Last week in Olympia my mother and I went blackberry picking twice, and ended up picking something like 35 cups of berries. If we didn’t love the wild blackberry so much, we might have spared some of our picking time for the many other forageables we encountered out in the brush. As Langdon Cook at Fat of the Land has shown, there are so many interesting wild edible plants out there, especially in the Northwest. The blackberry’s own rubus family made several additional appearances in our path, such as this salmonberry:
I’m not a particular fan of this rubus, although salmonberries are indeed very pretty. Some people love their mild taste, but I think they’re kind of insipid. I’m more partial to another rubus, however: black caps. From their looks, I’m guessing they are closely related to the domesticated black raspberry:
Black caps taste somewhat like raspberries, but they have a distinct, tannin-y cabernet overtone that sticks in your mouth. They are excellent for munching when you’re out traipsing through the brush. They’re fairly delicate, though. We picked some and put them into their own plastic bag, but by the end of the day they had gotten fairly mashed.
Lastly in the rubus category, we found some thimble berries. They have a pleasant floral raspberry taste, but they’re not really fleshy enough to be worth picking – at least, not when there are blackberries and black caps around. Moving away from rubus, we found plenty of red huckleberry bushes:
Red huckleberries are grassy and sweet and acidic, like little orbs of rhubarb juice. I might make some red huckleberry syrup for cocktails at some point.
We also encountered many wild hazelnut trees, which were already bearing unripe hazelnuts encased in prickly husks. The nuts inside were a lovely tawny color:
Come fall, these hazelnuts will get darker and be ready to harvest.
The final forageable plant we encountered, which I had no desire to actually collect, was stinging nettles. Langdon Cook has detailed many culinary uses for nettles, and they’ve even been a topic on The Kitchn. They’re reportedly very good for your health. Unless, of course, you accidentally touch one. Which I did. Repeatedly.
You can identify stinging nettles visually by the toothed leaves and bushy structure. And you can identify them aurally by the extreme cursing you make when you accidentally touch one. If you’re going to forage nettles, bring some thick gloves.
Excellent post and thanks for the shout-out! You were spending time in a berry mecca–most of my non-blackberry spots are higher in elevation and not ready yet. I especially love the blackcaps; they’re a native raspberry and quite delicious, but never prolific. I’ve rarely found enough blackcaps to do more than the usual hand-to-mouth picking. Give thimbleberries another try. Yes, they’re fragile to an extreme, but if you can get enough home (a packed pint is enough) they make a stunning jam. Agreed on salmonberries: “insipid” is a good word choice. They have watery flavor and lots of hard seeds, but are gorgeous-looking in a bowl: yellow, orange, red, even purple. Though red hucks have more pucker than the blue/black, they make great jams and cobblers with enough sugar and look terrific in sauces.
So how is the mushroom hunting on your folks’ property???
I’ll answer regarding mushrooms on our property in Olympia: there are any to speak of. The only thing we’ve ever found are two kinds of truffles in our front yard: the Oregon white spring truffle (tuber gibbosum), under a very big Douglas Fir; and a “false truffle,” but still very delicious, called melanogaster tuberiformis, under the overlap of the Douglas Fir, a Grand Fir, and a Monkey Puzzle Tree. We live right in town and our lot is large for a city lot, but not really large. I’ve seen a few mushrooms now and then, but haven’t wanted to try them. –Amelia’s mother