them this early before, you should be able to get them from your local Waitrose

 

[Neil1]

I saw this thread this morning, and as I had a couple of hours free, I thought I would go for a wander from where I live to the local woods (about two miles). The terrain is classic Devon farm land, hedgerows, river valley and mixed woodland. I did'nt do an extensive search, but here is a list of the edibles I found:
Hearts tongue fern
Nettle tops
Cleaver shoots
dock leaves
hedge garlic (second growth)
Black berries
Elderberries
Pennywort
Dandelion
Hawkbit
Burdock
Chickweed
Red clover
Ivy leaved toad flax
Brooklime
Common mallow
White nettle
Silverweed
Haws
Sorrel
Coltsfoot
Chantrelle
Field Mushroom
Hedgehog Fungus
Rosehips
Wild Mint
Red Valerian
Dill
Good King Henry
Greater Plantain
Ribwort Plantain
Wood Sorrel
Marjoram
Cob nuts
Sweet chesnuts
Several types of Thistle

On the medicinals front I found:
Yarrow
Meadowsweet
Willow
Chamomile

I did not include any plants that were old growth and to tough to use (like hogweed).
I hope this list proves usefull, I will try to get out in the next month and report back on what I find.
Neil

 

[Big John]

What's the difference between a cob and a hazel then? Does the cob have larger, softer leaves? I'd been wondering what that was, thought it was a different type of hazel - is it?

Thanks,

 

[led]

They're exactly the same thing aren't they?

 

[steve a]

Well yes they are,hazelnut refers to the smaller nut (Corylus Avellana) found on the wild hazel or cobnut tree. Another variety Filberts (or Corylus Maxima) are the cultivated variety and bigger.

 

[stevo]

Had a couple of replys asking for my acorn flour production methods....so as promiced!!


Well, as some of you might be aware the species of Oak which we have in Britian, of which we gather the acorns from are absolutely loaded with Tanic acid, which has to be leeched from the acorns before processing the flour. If we were in the states however, where they have a species of oak called white oak, or Quercus Alba, these would need far less processing.....I mention this only to say that if you have a local botanical gardens or somewhere with none native species of trees, then it might be worth a look for this species.
Anyway........using British species of acorn.... bear in mind too that I write using modern methods, but you can substitute these for more primitive at every stage!!...good luck

1. Collect as many as you can.....!!

2.Remove the hats, or the acorn covering.

3. Remove all the shells, so you just have the nut itself, which might split into two halves.

4. Put two pans of water on to boil, each one big enough to take all the acorns.

5. Once the water is boiling, put all the acorns into one pan. Immediately the water will go black as all the tannins are leeched out. Transfer the acorns to the next pan of boiling water. Pour out the tannin rich water from the first pan and refill with water, and put it on to boil. Repeat this process....tramsferring the acorns from pan to pan, as the tannins are leeched out. The water will get clearer and clearer eaxh time, but you could do this for a week, and probably still have tannins in the acorns. I do it about 10 times, to remove the bulk of the acorns.

6. Drain for the last time, and spread out the soggy acorns on a baking tray. Crush them roughly and place in a preheated oven at a low temperature. It doesn't need to be hot, all you want to do is dry them really. I usually leave the door open a little to let the moisture escape. This stage will further remove most of the remaining bitter taste from the remaining tannins.

7. Remove the acorns from the oven when they are totally dry (you might need to move them about a bit during the drying to ensure even drying). They will look like crushed biscuits.

8. All I do now is put the acorns through a coffee grinder to process them to a fine flour. Walla!!


Now, the flour is really heavy and dark. You can use it as regular flour in any recipe, but because it is heavy, I usually mix it with half plain flour. But this will still give you the rich nutty acorn flour flavour, which is well worth the effort!!!


My favourite...........acorn pancakes with homemade apple sauce and Birch Syrup!!!!!!!!!!!!

HAPPY COOKING BUDDING DELIA'S!!


STEVO