What's your favorite wild fruit to harvest and eat?

M Ljin wrote:I forgot to mention, mayapples are delicious!

I grew up seeing mayapples in the woods.  Didn't even know they actually produce an "apple."

Word of warning...  This is from Wikipedia, so take it as you will:

"All the parts of the plant are poisonous, including the unripe green fruit and perhaps the ripe fruit eaten in excess.[14][15][16]."

And further:

"Mayapple has been used by Indigenous Americans as an emetic, cathartic,[19] and antihelmintic agent.[19]"

None of those actions make me think "food."  They make me think "medicine," which has to be approached very differently, taken in different quantities than food, and for different reasons.

Wild blueberries from New England
Opuntia Cactus fruit / ‘tuna’ on West coast, with Golden Currants a close second.

Steve Thorn wrote:It can't get much better than harvesting free and no effort fruit.

We have lots of wild blackberries around here, and during the summer they produce loads of tasty and flavorful berries. These are probably my favorite. They can be eaten fresh or made into wonderful treats!

I've also found a wild peach tree that was really good and a mulberry tree that I haven't tasted yet, but hope to very soon this summer.

We don't have that much wild fruit growing around here that I've seen, and it seems like few people around here even grow fruit anymore, but hopefully that will soon change!

What types of native or wild fruit do you have growing near you and what is your favorite?

  Wild blackberries for sure easy to find and  taste fire.

Of the wild fruits growing in my region my favourites are 'Blauwe bosbessen' (Vaccinium myrtillus). Related to Blueberries and Huckleberries. These are low bushes growing in forests on sandy soil.

Wild blackberries are lovely, but I think it depends a lot on the fertility and moisture of the soil. In bad soil they are small, bitter, and seedy, whereas good soil and enough water makes them delicious.

As for mayapple—lots of plants are medicine. Cherry is cough medicine, and will poison you if you eat too much fresh bark or pits (cyanide). Most of the pawpaw plant is toxic as well. Every part of the yew except the flesh of the fruit is highly toxic. This is quite common—the fruit is edible but nothing else—because plants want the fruit to be eaten, but not the seed, bark, leaves, or roots.

Any kine, we get blackberries, several kinds of raspberries, alpine strawberries, lilikoi, purple passion fruit, banana passion fruit, and sea grapes. What I am able to gather depends on if I’m up mountain or by the coast. I’m a big fan of foraging for snacks!

My favourite harvested wild berry where I live is artic bramble (Rubus arcticus) (it looks a bit like translucent red cloudberry but tastes far better than cloudberry). It is nowadays quite rare, and unfortunately the varieties sold in nurseries to grow in garden are nothing like the wild ones, as they as hard and tasteless. I simply cannot understand what went wrong in the recent domestication process. I also like wild strawberries but one rarely finds more than a decilitre of those in any given spot, and there is a bit same problem with wild raspberries. Billberries are quite nice, and if it is a good billberry year, it is easy to pick 10 litres of those in a few hours.
When I was in UK during my postdoc blackberries were my favourite wild berry over there. Here even the hardiest cultivated varieties can barely survive and even when they produce fruit they are nowhere near as good as British blackberries.

Wecome to permies, Juha-Matti!

There are so many factors, like temperature and soil that affect how berries taste and how many you get. I do agree that even in my ecosystem, finding a wild strawberries is like finding a gold spec in the river!

This question is like asking what my favorite song is...25 songs later I'm adding to the list..

Persimmons are up there, but Pomegranates are right on their tail...trailing close are blackberries...but wait...figs...and who can say no to Avocados?  The same people who can't also probably like harvesting apricots like I do...right after that my plums come in...oh no I'd better not start thinking about my citrus...well I think you're getting the drift.  Your question really stirs me up!

al aric wrote:This question is like asking what my favorite song is...25 songs later I'm adding to the list..

Persimmons are up there, but Pomegranates are right on their tail...trailing close are blackberries...but wait...figs...and who can say no to Avocados?  The same people who can't also probably like harvesting apricots like I do...right after that my plums come in...oh no I'd better not start thinking about my citrus...well I think you're getting the drift.  Your question really stirs me up!

Your climate zone makes me jealous, with all those fruits growing in the wild!

Living here in the mountains of Montana, my favorite wild fruit to harvest and eat is, by far,

HUCKLEBERRIES !

Dennis Barrow wrote:Living here in the mountains of Montana, my favorite wild fruit to harvest and eat is, by far,

HUCKLEBERRIES !

I love huckleberries but have only eaten them one time during a camp trip in the Teton Mountains. We shared a patch for a brief time with a grizzly bear. The bear looked as us, we looked at it and we all went back to eating huckleberries.

My favorite wild fruit where I live are wild black cherries, mulberries and persimmons that have hung onto the tree into winter and basically dehydrated or freeze dried.

Mark Reed wrote:

I love huckleberries but have only eaten them one time during a camp trip in the Teton Mountains. We shared a patch for a brief time with a grizzly bear. The bear looked as us, we looked at it and we all went back to eating huckleberries.

My favorite wild fruit where I live are wild black cherries, mulberries and persimmons that have hung onto the tree into winter and basically dehydrated or freeze dried.

I take a radio with me and play it fairly loud to let the bears, (grizzly and black), know I am here, and please leave me alone.
Over the years I still have been asked, (maybe told is a better way to say it)  to leave good huckleberry patches.  I comply with their request.
Used to just carry a side arm, but now have that and bear spray.
My favorite is huckleberry jam.  That an huck's on pancakes.
I wonder if there is any in freezer I overlooked?

Jay Angler wrote:Wecome to permies, Juha-Matti!

    There are so many factors, like temperature and soil that affect how berries taste and how many you get. I do agree that even in my ecosystem, finding a wild strawberries is like finding a gold spec in the river!

    We have two species native to Long Island: Wild Strawberry (Fragaria virginiana)and Woodland Strawberry (Fragaria vesca) I found one once.  I left it for the critters; they get all of them before any human shows up.

I love madroños,  from the  Arbutus unedo (Strawberry Tree) that grows everywhere here on the edges of woodland paths. They have such a wonderful perfume, and, if steeped in the local hooch, make a lovely liqueur.

Mandy Launchbury-Rainey wrote:I love madroños,  from the  Arbutus unedo (Strawberry Tree) that grows everywhere here on the edges of woodland oaths. They have such a wonderful perfume, and, if steeped in the local hooch, make a lovely liqueur.

That's a nice looking tree! If I'll ever go to Spain, I surely want to visit that woodland region where such trees grow (but I don't have any plans to go to Spain ...)