to wonder why there are blackberries going bad whilst people complain that they don't have enough money to feed their family healthy food.

[froken]

We went blackberry picking today, I was expecting a couple of manky blackberries to be left because I hear so often in the media and on mumsnet people saying how they struggle to feed their dc healthy food and sometimes people saying they have a hard time finding enough money to feed their dc at all.

There was a huge amount of blackberries, we were a 20 min walk outside a major city so an easily accessible place for 1000s of families.

We picked 9 pounds of blackberries.

Aibu to think that it would be a good idea for those struggling to feed their family a healthy diet (and those struggling to feed their family at all) should be out picking the free fruit that grows all over England's public spaces?

well, i hope that you have a good supply of nappies froken, this could be quite uneconomical otherwise

I think the blackberries will do ds some good usually we are trying to persuade him to eat prunes!

We use cloth nappies to save money I'd like to say it was for the environment or to save ds's skin from chemicals but it's not for those reasons we have a free laundry room in the flats that we live in so it's much cheaper for us to use cloth nappies.

Who the -hell- doesn't know their belladonna? I should google the Mary Cicely Barker Deadly Nightshade Flower Fairy poem.

I am, quite frankly, ignorant about plants. I have -never- been able to recognise Fat Hen, for example, although I know to stay the fuck away from Hogweed. But I know Deadly Nightshade. Even if I didn't, I'd never pick any fruit I didn't know and put it in a pie!

Respectable? Fucking idiots is more like it.

I now understand why so many people have simply brainwashed their children to think everything's poisonous. If not even adults can fathom not to eat random berries...

do hope you brush his teeth well tonight if he has any.

what's the harm in his walking up the hill by the way if there are two adults with him?

i can recognise a magic mushroom and was a very good picker in my time. doubt it would be considered good parenting to feed them to my child though.

They are those little black plum-shaped things, aren't they? The ones DD eats raw but that cause eye-watering and face-scrunching in normal people?

ROFL that sounds like sloes all right!

Sloes are picked fast though. I used to track how fast it took people to empty the hedge I knew of as a child, for amusement's sake. Apparently they're better "after the first frost" but in reality, they are gone long before that!

while the people are starving bollocks is silly

I am surprised that no one picks them any more

I've been googling- I haven't found anything that lifts my Fat Hen memory block, but I found out you can eat Mallow leaves.

The only problem is that the source for this is a magazine that once ran an article claiming that the Polio vaccine caused Polio and that it contained monkey brains...

Update: other sites substantiate this!

I'd be well up for an ongoing seasonal foraging thread, as long as it wasn't used to berate 'the poor'.

I think we need a source of "weed" seeds for things that apparently grow easily, so we can sow them nearby.

I actually read an article about a UK town, where people were planting public flowerbeds with carrot and potato plants for citizens.

Our friends pick every day this time of year. They have a few hundred pounds in the freezer already. They make blackberry wine with it throughout the year. Dosent feed them but saves on the wine bill!

OP, do start a foraging thread for us!

Goodness, yes, Deadly Nightshade. I can recall snippets of the Cicely Mary Barker poem. I think it ends with a warning.

Jessie, we have done that here. I gave some land and some neighbours planted herbs and veggies and everyone is allowed to help themselves. There are rather a lot of marrows at the moment.

Ah, marrows. Marrows seem to just happen whenever people garden. I think there's a Marrow Mafia of sleeper agents who have been conditioned secretly sabotage allotment owners' plans for, well, stuff that isn't marrows each year. Some agents are gardeners themselves, others are partners, and others simply live locally enough to conduct regular hypnotism sessions or contaminate seed packets.

The Song of The Nightshade Berry Fairy

"You see my berries, how they gleam and glow,
Clear ruby-red, and green, and orange yellow;
Do they not temp you, fairies, dangling so?"
The fairies shake their heads and answer "No! You are a crafty fellow!"

"What, won't you try them? There is naught to pay!
Why should you think my berries poisoned things?
You fairies may look scared and fly away-
The children will believe me when I say
My fruit is fruit for kings!"
But all good fairies cry in anxious haste, "O children, do not taste!"

The bottom of the page carries the admonition, "you must believe the good fairies, though the berries look nice" along with a description of the Woody Nightshade's summer flowers.

Marrows- I blame the courgettes.

Too many foragers around this way: sloes were gone before we got there

and you don't have to have gin for sloes: they make a very nice cordial

We were poor as kids - dirt poor - but ate like kings due to "foraging" - or as I have said in the past "finding something for tea". Depends where you live - on a Scottish island the wild riches were great - and the weather awful - "foraging" is not the delightful idyll it is made out to be when done in horizontal rain .

