Foraging for Edible Wild Plants: A Field Guide to Wild Berries

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Search in natural meadows, at river and pond margins, overgrown farm fields or recent burns, along country roads and lanes, and under power line rights-of-way. Some berries grow in marshes, others in sandy barrens. The guides recommend "disturbed ground" or places where man has removed trees and undergrowth, then abandoned the land, providing several decades of sunny ground for fast-growing berry bushes and small fruiting trees to colonize, before forest trees grow up to shade them out.

Till you are well-experienced, avoid all vine fruit save for wild grapes that grow up into the trees, fruit in clusters like store grapes, have twisty tendrils on their stems and leaves with serrated edges and a heart-shaped base. The fruit are dark blue or red and have a sweet outer skin that slips off easily from the glutinous, sour inner seed envelope. Seeds number one to three and are hard. In the North, they taste like Concord grape jelly or Manishewitz, in the South, like Muscatel wine. Young shoots and leaves are edible.

Most other wild vine fruit are poisonous or hard to differentiate from look-alikes that are. The fruit of Smilax genus, misnamed carrion flower in the North and greenbrier (bullbrier) in the South, grow on vines that produce small clumps of edible black or blue-black berries. They are never abundant (I can show you but a single vine hereabouts), and can be confused with the fruit of the Virginia creeper, which puts out a spray of small, blue, appetizing looking (and marginally palatable but toxic) berries. Uncommon, but poisonous, Canada moonseed looks like grapes but has large (up to ten-inch) round, smooth edged leaves, bitter fruit and crescent shaped seeds. Poison ivy, when it climbs a tree to fruit, produces unappetizing, hard white berries, while nightshade's berries are small, orange-red and bitter (its other name is "bittersweet"). Both are toxic in one way or another.

Identify Wild Berries: When to Forage

Summer is best, though some berries fruit in spring and others in fall. Many even hold on till winter, with some, such as Hawthorn's mini-apples, improving in sweetness and flavor after frost. Following is a list of the most common berries of midwestern and eastern North America. But first . . .

Three warnings before your trip out:

1. Make a positive identification before you pick or eat any berry. Obtain, study and use a reliable, up-to-date field guide. (See "Sources" at the end of this article). If possible, make your first trips with a long-time berry-picker from your local area; field experience is by far the best teacher.

2. You'll want to avoid areas that have been sprayed recently with herbicide. Most spraying is done early in the growing season when plants are making fastest growth and are most vulnerable. Dead vegetation is an indication of a recent spraying. If vegetation in an even ribbon along the roadside or under the highlines looks to be growing, but is stunted, unevenly leafing out or well behind similar plants growing elsewhere, you have an old spray zone that is fighting back. Any fruit will have grown on canes or buds produced after the spray lost strength. But still, I'd leave it and come back next year.

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