Secret Food

[Roger Gregory]

Does anyone else do this?

I have a few secret locations for some good scavenging. A damson tree, a couple of good wild apple trees and a couple of domestic apples trees long abandoned after a cottage disappeared ..... these may well be the secret trees of other people but there's plenty for us all as long as nobody blabs

Roger

 

[harry]

I think for me one of the best secret food stores for me is in some old graveyards in Dorset and Surrey. The Berries are great and the place is usually empty so it's nice to just take your time and pick loads!

It may be a good idea to get an old map of the area and look up old buildings that are no longer there. Maybe some cultivated fruit trees or vegetables may still be lingering! they may be easier to find than we think! Good for you Roger.

 

[bagman]

When I was a teanager I used to go off with the air rifle to an abandened orchard that had the best victoria plums I have ever tasted and bring back big bags of them for my Mam to make jam and my Dad to make "wine" with.

The lecky board then decided it was a good place to put a pylon and grubbed the whole lot up :x

 

[Matt]

Hehe, being a student we often get up to a little scrumping - there is a road nearby with plums, apples, pears, elderberries, blackberries, hazel nuts, figs, cherries and rosehips....plus this strange fruit i've never seen before. We had a fruit stew and elderberry bannocks yesterday

 

[Tony]

....plus this strange fruit i've never seen before. We had a fruit stew and elderberry bannocks yesterday

Matt, see if you get a picture of the strange fruit send it to info@bushcraftuk.co.uk and we will I.D. it. Hopefully we will soon have the ability for members to post pics but for now it's the best way.

Cheers

 

[Keith_Beef]

Hehe, being a student we often get up to a little scrumping - there is a road nearby with plums, apples, pears, elderberries, blackberries, hazel nuts, figs, cherries and rosehips....plus this strange fruit i've never seen before. We had a fruit stew and elderberry bannocks yesterday

I've never seen figs growing in the UK. It must be possible in the south-west, since they grow well in Brittany, with a similar climate.

When I was a youngster, I used to go in abandoned allotments. There were a few with fruit trees and bushes, one had rhubarb. And the local council had a brilliant idea of planting redcurrant bushes along a footpath. As a kid, I used to eat these straight from the bush on the way home from infant school. We used to call them "wild grapes", because of the shape of the leaves... The bushes are still there!

Can you describe this "strange fruit"... colour, shape.
Describe the tree or bush it grows on, too.

Take a picture, post it to a binary newsgroup or to a website, and post a link to this thread...


Keith.

 

[ESpy]

The garden centre near us sells fig trees - as outdoor trees, that is.

Quite tempted... My apple & pear trees are pretty much goners, and look like they need grubbing up.

I've also discovered fruiting vines at the back of the garden...

 

[Matt]

Yeah, figs do grow down south, though they confuse me a great deal - does the fruit take 2 years to mature or something? I've never seen a ripe one. We actually grow olives down here too ;-)

Err I would have posted a pic of the mystery fruit, but i'm not due back at uni for another month. It was similar to an apple in shape and size (similar enough for us to mistake it in the dark - we didn't pick any deliberately, so it may have grown on something remotely similar to an apple/ pear tree or at least in close proximity). It was grass green with obvious white specks, and was remarkably hard - you couldn't bruise the flesh with your hands, that required grinding it on a brick wall! When we got some back to the kicthen, I did cut one one open - it had white flesh and a spherical space for the seeds in the core. The seeds were a light tan? (I think). I didn't think to smell it at the time, and I certainly didn't taste it! :-o

Any ideas :?:

 

[Keith_Beef]

Yeah, figs do grow down south, though they confuse me a great deal - does the fruit take 2 years to mature or something? I've never seen a ripe one. We actually grow olives down here too ;-)

Err I would have posted a pic of the mystery fruit, but i'm not due back at uni for another month. It was similar to an apple in shape and size (similar enough for us to mistake it in the dark - we didn't pick any deliberately, so it may have grown on something remotely similar to an apple/ pear tree or at least in close proximity). It was grass green with obvious white specks, and was remarkably hard - you couldn't bruise the flesh with your hands, that required grinding it on a brick wall! When we got some back to the kicthen, I did cut one one open - it had white flesh and a spherical space for the seeds in the core. The seeds were a light tan? (I think). I didn't think to smell it at the time, and I certainly didn't taste it! :-o

Any ideas :?:

There's something very peculiar about the way figs ripen... I don't remember the whole story, because I heard it in little snippets on the radio while I was getting ready for work one morning; my mind was on about half a dozen things at once...

It goes something like this: one year, figs grow out of fertilized flowers, the next year, they grow from unfertilized flowers. There might be some species that requires fertilization by a fly (or an ant?) that gets trapped inside the flower, and lays its eggs inside the developing seeds... or I may be confusing the fig with another fruit. Anyway, since the fig is not a native to the British Isles, it may well be that the particular insect that fertilizes the fig flower is not present, so you only get the fruit from the unfertilized flower, i.e. every other year.

And your "mystery fruit" sounds to me very much like a quince. You can try to eat one, but don't take a big bite out of it.... better off looking at recipes for quince jelly.

Keith.

 

[ESpy]

Or quince fruit leather - which is mostly apple anyway.

 

[Roger Gregory]

The mystery fruit sounds like quince to me too. It gets planted as an ornamental shrub, usually in weird imitation quince varieties. In the Far East it grows as a smallish tree.

I use quince in jam, jelly and chutney. It's a bugger to prepare though so it's only worthwhile whan you've got some knife-testing to do

Roger

 

[Anonymous]

The mystery fruit sounds like quince to me too. It gets planted as an ornamental shrub, usually in weird imitation quince varieties. In the Far East it grows as a smallish tree.

I use quince in jam, jelly and chutney. It's a bugger to prepare though so it's only worthwhile whan you've got some knife-testing to do

Roger

I remember seeing one in a neighbour's garden in the UK that was a bush, and had very small fruit.
Here in France, it's quite regularly grown as a small tree, much like an apple tree, and I see the fruit in the market from time to time. Hard flesh, needs to be cooked in a certain way (I've tried 'making it up as I go along' and I got something horribly acid and tannic)...


Keith.

 

[sez]

Figs fruit best when their roots are well contained. In Penzance there is a massive (and I mean massive, it's growing up a twenty foot wall) fig tree, my daughter and I went to see if we could help ourselves - one unripe one.

I used to have a brilliant place to go. I used to pass a ruined cottage most days on my walks when it occurred to me that there had to be a garden, oh, black and red currants, strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb, some vegetables. I tried to find out if I could cultivate it, tracked down the owner who told me it was subject to a compulsory purchase order, it's been concreted over now, she gave me loads of cooking apples from her garden though.

Also, my dad used to teach at a posh boarding school, we lived on site, the grounds had an orchard and grew it's own vegetables. Our family were going through a particularly lean year once, so my brother and I would go out at night and ah liberate some..a few...OK, more than a few.


Sez

 

[hamish]

I live just north of Nottingham and have planted a fig tree in my garden it's doing great,it is now about 10' tall and giving bumper crops most years.

 

[ilan]

we have a fig tree in our garden was in a now long gone greenhouse but we still get fruit of it in a hot summer