Wild Food Girl

Foraging the wild for plants and stuff to eat.

  • Home
  • About
    • Privacy Policy
  • Notebook
  • Contact
  • Calendar
  • Links

Fruiting Forward

September 16, 2014 By Erica M. Davis 1 Comment

Frosted wild plums on a cold Denver morning.

We went for wild plums in the cold, misty morning, gathering them with fingers freezing and lethargic, my feet squishing in icy, wet boots. It was worth enduring the thorny thicket, the musky scent of catnip tall around us, to come home with 20 lbs or so of plums, without making a dent in the patch.

The wild plum season wasn’t good last year, but this year the plums are going off. Elevation estimate 6,000 feet, North Denver/Front Range adjacent. I have a good friend to lead me to such bounty.

Speaking of which, have you tried her Old Farmhouse Plum Ketchup? Click on through for that recipe, and lots of good info on “ditch plums,” as she likes to call them.

In the midst of the thorny plum thicket there were apple trees too, many different varieties so loaded with perfect, plump apples that the branches near touched the ground, the fruits of a long-forgotten orchard overrun by the urban jungle. There were plenty on the ground ready for eating, no need to bother the tree just yet, my friend insisted.

There are plenty on the ground ready for eating, no need to bother the tree just yet, my friend insists.

And then … can you say pears? Consider yourself lucky to find a tree dropping its fruit. There’s no need to let the pears rot on the ground either. Even the ones with bruises and holes can be quickly cleaned with a knife and dropped into a simple, equal parts sugar-and-water syrup, then refrigerated or counter-fermented, she taught me. We ate days-old zingy pears with a spoon, and poured slightly fermented pear liquid into sparkling seltzer and drank our pear sodas like queens.

How many pounds of pears can you collect in 10 minutes? A lot.

Later, back at home, I made a baked fruit crumble with mixed plums—not just the wild ones, but also some cultivated, powder-blue Italian plums her friend John invited us to harvest. “Pick the hell out of them,” he said, so we climbed deep into the weedy thicket to get at the difficult-to-reach plums, leaving the easily gathered ones to other hands. They hung plump and perfect under the dark green foliage, plentiful as grapes, their otherworldly color making me feel like I was foraging in a cartoon world of endless wonder.

Processing Italian plums.

 

The mixed fruit crumble used both types of plums, along with spoonfuls of zingy pears. I whizzed up a quick topping in the food processor, cutting butter with flour, brown sugar, and oats.

(My grandma’s apple crisp recipe, upon which all of my crisps and crumbles are based, says to bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. We tried this in the toaster oven, however, and ended up having to add 20 minutes or so, bump the heat to 400, and broil at the end to brown it. Maybe the actual oven would be easier next time, heh.)

In addition to the crumble and my own giant batch of zingy pears, I have a semi-spicy, Japanese-chile-infused plum sauce in the works, apple slices drying, and a daily diet of super-ripe tiny plums bursting with sweet wonder juice. A heaven of fruit and flavors, gleaned from once lovingly tended, now wild spaces.

Much of the inspiration and information underlying this piece comes from my good friend, the talented forager and cook Wendy Petty, blogger at Zester Daily, and Hunger & Thirst, where she is known as “Butter” or my moniker “B” for short. She is based on the outskirts of metro Denver and is an excellent resource for Denver and Boulder-area foraging enthusiasts in Colorado.

This piece was helpful to me in learning the differences between crisps, crumbles, cobblers, and buckles: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/crumble-cobbler_n_3455487.html

Gregg Davis took the bottom photo of me processing the Italian plums. They were more of a striking powder-blue on the tree, but alas, my iPhone shots did not come out.

Filed Under: edible, useful info Tagged With: apples, Colorado, Denver, foraging, fruit, introduced, non-native, pears, plums, Rocky Mountains, urban foraging, wild plums

Comments

  1. randomdaisy says

    January 19, 2015 at 1:40 pm

    oh man, i am so jealous!! to find a plum thicket or abandoned orchard like that would be a dream come true. i hope the rest of your harvest was just as good as you described– and as the pictures look, too!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Facebook Fun!

Posts

  • Samuel Thayer’s new book ‘Incredible Wild Edibles’
  • Three pennycress mustard recipes
  • Forgotten rhubarb of the old west
  • Narrow dock in ‘whiney’ mushroom sauce
  • Eating chicory greens
  • Elm samaras are edible, gourmet
  • Hank Shaw’s Latest: A Cookbook for Deer, Elk, Antelope, Moose & More
  • Everything You Need to Know about Colorado Acorns
  • Land Caviar from Kochia Seeds
  • Fruity Sipping Vinegars from Repurposed Berry Mash
  • Wild Tarragon in the Weeds
  • Shasta Daisy & Dandelion Greens with Yucca Antipasto
  • A Tale of Four Daisies
  • Katrina Blair’s Wild Wisdom of Weeds
  • You’re My Candytuft
  • A Summer for Wintercress
  • A Patterns Method for Wild Food: Thomas Elpel’s Foraging the Mountain West
  • Fun with Wild Waterleaf
  • Don’t Forget the Tumble Mustard
  • Snowboarding, Nettles, & Jerusalem Artichoke Bouyah
  • Northeast Seaweed Farming & Foraging: A Chat with Charles Yarish
  • Sprouting Flour with Quinoa’s Wild Kin
  • Seaweeding the Eastern Shoreline
  • A Fall for Thick, Rosy Hips
  • Fruiting Forward
  • Dina Falconi’s Foraging & Feasting
  • Dad’s Creamy Wild Mushroom Soup
  • Lambs’ Quarters Pesto with Sunflower Seeds
  • Colorado High Country Blueberries are a Go
  • Eat Your Ornamentals: Backyard Foraging with Ellen Zachos
  • Hawks Wings Mushrooms – Free Download
  • Leaves of Three, Strawberry!
  • Wild Greens & Potato Pie with Kochia
  • Wilted Wild Greens with Lemon & Chive Flower
  • Tumbleweed Salad
  • Orache is a Wild Favorite
  • Wild Edible Picnic
  • Spring Cleaning with Fruit Leather
  • Florida Herbal Conference Starts February 28
  • Low Cost Meal—Beans & Dried Dock
  • Practical Herbs by Henriette Kress
  • Wild Edible Notebook—October release!
  • Stuffballs on the Menu
  • Old Places, New Head Spaces
  • Whistling Suillus
  • Antelope Liver Pâtés
  • Last Night’s Wild Dinner
  • Cold-hearted Cattail Salads
  • Creamy Green Yogurt Sauce with Spruce Tips & Dill
  • More Whitetop Kitchen Experiments

Recipes

Three pennycress mustard recipes

Shasta Daisy & Dandelion Greens with Yucca Antipasto

Dad’s Creamy Wild Mushroom Soup

Lambs’ Quarters Pesto with Sunflower Seeds

Antelope Liver Pâtés

Archives

Comments

  • Will K. on A Summer for Wintercress
  • Erica M. Davis on Lactarius deliciosus is fine with me
  • Sky on Albatrellus Confluens Conference
  • The Road Trip – #6 Condoblin to – Paol Soren on Orache is a Wild Favorite
  • SS on Lactarius deliciosus is fine with me

Email-list-advert

Free Issues, Samples, & Periodic Updates

If you would like a free issue of the Wild Edible Notebook in PDF form, join the email list! One of these days I'll write with news, updates, or freebies as they become available, and you can unsubscribe any time. Joining the email list takes 2 seconds. Fill your info into the fields below and click "Subscribe."

Copyright © 2019 · Wild Food Girl · Thanks for Reading!