Sunday Forage

I went out with a friend (Dan) bow hunting this weekend, hoping to catch a deer off-guard. We had no success catching any venison, but I used the opportunity to gather some wild edibles.

As I was waiting for Dan to show up at the range I spotted a large section of the ground covered in black walnuts. I quickly filled 3 grocery store bags with walnuts. I hulled about half of them this morning so my hands are pretty well stained.

Having enough walnuts I ventured forth into the surrounding woods. Sarah Lohman had pointed out what rose hips looked like earlier in the year - I found some and collected them. The smallish berries have a fibrous center filled with seeds. Both the taste and texture were a bit surprising to me. They have the texture of a bell pepper (we ll a really tiny piece of a bell pepper) and the taste was very slightly sweet. For some reason I was expecting them to be more like elderberries. It will take a lot of prep time to separate the seeds from them all, even with such a small amount collected. No wonder they are traditionally used to make tea! They are a good source of vitamin C, so be gone ya scurvy!

We marched over to where the ederberry bushes are - I was hoping to gather what I had missed the last time. No luck, the birds have picked the rest of the bushes clean. I did head over to the area where the hickory trees are. I collected a small bag of hickory nuts; most of them were bad, about half of them with white grubs in them. If you are fishing at Spencer Lake and run out of bait, you can probably find some good grubs in the hickory nuts! Put a hammer in your tackle box!

The ground cherries out there are still not ripe.