Wild food from the park – December

Aha! Finally, it’s December and we only had to find one more wild food source this month to complete our year-long project. This December’s weather is somewhat different to last year’s. On the 22nd of December, I checked with the Twitter blogger ‘Stirling Weather’ who posts tweets on, well, you work it out. They confirmed that the temperature that day in 2011 was a full 20 degrees Celsius warmer than the same date in 2010. Thos extreme winter temperatures in December 2010 were maintained into January 2011, making our wild food searches somewhat problematic. As I reported though, we did manage to find jelly ear fungus that saved the project foundering before it had barely begun. And so, as we reached December, jelly ear fungi once again proved to be a reliable source of winter wild food. We cooked them with some ordinary white field (supermarket) mushrooms and included them in a pasta dish:



A final use for jelly-ear fungus– with commercial white mushrooms in a pasta dish

As we only had a couple of days of frost in December (it was actually remarkably mild), wild sorrel remained available, as did the wall plant ivy-leaved toadflax which we’ve eaten before and which is edible but uninteresting. We included leaves from both plants in a vegetable soup in late December, to bring our year-long wild food project to a successful if reasonably unspectacular finish:

Wild sorrel and ivy-leaved toadflax in vegetable soup

I’ll shortly post a review and discussion of the whole year’s ‘Wild Food from the Park’ experiences.



Wild food from the park – November

So, with November, we were nearly there for a full year of wild food from the Park. If you’d asked me in January if November was likely to yield much wild food, I suspect that I would not have been hopeful of finding much beyond some meagre greenery and a few jelly ear fungi. But, as you’ll see, a long extended tail of a mild Autumn left us with a relative cornucopia of delights in November... which does make for a more interesting blog!


In a previous attempt to use the wild food in our park, we tried to make some hawthorn jelly sweets using a recipe in Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book. On that occasion, the haws (collected late in the season) were rather sparse and quite dry and the resultant sweets were a bit of a disappointment. This year, we were able to pick them a bit earlier, so the moisture content was higher. But there was, again, quite a poor hawthorn harvest in King’s Park’s. So, we supplemented these with hawthorn berries, or haws, from East Lothian, where the hawthorn bushes were so red this year with big, plump haws that they looked more like cherry trees. On a visit to see family, I collected a couple of kilogrammes of hawthorn berries from the Longniddry-to-Haddington railway walk, which is lined for much of its length with hawthorns and which, in October this year, was distinguished by dense, bright red drifts of haws. This photo is a bit out of focus but it shows the lovely, fat, red hawthorn berries:

 The recipe calls for the boiling of the haws with water, straining the resultant mash, then boiling the resultant liquid with sugar until it thickens. It is then poured into moulds or onto a flat tray to set – a bit like a fruit leather, I guess. The resultant sweets are then rolled/coated in icing sugar to stop them sticking and the final result is not unlike Turkish Delight! And did I mention, surprisingly tasty?

We did a bit of both – here are some hawthorn jellies produced in silicon moulds:

and here’s the process of forming it into a sheet and cutting it up (free tip: kitchen scissors proved more effective than a knife):

Just as with the start of this project in January and February, when we were able to harvest jelly ear (or Jew’s ear) fungus, even in the coldest weather (when everything else in the Park was frozen solid between -10° and -20° C for weeks), as the rest of the wild food harvest began to dwindle in November as winter approached, so we were able to collect many large, freshly-emerged jelly ear fungi from dead elder trees or broken-off branches. We used them with some of the wild chanterelles we collected earlier (not from the Park) in a potato and wild mushroom ‘au gratin’ dish from Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book. Finely-sliced potatoes are layered with wild mushrooms and garlic in a casserole dish, cream poured over the top, parmesan grated on top and the lot is baked in a hot oven:

The jelly ear fungi, although quite tasty, have a tendency to rubbery chewiness when cooked (we normally cut them up very small), but prepared this way, they were quite tender.


One of my favourite discoveries this year has been a large area of wild garlic in a relatively inaccessible corner of the Park, and the riotously-tasty wild garlic pesto we made from some of it in April (here). I’ll definitely be making more (much more) in 2012, now that I know we have such a large local supply of wild garlic. That experience made me keen to explore other possible pesto ingredients from the Park. One of the key ingredients of ‘true’ pesto is pine nuts. Obviously, that’s a difficult wild food ingredient to source locally but I couldn’t help thinking that the few beech nuts (or ‘mast’) that we started to find in the Park from late September were very like pine nuts in look, texture and even to some extent in taste. Now, as I wrote about in the September wild food post, most of the beech mast cases we looked at were empty or contained hollow beechnut cases but a few had little beech nuts and we began to collect them, along with the few hazelnuts we could find that hadn’t been snaffled by the darned grey squirrels. Comments on Twitter by TV gardening broadcaster Toby Buckland and in the Guardian newspaper’s nature diary suggested that 2011 was, at least in the south of Britain, looking like a classic ‘beech mast year’, with a prodigious crop of beech nuts. I had high hopes, therefore, of a great opportunity to make lots of beech nut pesto but, by late November, our local crop proved to be thin pickings, it was obvious that we weren’t going to find any more and we had to make do with a small dish of local beech and hazel nuts supplemented by some shop-bought hazelnuts (boo – the best-laid plans and all that):

Our meagre catch of local hazel and beech nuts

But, with the addition of the more usual oil, parmesan, basil, etc ingredients, we made a more-than-passable pesto:

Beech and hazel nut pesto certainly looks the part...


