Foods for free. Anything you want to post about wild foods or foraging, hunting and fishing. Please note, this section includes pictures of hunting.
Sorry to say that Selfsufficientish or anyone who posts on here is liable to make a mistake when it comes to identification so we can't be liable for getting it wrong.
I've only ever seen bilberries growing in open moorland - although it must be 40 years since I last went out picking them. They grow on teeny weeny shrubs, really close to the ground, and look more like elderberries (in size not how they grow) than blueberries.
Just make sure they're not a nightshade!!!!
Maggie
Never doubt that you can change history. You already have. Marge Piercy
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. Anais Nin
I know they grow there - the older folks in the village used to be paid for them by the cotton mills they were used for dye.
In fact, until relativly recently the whole economy around here was based on Strawberries, blaeberries and other real small scale growing.... quite a few of the locals are really happy to see what we are doing
Haven't been back up to the park, will go tomorrow me thinks...
Ann Pan
"Some days you're the dog,
some days you're the lamp-post"
It seems a bit early in the year for blaeberries, though - I'm sure I didn't pick any before August the last few years. Mind you, the weather we've been having for several weeks now, they might be earlier this year...
Ina
I'm a size 10, really; I wear a 20 for comfort. (Gina Yashere)
I have picked them on the Wrekin in Shropshire, Stiperstones also Shropshire both picked before our school hols start as one child I care for wouldn't make the hills. Also picked at to local places to me. This week I was sitting by a pool snacking on blueberries.
Oh our school hols start next week ... arrrrrrrrrrrrgh
My mum took us picking bilberries up a hill when I was young, we call them whinberries though.
I remember us kids walking up the hill blowing 'raspberries' & calling them wind-berries!
I shall have to ask her where that hill was and go foraging :)
"It's breaking the circle.
Going to work, to get money, to translate into things, which you use up, which means you go to work again, etc, etc.
The Norm.
What we should be doing is working at the job of life itself."
- Tom Good, The Good Life.
I used to pick bilberries up on the Longmynd in Shropshire but the sheep usually got most of them.
I have a tiny bilberry plant in the garden now but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, except possibly dying slowly in with the cranberries in an old butlter's sink.
What sort of conditions do they like? - acid I guess as the rest of the family do, but wet (boggy) or dry (well drained) , sunny or shady?
It seems to me that moorland and woodland are two quite different environments! And a boggy butler's sink, something else...