"not lobster for tea again mum" has gone down in family lore!

... rabbit stew, pigeon pie, brown/rainbow/sea trout, mussels and mackerel, crab and clams, rhubarb, nettles and rosehips grow anywhere like weeds.. but even then, even with those riches abounding, local people whinged about the price of food and having to feed the kids on spuds and cheap cheese... we never had much in the way of money, clothes or possessions, but by god we ate well...

Loads of blackberries near me (inner city area) but I'm not keen on them (too many pips).

However, the local childrens play park has apple, pear and plum trees (as well as shedloads of rosemary) that the council planted.
The past 2 years there has been no fruit worth picking - the summers were crap, and the trees get a bashing from the kids (breaking off branches).

This year there are loads of fruit!. Last weekend my DH and I went over with a carrier bag to pick some plums and pears. While doing so some of the kids (age 12+) asked what we were doing, so we told them and explained how to let the pears ripen before eating, and to wash the fruit first etc.

The odd thing was that none of them had realised that the things they had been picking and throwing at each other for weeks were fruit. One was adamant that I was having him on, so I ate a pear and a plum to show him. One kid had never tasted plums, so tried one and loved it!

We took some home for ourselves, and showed the kids how to pick safely for themselves. I suggested that in future they don't break branches or pick unripe fruit just to throw, so they can take ripe fruit home. Here's hoping!

We have bloody loads of blackberries from our garden. We also have fruit trees and there's been a bumper crop this year. The freezer is full to bursting point and we are trying to give plumbs, apples and blackberries away to anyone who'll have them.

I forsee many hours of crumble cooking, jam making and chutney making.

There are absolutely loads of foraged foods if you can co-ordinate things, sort out leisure activities like walks and amusing the children. Not including things you need a permit for:

If you live by the sea: crabbing is a doddle and good fun with kids, razor clams are edible, cockles and whelks obviously. Squat lobsters are incredibly delicious.

Rivers: if you can get signal crayfish, you're doing the ecosystem a favour as they are an introduced species which is knocking out the native crayfish. I've known people collect so many in a day that they just went round to local restaurants and sold them on.

Hedgerows and woods: Elderflowers and elderberries, hawthorn berries, ramsons, mushrooms of course (eek, though, I wouldn't be confident unless a really obvious kind like puffballs), juniper berries, blueberries, wild fruit everywhere, nettles...the list just goes on and on.

You'd have to be very hardy, very time-rich and energetic to get the bulk of your diet from foraged food, not an option for anyone really. However: children need to be walked, we all need more exercise, picking a bit of stuff as an extra is really satisfying, and working out what to do with things improves your cooking skills. There are tons of vitamins in things like elderberry robb or hawthorn syrup. OK it's ridiculous to assume that everyone's going to be interested or bothered or able to do this, but that doesn't stop it being a healthy and satisfying thing to do. (In particular it feels good sticking it to The Man and getting tasty stuff for free.)

When you google foraging, the first hits you get are from people selling their knowledge to the middle classes, or selling their books. The fact is you don't need them: keep googling, look on message boards like this one, pick out the useful bits and you can find the same knowledge for free.

After a big session yesterday, I now have four bushels of apples, one of conference pears and one of plums if anyone wants any, BUT I was cooking all evening preparing stuff for the freezer and I have barely made a dent in it AND I have had to shell out £30 for some stacking apple crates to store it properly in the garage (hopefully the nice will not get at it all like last time) AND I have had to spend quite a lot of money on supplementary ingredients like sugar, flour and eggs and freezer-friendly containers to put the stuff into some sort of usable form. Realistically I don't think most people in small flats and houses on a limited budget could invest this much time and money in a harvest. I wonder if they should give the WI sugar like in the war and get them bottling all this stuff for the nation. (I am only partly joking).

have just spluttered my reading this thread

It May have been better to maybe suggest that there is a nice day to be had out blackberry picking, I've done it but there is no way it's going to be a solution to feed my hungry family.

What do you do, make jam, tarts etc? I do get your point but I imagine my family will end up detesting them if fed in abundance!

Blackberries are still green where I am, but I just picked a kilo of wild raspberries from the side of the rude. We had old ladies coming over to swap recipes for jam, and kids who didn't have clue what we were doing, but tasted some berries with us.
We also had one delightful bitch woman who called us knackers, but never mind.