What are some things you may remember your grandparents or great-grandparents foraging for outdoors - or maybe you know someone now who does - for food?

Poke is one - some like the young, tender leaves

Blackberries, other fruits (muscadines, apple, pear, etc.)

Nuts

Mushrooms - as long as you know WTH you're searching for and eating

What else?

Blackberries and the muscadines. Also bream, crappie and bass. Occasionally we had catfish from the wild. But usually if we were eating catfish, there was a lot of ketchup bread because we didn’t have the 3 previous fish.

Dandelion, cattail, American bueatyberry are all edible.

I had a weird uncle that likes to eat poke salad and boiled squirrel brains.

Have you ever ate much of that?

We had a guy in the deer club that used to gather white oak acorns and make bread from them. Seemed like a lot of trouble to me.

Decent amount.

Not much of anything but blackberries around here. I sure wish we had morels and fiddleheads here though

Maypops, blackberries , muscadines, wild plums

Granny used to make poke salat all the time. She also made blackberry cobbler. She used to take me on hikes in the woods and we would dig sasafrass roots and she would make a tea out of them.

Pawpaw used to make blackberry jelly and muscadine jelly both were awesome. I remember them cooking them up out back of the house.

They lived through the depression, so they knew more than most people how to live off the land and they weren't ones to let anything that was edible go to waste.

I've eaten a lot of persimmons when I was a kid. I've also eaten a lot of tree nuts.

I've always been curious about ramps, but I've never tried them.

I'm wanting to start growing ginsing once I get the cabin finished. I think my mountain side will be a great place to grow it. According to a book I read about Lookout Mountain ginsing (sang) used to grow all over that mountain. We already have a bunch of muscadines and I plan on transplanting some in the front yard and building an arbor for them to grow on.

Most of the foraging my granny and paw paw did had medicinal purposes. Rabbit tobacco, ginseng, wild honey, yellow root, vetch, oxalis, several more I can't remember. They had a natural cure/remedy for tons of common ailments.

Wasn't including fish and game in this. We know about hunting and fishing.


Great stuff. I forgot about cattails and dandelion. Have had both. Cattails are kinda tasty.



Some of those I remember from reading the Foxfire books. Always loved those books.




I never knew the Maypops were edible.

Huckleberries. They grow along the bluffs around here.

Wild plums are awful tasty as are ripe persimmons. There aren't any wild plums on our farm anymore, but I do graze on persimmons in the fall.

Not for nourishment but chewing on the stem of a sweet gum leaf tastes sorta like peppermint.

Ramps.

Do they have ramps in AL?

I've never heard of ramps here in Alabama but have smelled and found them while on a camping trip in northeast Georgia. Doggone strong aroma.

I don't really have anything to add, but have always been extremely interested in foraging/gathering.

We'd pick enough wild plums for a years worth of jelly. Can't find a wild plum anymore. In the summer, Mom would give me a bucket and tell me not to come back home till it was full of dewberries. We had dewberry cobbler several times a week when they were ripe. Same thing for scuppernogs and muscadines in the fall. We'd fill five gallon buckets home from the woods at my grandparents. I delivered a bucket to an older man in town one day, and the next Sunday at church he told me he ate them like he did when he was a kid until his mouth as raw from sucking on the husks.

We'd also pick up pecans on the weekend. Our trees and all over the county. Probably an attempt to keep us under their thumb, to a degree. We always had a deep freezer full year-round, and every Christmas my mom would give me a gallon bag of shelled and cleaned pecans to give to my teachers. They always acted like it was a great gift, but l thought it was kinda goofy. Either they were being nice, or sto-bought pecans were expensive back then too.

We only messed with walnuts once, though. We had yellow hands for weeks.

Ramps are popular in the spring in WV. Some have ramp dinner/festivals.

https://wvexplorer.com/recreation/agritourism/ramp-dinners-festivals/