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

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Emerging poke shoots are widely eaten like asparagus or forced like Belgian endive, though red ends of the shoots are cut off. The berries are all purple-red, and Foxfire 2 (wisdom of state-of-Georgia elders) warns against them. I don't know any old-timers who'll eat them, though the berries do figure in more than one folk remedy.

Fruit of buckthorns resemble blueberries, but are blacker and bitter and cluster along branches of a shrub. Some have thorns.

Elderberries

Appearance: Flowers bloom in a six-inch or so diameter spray of dozens of white blossoms (called "elderblow," they are delicious dipped in a light egg batter and fried in butter to make fritters), followed by a multitude of small dark red-purple berries in summer. Wait till berries are ripe and juicy. Toxic to some people when eaten raw, with a strong sweet-bitter flavor, they cook up into a grand juice for jelly, flavor for apple wine, cordials or syrup. Mix juice with an equal part sugar and some lemon juice to counter the bitter, cook till bubbly and pressure-can in pint jars for syrup to go on pancakes or ice cream. Once when I was little, my Great Aunt Elsa served fresh-picked, egg-batter-fried elderblow with elderberry syrup for breakfast to the whole family (we'd gone out to the old farm for strawberry time in June). I was too young to appreciate the weedy appearance of the blossoms or the bitter principle of the syrup, so I settled for fritter-batter pancakes with fresh strawberries; I've been kicking myself ever since.

Location: Elderberries need a rich forest soil and are found in moist woodlands, at margins of fields and along trails and forest roads.

Season: Flowers bloom June to July, fruits appear late Summer into fall.

Warnings: See blueberry warning.

Wild Cherries: Black Cherry And (Red) Chokecherry

Appearance: Small (quarter-inch) round, red or blue-black berries in sprays on low trees. Young trees of dark-fruited black cherry have a shiny, reddish bark with shallow pits. Snapped twigs have the characteristic "wild cherry" odor. Fruits are small, juicy, round cherries born along lengthy stems at ends of branches. Chokecherry fruit grows similarly but is bright red to purple. It is bitter or sour or both, but palatable as a trail refresher and can add a wild flavor to apple jelly or wine. Native Americans dried and used them in pemmican and other winter foods and trail mixes.

Of the Prunus genus and related to plums, cherry trees have the characteristic fruit tree leaf: ovoid, small, with many blunt teeth around margin. It's easy to confuse chokecherries with small red bushberries, which is OK. As a rule of thumb, if a bright red, juicy berry growing in quantity on a wild bush or tree tastes good (even if it's a little sour), it is edible. If it is too sour, spit it out. But, as with any wild food, be sure to ID it from a book before eating in any quantity.

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