Now that we're into July, raspberries should be coming into season in our neck of the woods. *B* and I kept talking about going out and foraging for berries and some more sumac, but nothing was coming of it. Thursday, it was "do or die" day.
*B* cut about six cones of sumac from the side of the road on his way home from work. That makes 6 cups of sumac-ade, or can be reduced down to make a lemon juice-like substitute. We're looking into how to best store them for the next couple of months, whether it's dried as a cone or in liquid form. There's a great stand of sumac that I want to cut, but it's off an exit ramp, and I'm nervous about taking Miss F there. It might be a project for a day when she's home with *B*. I could probably gather 20 or more cones just from that one stand.
We went for a walk in a local park where *B* had seen some berries a few days ago. As soon as we drove in, we started spotting the raspberry bushes. Most of them were unripe, which is great news. It's better to be early for berry season than late.
Unripe raspberries
As we walked the trail, we saw tons of raspberries, but we started seeing blackberries as well. Many were good sized ones, like you'd get from the grocery store! We probably walked around the park for two hours, but by the end, we had a ton of berries: 2 cups of blackberries and 6 cups of raspberries. And that's not counting the ones Miss F ate (we forgot to pack her a snack and it was dinner time).
I figure that 8 cups of berries at $4 per half pint (going rate at our organic market) yielded us $32 worth of free berries. That's the equivalent of paying ourselves $16 an hour to have a walk outdoors as a family!
How neat that there is so much wild food growing around you! A few years ago we stayed at a campground with wild blackberries everywhere and we enjoyed snacking on them. There isn't much wild growing here that I know of. Most of the land is farmland, and I'm guessing they wouldn't appreciate us "foraging," ha ha.
ReplyDeleteAt the college my husband and I attended, there were a few fruit trees around. I thought it was so neat that they used something edible as part of the landscape, and it was fun to see people eating the fruit.