Friday, July 15, 2011

Feral Food Foraging

Not all of the food I forage is wild or weedy. Occasionally I come across domesticated plants gone feral. Case in point is this black currant bush. I found it last summer, while harvesting red clover in a stretch of green space, close to a parking lot for a medical building, a short bike ride from my home.

What black currant bush, you ask? Yeah I know, it's kinda hard to see anything other than a wall of green here, but if you look closely....
...a little closer.....

There! Right there! A black currant bush! (Click to see the currants. They're there. Really.)

And that, my friends, is the key to foraging and wildcrafting: always look closely and try to differentiate the wall of green to see the individual plants. You'd be surprised at what you might find. Sometimes you find 2lbs of black currants!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i think a blackcurrant bush has sprung up in my garden, it has some very small berries on it, how can i be sure it is a blackcurrant, dont want to poison anyone :)

Anonymous said...

i think a blackcurrant bush has sprung up in my garden, it has some very small berries on it, how can i be sure it is a blackcurrant, dont want to poison anyone :)

Amber said...


There are some good pics of black currant on this site. Luck!

http://ontariotrees.com/main/species.php?id=41