Things You Might Eat
We’re deep into fall, and plants are still producing some edible stuff. What’s a bit curious to me is that it’s not generally super tasty. While late spring and summer fruit like blueberries, mulberries and peaches tend to be super sweet, the things that emerge this time of year tend to be sour.
Part of it may be the result of selective breeding by humans. Eating apples are the result of careful hybridization, selection and grafting, and it’s possible that ripening in late summer and early fall was one of the chosen characteristics to make harvesting more convenient.
Crab apples like these are essentially ornamental and planted mainly for their flowers. You can add them to a press for cider or make jam from them and cut their sourness with a ton of sugar, but most people just leave them for the birds.
The name chokecherry is pretty clear. Unlike regular cherries, which need netting when grown for food to protect them from birds, chokecherries tend to stay on branches until birds have little else to eat. Like crab apples, you can make jam from them if you use a lot of sugar.
This is beautyberry, which is not supposed to be as sour as chokecherries and crab apples, but they’re not really for eating out of hand. They are full of seeds, for one thing. I’ve read that they are mostly cooked and strained for juice, which is supposed to taste like hibiscus tea.
And then there are rose hips, which are definitely too sour to eat straight, although our last foster dog liked to eat them off the vine. They are loaded with Vitamin C, which gives them their sour taste, and are mostly used for jelly and tea.
Black walnuts grow in the park near my house. They are mostly gone by now to the squirrels, but a lot of them still linger in the leaf litter, with their green husks now shrivelled and rotted. They are much stronger tasting than cultivated English walnuts, their shells are much harder to crack, and they have much less meat, which is why they are not commonly sold. (Butcher, of course, would argue that no variety of walnut should be sold.)
Finally, these are persimmons. I love persimmons, and they can be great to eat straight off the tree, but with a warning. Unless they are perfectly ripe, absolutely soft to the point of being almost mushy, they can be so astringent that they’re like eating an aspirin lollypop.
Persimmons are one of the few edible fruits native to the US, although Asian varieties are much more common in stores due to larger size and greater ease of shipping. When they start to ripen they turn a beautiful shade of rich orange. Common wisdom is that they only ripen after a hard frost, although that’s not necessarily true.
If you’ve never had persimmons and happen to see them in a store, buy one or two and leave them in a closed container or bag with a piece of fruit like an apple or banana that will help them ripen. Wait until they are really soft — out of all of the edibles shown here, persimmons are the best.
I have to tell you about the time my younger sister and I, burgeoning alcoholic-manqués both, I was about 8 so she would have been about 6, decided to pick some berries from the bushes that guarded the entrance to our elementary school, put them in a jar with some water, and store it in a secret hiding place in our family garage. Our goal was to make to make wine.
First of all, the berries might have been poisonous, because the early 70s were a time when childhood safety seemed to be at the very bottom of any parent’s or educator’s priorities list. That same elementary school had a freestanding 8-foot-high chain-link fence behind the batter’s position at the scrubby baseball diamond out back (so that no one had to run into the woods behind the batter to retrieve an errant pitch), which provided a favorite climbing/leaping into oblivion opportunity—
Anyway, second of all the berries, thankfully, almost immediately grew mold and scary fuzzy froth so even we didn’t sample it. It’s a wonder any Baby Boomer and half of Gen X survived their suburban childhoods.
Pokeweed berries are all over this time of year and they’re poisonous. Holly berries are bad for people, although they’re supposed to be so foul tasting to people that there’s little risk of eating enough to be too bad.
It’s pretty obvious how many pretty berries will cause harm that they all evolved only with regard to birds and mammals (and especially people) don’t count for squat.
My grapes were almost ripe when we left for PR but I thought I would be able to harvest when I got back. Nope, raccoon ate the entire crop! I caught him just sitting in the middle of the grapes last weekend finishing off whatever he hadn’t already eaten. We just harvested a giant zucchini & some of the pumpkins and even tomatoes are still on the vine but not going to ever get ripe. We had the warmest/driest October on record but it has turned cold, wet and windy over the last week.
Nice pics by the way!
It’s always the last one at the party who gets accused of drinking all the beer. That poor raccoon might have just followed some crows.
No, I caught him a few times, crows and other wildlife haven’t shown any interest in them.
But they’re so cute, so fuzzy, those spectacles!
Actually, one time I saw one cleaning out a nest of baby squirrels. They’re Terminators.
Only somewhat related (due to the word “edibles”) but I went to lunch at the taco place around the corner.
They had a Halloween sign on their door that said “All the good candy is next door”.
Next door is a weed store!
I was hoping that you were going to say you had edibles for lunch!
We had an american persimmon tree in the neighborhood when I was a kid and the fruit looked more rounded and had a white bloom on them like blueberries had.
Once we had a frost and they were mushy on the ground, some neighbors would collect the fruits to be used in baked goods and jams. But like had to be a freeze and thaw then time to collect. I guess it was way easier to use them in pulp consistency after the thaw since mother nature did a lot of the work for them.
Also I’m going to be an annoying plant person.
American beautyberry is a lovely native species that has pretty flowers in late spring and is not invasive. If you live anywhere in the US in the range of Texas north to Missouri and east to Virginia, chances are its native range includes your area. It’s a great replacement for invasive species or just hey I want a lovely shrub that birbs will enjoy the berries of and I know won’t spread like fucking honeysuckle.
Those berries are beautiful too, even if you never use them, and they’re out at a time when a lot of plants are going gray.