Harvest Time

Plums are falling all over the jogging trails, blackberries are starting to ripen in sunny spots, the elderberries are getting nice blue/purple coloring, and even the figs are ripe enough to pick!  This is a very tough time of year, trying to get out and harvest all the wild edible fruits before the birds, bears, or sun ruin you crop.  I have been watching a dozen fig trees for the last two months, waiting and waiting for the telltale droop of the figs that tells you when they are ready to harvest, and the time is now!

During a morning jog, I just picked a 5 lb bag of figs from along the trails of the American River!  i am sure I will be back soon for more!

Lemon Jelly, sorta....

If you happen to live in the Sacramento area in the late "winter" using "foraging vision" you will have noted the crazy amount of citrus available to pick almost everywhere!  In January, Tracy and the boys and I went to a friends house and loaded up on mandarin oranges, navel oranges, lemons, limes, and kumquats.  Then the experiments started - maybe I will write about some of those later, but write now I wanted to talk about Lemon Jelly.

I was on a roadtrip for work in mid-March with a gentleman from another company who I work closely with often.  Three hour drive each way to a meeting, of course the subject of foraging came up!  One end result of this conversation being, that when I dropped him off at his house, I got to wander into the back yard and pick a large bag full of Meyer Lemons.

Earlier in the year, with piles of lemons, limes, and oranges, I had tried multiple different methods of putting up citrus.  Not to say that the methods and recipes did not work, but what do you do with 20 pint jars of bitter marmalade?  I ended up dumping out all but four jars and figure I will bring it out as more of a novelty item on occasion, it just does not fit with what we eat on a regular basis.  Same with the orangelemon chutney and orange jelly.  One nice thing, I do make alot of blackberry jam in the summers, so I had squeezed a bunch of lemons and froze them in ice cube trays for use during the summer canning season.  But with 2 gallon bags of lemon cubes, I had to think of another use for this large bag of lemons!

So I decided to make Lemon Jelly - easy enough:

8 cups lemon juice
6 cups sugar
lemon peels in jelly bag -

I boiled the juice with the skins in a bag for pectin content,
added the sugar and removed the peels,

I usually put two plates in the freezer to test the sets of jellies or jams, especially when trying something new like this.  I boiled this for two minutes, tested the set on a plate, and though it set well - jarred it, canned it for ten minutes in the pressure canner at 5 psi, and ended up with 10 jars of lemon syrup...

What happened?  I am not quite sure, but I think I jumped too soon on the plate test and I never had a jelly set, that or I had too much heat in the pressure canner and something went wrong. 

So I ended up with jars of light lemon syrup, I thought about recanning to get the set, but then thought, "how often am I actaully going to want to use lemon jelly?"  Lemon syrup on the other hand, came in really handy over the last couple of months for making homemade margaritas!  So in the end, I did have a successful use of foraged lemons!

Walk through the Woods

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of being invited for a walk through a local park with a foraging expert.  Stephen Nix, who also writes the blog Foraging School let a small group through the woods near his house.

Stephen led a very informative talk as we walked through the Hinkle Creek Nature Center and pointed out all the local edible or useful plants.  A particularly good point Stephen had at the beginning of his class was to always utilize the Latin names for the plants as well as the common names in order to avoid any identification confusion.  Of course, until I learn more Latin names this does not do too much good.  The point was well taken when later in the walk there was a discussion revolving around milk thistles and different ways to eat and cook them. The statement was made that you could eat all thistles, shortly followed by someone asking about star thistles.  Star thistles are not in the thistle family and are not edible.  That conversation just highlighted the errors that can occur based upon using common names for plants versus the Latin nomenclature.

Unfortunately, I did not get to listen to Stephen as much as I would have liked.  Tracy and my two boys were with me, and Carter, my two-year-old, is only happy for a short time in the backpack while listening to people talk.  We let him loose and he ran up and down the mile long trail, thoroughly enjoying himself, but either Tracy or I had to give chase and miss portions of the class.

It was definitely an enjoyable walk on a Saturday afternoon.  The kids enjoyed being outdoors, and Tracy and I managed to learn a few new plants to add to our diet.
My favorite was Miner's Lettuce.  I have heard and read about Miner's Lettuce for some time, but I have never been to trusting on book identification of plants, so having someone show me this plant was very useful.  Once identified, it is easy to pick out and I have had several Miner's Lettuce snacks since!

It was a pleasure to meet Stephen and others for the NorCal Foraging Yahoo Group!  We look forward to returning the favor by leading a walk through our local park someday soon!