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Vaino

Cannon
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The immediate areas surrounding my Gparents farm in northern Minnesota had assorted berries at different times of the year and we picked berries from mid summer through early autumn.

Wild strawberries that we picked had much more flavor than the "tasteless" berries found in the stores today....they didn't have the eye appeal of the very large strawberries grown today which are "all show and no taste", but surely were exquisite in taste.

The wild red and black raspberries that we picked for a few weeks were so delicious that my Gmother had to remind me that some should "go home" because of my tendency of too much sampling.

Blueberries were not easy to locate, but we did have our favorite "secret" spots. As w/ strawberries, they req'd a lot of "bending down" which my Gparents didn't like, so I did a lot of the picking. As w/ most of the berries, thick cream was the preferred liquid.

To slightly veer off the topic....hazelnuts were found in abundance and were a "snack food" in between meals. I remember one time of sitting on a log peeling and eating hazelnuts and was joined by a red squirrel who sat beside me and accepted a few hand held nuts.

No wonder this survival farm was my Utopia.....Fred
 
My Sicilian grandmother would make Granita from similar small, explosively-flavorful Strawberries. I can still taste it....
 
When I moved to the ozarks I got off in to the woods pretty quick.i grew up in New Mexico and the woods was a whole new adventure for me. Christopher Robin was my guide( he still shows up on the trail).
My second spring I came across my very first ever wild strawberry. OMG!!!
They remain a rare treat.wild black berries, persimmons and hickory nuts still are the treats in season.
 
The time I spent on my Gparents farm was during the "Great Depression" and both deer and bear were nearly non-existent because of the need for some kind of fresh protein. What the farmers didn't get, the wolves did.....so even seeing a single deer was an event...Fred
 
The best wild strawberries I ever found was in WV on a trout fishing trip and boy they were the best. We have them on my place in MT but they are about the size of a match head. Wild raspberries the same. I have only found one hazelnut tree in my life when I was about 10 yo.in WV. We do have good huckleberries near by in the Bitterroot and world famous mushrooms.
 
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Driving through Oregon 6-7 years ago I saw a couple sitting on the corner with the "Hungry anything will help" sign. Behind them (in the area between the Highway and the off ramp) was a Black Berry Bramble with what had to be 200 pounds of ripe berries, 1000 yards away was a truck stop full of trucks. I remember thinking :hmm: they could make $200 selling Black Barriers to Truckers, Talk about sleeping on gold dreaming about silver :snore:
 
Boy ! I see this all the time. If they had grown up like me they would be glad to pick all they could. I still pick blackberries and wild plumbs in the Clearwater drainage in Idaho every summer.
 
I remember the first deer hunting season since ????? in WV. About 1940 (?) One day, bucks only. My Dad and GD set up camp some where and Dad killed a 16 point (eastern count) buck which is shoulder mounted and still is in the family. Same for eastern VA at the time. Now in VA you can kill as many as you want as long as you buy the tags.
 
Blackberries are not native berries, in case anyone cares. They are also known as Himalayan Blackberries, and were introduced by settlers and then spread all over the countryside by birds dropping the seeds everywhere. They're common along irrigation ditches and basically anywhere people have settled at one time or another.

AZ has the tiny little "match head" size wild strawberries, and you're lucky to find enough of them to taste.

We do have native wild raspberries, though, in large numbers if you hit it right. The forest fires of the last few decades have made good stands of them in slash piles. They are excellent.

One berry I have only seen in the SW, and picked enough of to make something out of is desert barberries, which my family (from TX) called algerita. They grow from about 3,000ft. to 6,000ft. elev. and have very stickery leaves. We made good jelly out of them and I have eaten a pie made out of them that was plenty good. The berries are about the same as the ones on the low growing barberry bushes you see in the mountains of the West, but the bushes are very different, growing up to 15' high and just as wide. The leaves also have points that are much sharper, making leather gloves a good accessory for picking them. The very fragrant flowers are good to eat as well, before they put on berries, with a good tart flavor, but still sweet enough to enjoy eating.
 
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