And it was pretty tasty on cracked-back-pepper oatcakes. Next stop, some pasta.

We managed to gather a few remaining sloes from the Park but, on my East Lothian visit, I also found a blackthorn bush that yielded nearly two pounds of sloes (and that was only a small part of the crop). Then, at the eleventh hour as far as this particular harvesting opportunity is concerned, I discovered a little crab apple tree out in the middle of the Park’s golf course. All but three of its crab apples had fallen and been removed (actually only the day before!) when the greenkeepers sucked up all the leaves along the edge of the fairway with their leaf and (crab apple) sucking machine. But I picked those remaining three (and watch out next year!), and with some of the few apples our garden’s apple trees managed to produce, we used the sloes to make a sloe and apple cheese using another recipe from Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book:

Amazing sticky red sloe and apple cheese goo!

...transformed into preserved ‘product’ and awaiting consumption on a cheese board!

Happy New Year!

Thank you continuing to read my blog or, if you've only just arrived, then welcome! Whatever your visiting status, today seems as good a day as, or even a better one than any other, to wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year. In comparison to last New Year, this one is remarkably mild, concluding one of the mildest and wettest years in the UK since records began (which for very reliable observations was the year 1910, I think).

The past Autumn was extremely mild. Here in Stirling, we've only had two or three mornings with frost and December temperatures reached double figures Celsius on a few occasions. There have been numerous media and social media comments about ongoing flowering from this year or the early emergence of next Spring's flowers. We have just spent Christmas with family in West Wales where we saw cow parsley in the hedgerows either still flowering or flowering early. Red campion was also extensively still in flower, as this post's only photo shows.

And it isn't just the flowers - the birds and bees are doing what they ought not to be too. I saw a Twitter comment this morning about queen bumblebees in southern Britain being active today (unfortunate, as they won't survive any sudden temperature drop such as is forecast for the next couple of days). When I was walking the dog in the park this morning, the woods were alive with wood pigeons giving their courting calls and I saw collared doves displaying in flight yesterday.

We're all doomed, I tell you, doomed!

Wild food from the park – October

We were really into the swing of things by October in our ‘Wild Food from the Park’ mission, finding interesting ways of using what wild food was still around (well, interesting to us at any rate). We managed to gather a few late brambles, just as the rose hips and sloes began to appear and, with a cup of the remaining honeysuckle blossom, boiled that lot up, strained it, added sugar, boiled it again until the setting point was reached, and made a few jars of a very dark red ‘Autumn’s end’ jelly. Truth be told, I slightly overdid it, and boiled it a bit long, so let’s call it a very firm jelly. It’s easily meltable though, so it won’t be wasted, as a glaze, a hot cordial, a syrup for ice cream, etc.

Autumn’s end jelly ingredients – brambles, rose hips, sloes and honeysuckle

And I almost forgot that we also produced a batch of rowan jelly, a real staple of Autumn wild harvesting, and a great compliment to venison (and to loads of things really – we’ve also eaten it with roasted vegetables and with beef curry before). We tend to use it quite sparingly and only just finished the last jar of rowan jelly from 2007 (which was the last time we had made it). The huge bunches of bright red rowan berries are one of the first and most visible signs of approaching Autumn and this year, in our local park, King’s Park, which is rich with rowan trees, most of the rowan trees had HUGE crops of berries. 

King’s Park rowan berries

A large bowlful of rowan berries, cleaned of stalks, leaves and with the occasional beautiful shield bug liberated out of the kitchen window,

....and ready for cooking up:

The final product – 2011 King’s Park rowan jelly – but all those berries to make only five wee jars once the boiled pulp is strained then boiled with sugar!

October also provided us with some local wild mushrooms, although not from the King’s Park (where we could have harvested, but didn’t, some more jelly ear fungus). A nearby wood where we have been collecting chanterelles for 20 years is slowly being felled – it is a commercial conifer plantation – and the felled edge is now only about 25 metres away from our lovely productive chanterelle site. We managed to pick half a kilo of chanterelles for what I fear may be the last time, as I think this wood will be gone one a few months time (if it hasn’t already gone ). In that same wood, we also found some fine hedgehog mushrooms – these all found their way into various pasta dishes in October.

Wild food from the park – September

Well, we reached September in our little local wild food project with 8 months of interesting discoveries, experiments and food and drink already behind us and documented on this blog. And, with September being more or less the peak of the natural produce ‘harvest’, we had a reasonable expectation of more good wild food opportunities.

