Food without Farming

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July and August are very productive months for the wild food forager and almost everything that produces edibles has something to offer at this time of the year. True, the greens are a little tough but trimmed chicory and dandelion are good all summer.

The cattail, too, has white salad material in the stem bases and—in some areas—the new cattail itself is still green and hard. Green cattails make a good substitute for Zucchini squash if it's baked for a few minutes at 350° and then swabbed with melted bacon grease.

Blueberries and huckleberries ripen in mid-summer and, of course, blackberries and raspberries are also at their delicious best. We like to pick berries and our whole family turns out to fill pail after pail.

A special treat which July gives us are wild cherries and Juneberries (or shadberries). Near our camp in Northern Wisconsin is a 25-acre ridge that is a virtual Juneberry orchard. Hundreds of water pails wouldn't hold the crop from this one ridge in an average year . . . and not far away are a dozen pin cherry trees that yield red, sweet, delicious cherries as large as the end of your little finger.

Picking Juneberries and pin cherries is more fun than work. Both can be stripped from their branches by sliding the fruitfilled twigs between the thumb and forefinger almost like milking a goat.

Down here in southern Wisconsin another fruit also ripens on trees and is at its best right now: the sweet and delicious black cherry and choke cherry. Picking black cherries is best accomplished by spreading a canvas or other cloth under the tree and shaking the limbs with a pole that has a branch hook wired to its end.

Mid-summer is also the time to harvest a large rhubarb-like plant that grows up in rich soil over the temperate regions of the nations; Wild Gobo or Great Burdock. And we musn't forget Wild Onions, either!

I'm getting hungry just thinking about all this foraged fare so let's get down to specifics about these foods.

As I mentioned before, picking Juneberries (Amelanchier Canadensis) from the trees in northern Wisconsin is no great chore. They usually grow so thick they can be stripped from the branches in handfuls. The berries go through three stages. First they're green (and of course inedible), next they turn red (and in the latter red stages they're sometimes very good and juicy) and—finally—the berries reach a final blue ripe stage. Usually we pick them as they purple from red to blue.

People aren't the only creatures that like Juneberries. One year we had severe competition from a family of two cubs and a sow black bear who practically lived in our Juneberry orchard. We didn't really mind if the bears ate all the berries they wanted but their eating habits are downright destructive to the trees. Bears climb out on limbs until the limbs bend to the ground whereupon another bear may grab a branch and break it off. We finally had to have our Labrador retriever chase the bears to another area where they no doubt found a Juneberry orchard without people and dogs.