Who else forages?

i like picking blackberries but thats about it....love making bramble jeyy its a lovely colour and tastes fab

My wife and I are avid foragers. In late summer and autumn we forage for blackberries, rose hips, apples and cherries. Right now, we are picking a roadside weed we call plantain, from which my wife makes a herbal rub for aching limbs and back pain - she is Thai and uses it as a massage balm in her traditional Thai massage therapy business.

Meeee! I live on the edge between town & country so practice both rural and urban foraging. Many residents of our little town have become so used to me knocking and asking whether I can pick their apples/pears/japonica quinces in autumn that they've got some waiting in a bag for me! I always return a jar of whatever I've made with them. One local Freecycler with a small orchard always sends me an email in autumn saying, they're ready, come & get them!

I've just bottled up my second batch of elderflower champagne for this year; you can buy the cordial relatively cheaply, but not champagne & there's nothing like a glass at Christmas to bring the summer flooding back in. Elderflower fritters are rather nice, and I usually make strawberry & elderflower jam (just throw a handful of the flowers, stripped off their stalks, into your jam as it approaches setting point, and some lime juice helps bring out the flavour) too. It's been really rainy for a couple of weeks now, though, and though there are plenty of flowers still coming out, I doubt they'll have much flavour, though I'm quite prepared to be corrected!

Out on the drove roads through the countryside to the west, in autumn I can usually find hazelnuts, walnuts, crab apples, sloes and yet more blackberries. (Which always remind me of the days when I used to pick them along the edges of the Tube lines in London.) At this time of year, in one or two places where there used to be cottages & gardens, I can find blackberries, gooseberries and redcurrants; the plants have survived even though the habitations are just bumps in the ground now & don't appear on any maps.

It's interesting what the plants can tell you about the history of an area; Babington's Leek (edible!) grows in our front garden, which only appears on the site of old monastery kitchen gardens; indeed there was a monastery here once, but it went in the Dissolution of the Monasteries nearly 500 years ago - but the plants are still here!

I'm 60 now and have been foraging just about all my life - my Dad was a dedicated forager - but I'm still learning. Yesterday I brought back an armful of goosefoot "weeds" from the edge of our allotment for our chickens, only to discover that we can eat them too! Too late, alas... they went down those beaks like moonshine. Ah well, unfortunately there are plenty more where they came from...

I would love to try making elderflower champagne. I tend to stick with cordial at the moment. I have a recipe written down for a blackberry and elderberry cordial which I would like to try in the autumn. I'm hoping it will taste like the ribena winter spice they did as a limited edition.

About to bottle 2 gals of rhubarb wine, elderflower wine in demi-johns , elder flower champagne bottled..
Local wild garlic almost over , allottment looking good -already picked lettuce/raddish/purple sprouting -broad beans any day ....... yum.