Our opportunity to make the most of these was a bit truncated, however, as we spent two weeks away in our campervan in the first two weeks of the month. While we were away, unfortunately, the crop of blackberries on the bramble bushes peaked (and were picked – by others) and had largely vanished by the time we came home in mid-September. We managed to find a small number of ripe blackberries that hadn’t begun to rot. Plus, a hopeful sight, there were also quite a few green, unripe blackberries that, with a relatively dry, mid spell of weather might ripen (and they did indeed, by the end of October). More later on how we used the blackberries.


Honeysuckle (Latin name: Lonicera periclymum) is a widespread and common plant species of woodlands, growing as an entwining climber up into the trees. Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’ describes honeysuckle as having: “one of the sweetest and best-loved scents of all British wild flowers.” He reports that children (and, I can confirm, some adults!) still pick the flowers to suck nectar from the base (although I doubt if Stirling children do this these days, at least not as far as I have spotted). Tess Darwin’s book: ‘The Scots Herbal. The plant lore of Scotland’ says that, as well as having been used for a number of medicinal purposes, honeysuckle flowers can also be made into tea and wine. Honeysuckle is widespread in the wooded areas of our park and we collected blossoms for yet another purpose:

We were really keen, knowing that the flowers are edible, to use them in some way that would make the most of that wonderful fragrance. The other ‘fragrant’ product that we make regularly is elderflower cordial, so we decided we’d have a go at making honeysuckle cordial. A quick search on t’Internet confirmed that people have done this successfully before so we just substituted honeysuckle blossoms for the elderflowers in our usual elderflower cordial recipe and made the cordial by our usual method. Honeysuckle blossoms in the park occur as either pink or yellow and we harvested blossoms of both colours:

The resulting cordial is the most fetching light pink colour and may be the most wonderful drink we have ever produced. It is delicate tasting and fragrant and we will make much more next year! It gets a gold star from me and has been my personal high point in this year-long wild food experience so far:




The pink delight that is honeysuckle cordial



From the Park, we managed to gather together enough brambles, some of the wild plums I wrote about in August, a very few wild greengages that had been growing unnoticed next to the plums, and a few elderberries, all cooked together and strained, the juice then being made into a very dark and well-setting hedgerow jelly:




Some remnant blackberries, with wild plums and greengages.
With elderberries, these became a hedgerow jelly.



Hedgerow jelly in preparation

 We harvested a few more hazelnuts that had escaped the attentions of the local grey squirrels, but many of the nuts proved to be hollow:

We also began to find, right at the end of September, that some of the beech trees were producing beech mast (the hard green cases that hold the beech tree’s seeds in the form of beech nuts). Most beech mast cases were empty or contained hollow beechnut cases but a few had little beech nuts, covered in a fine brick-red fuzz (which is quite bitter, in my experience, and should probably be scraped off, if you can be bothered). We began to collect these in dribs and drabs as a little wild food plan had begun to germinate which would deliver much later in the Autumn.


We had other wild food opportunities in September as a result of our holiday travels. On the way north, we stopped at Coylumbridge on the edge of the Rothiemurchus Forest near Aviemore and took a walk up the bottom two miles of the Lairig Ghru footpath (it cuts through the Lairig Ghru pass, connecting Aviemore with Braemar or, if you take a wrong turning, Blair Atholl!), to stretch our legs, and tire out the dog. The Aviemore end of the path lies within the great Scots Pine forest of Rothiemurchus and there we picked a couple of pounds of chanterelles, at a site we had visited and picked them at maybe five years ago. We ate those as part of several breakfasts during the following week of our holiday:

Rothiemurchus chanterelles plus a birch bolete

Then, the final day of our fortnight’s campervan holiday was spent in the glorious Culbin Forest and Sands on the north-east coast of Scotland, the Moray coast, near Findhorn. Long-established Scots Pine forests provide a habitat for many species of fungi – mushrooms and toadstools, including a number of edible (and much sought after) species. In Culbin, we picked some chanterelles, some (very) large orange birch boletes and, a brave first for us, a dark brown hedgehog mushroom we’d never seen before and which is restricted to northern Scots Pine forests. We ate these in a big mushroom risotto once we were back at home.

A Merry Christmas to all our readers!

I hope you and yours stay well and have a lovely day today. I've been busy writing and will be posting some more scribblings after the next couple of days of eating, drinking and making merry!

I'm just off to check if the sea is in a swimmable state for a Christmas Day dip! Whatver you are doing today, enjoy!

Signs I Like #28

Well, looky-here! Edinburgh Zoo took delivery this week of a pair of Giant Pandas from the People's Republic of China (it can't have escaped your notice on the news, if you live in the UK. While I will post something more detailed about this later, I wanted to share this sign which I found today outside the zoo. You can sense a quiet pride in their acquisition, in stark contrast to the extreme marketing in the zoo shop! Of which, more later...