Mmmm!  Wintergreen!  Eat the berries, make tea with the leaves.  Yum!

Rose Hips, years ago, probably late August one year.  They are supposed to be very high in vitamin C.  I tried eating them, and also tried steeping them in some boiling water like tea.  I wasn't impressed.      But they weren't awful, either.

Thanks for the OT move.  I thought there already was a Wild Edibles thread, but couldn't find it to bump.

Yes wintergreen berries & tea.  Stuffed a trout with the berries once, added a nice tart bump.

Blueberries, strawberries, rasperries, saskatoons, pincherries are all on the menu when available.  As a child my family used to spend whole days picking berries in the bush.  Followed by a day or two of cleaning & jamming.

I'm wary about mushrooms.  Mom picks them.  If I'm with someone who's confident then I'll eat them.  A couple years ago someone picked a bunch of morels and at the campfire said, "If only we had some butter."  I pack butter!  So we had fried speckled trout with morels.  Yummy!

Sumac tea is good too.

Pretty sure you can pick the fruit in parks.  Back when the family would pick we would get our spots from the park staff and often picking in the park.  That was 25 years ago, maybe things changed.  The distinction being that you can't uproot a plant, but you can pick the berries. 

Proper mushroom picking is cutting the base so it can re-sprout.  Yanking out of the ground is bad form.

Part of me wants to try the Survivorman diet during a trip.  I'd still pack food, but just try to snare something small or catch some frogs.  Legally, of course.

Quote:


I pretty sure they have a season, but from looking at the Ontario Fishing regs, I'm still unsure as to the legality of catching/consuming them in the Q?
Plenty of snappers there. I doubt many visitors would be interested, so don't know if over consumption would be an issue?
I'd like to grill one over the campfire IF it was legal?
Anyone know for sure.

Well that settles that.
THX

thanks, dd.

fascinating reading.

Not 20 yards from where we throw up Deer Camp every year in Northern Kentucky are stands of both sumac and sassafras. And elsewhere in our neck of woods are everything from ground nuts to cattails to blackberries to raspberries to wood sorrel to persimmons to walnuts and hickories (and of course a half dozen species of oaks).

In the unlikely event we were stranded there and forbidden to kill and eat meat (deer, turkey, squirrel, rabbit, groundhog, dove, grouse, etc. etc.), we surely wouldn't starve.

-- kypaddler

Anybody eat inner pine bark? heh heh

Yeah, you shouldn't be picking mushrooms unless you know what you're doing.

There are only a few deadly poisonous ones out there, but there are some. Even if eating the wrong mushroom might not kill you, it could cause permanent liver damage, or you could just end up puking your guts out. On the other hand, you may (also) experience a transformative hallucinogenic experience, but I have no personal experience with that.

There is something called a "false morel" which I think is in the poisonous-but-not-deadly category. To me they don't look much like real morels, but apparently there are enough people who make the mistake.

All Europeans from Russians to Italians pick wild mushrooms. If you're culturally deprived, you might find a local university or community college that offers courses. There are lots of good books out there as well: Orson K. Miller's is a classic, and David Arora's is good too. But it's nice to have someone take you out and show you.

In addition to morels (delicious but fairly rare, in my experience), there are some other excellent eating mushrooms which are common in late summer and are easy to identify, such as lactarius deliciosus, various boletes, chanterelles, oyster mushrooms, and honey mushrooms. Though I'm not specially keen on them, some people like puffballs and coral fungi too.

Maybe the chicken-leg fogs in Q would taste even more like chicken!

I had fried frogs leggs once in a vietnamese restauraunt.  Mmmm tasty!  I commented on how crispy the batter was.  That's not batter, that the skin.  Mmmm tasty!