50+ Edible Wild Fruits and Berries | Practical Self Reliance

Wild foraged fruit is one of the tastiest ways to fill your basket

When people think about “foraging,” most imagine bitter wild weeds, but there’s much more to harvest than lawn salad. Wild fruits and berries are some of the tastiest choices, and most are easy to identify with no look-alikes.

Just about everything that looks like a raspberry or blackberry, for example, is delicious…and there are hundreds of different species to fill your basket.

Read More: 50+ Edible Wild Fruits and Berries (A Forager’s Guide)

And, if you’re worried about toxic species, you can read my guide to poisonous berries as well, which will help you avoid some of the most common toxic fruits.

Wild Edible Fruit (Left to right, from top left: Saskatoons, rowanberry, bunchberry, barberry, crabapples, highbush cranberry, wild strawberries, autumn olive and nannyberry.

If you’re looking for specific foraging guides, I’ve got you covered there. Here are some tasty options:

• Aronia (ChokeBERRY)

• Autumn Olive

• Barberry

• Black Cherry

• Bunchberries

• Chokecherry (ChokeCHERRY)

• Gooseberries

• Hawthorn

• Highbush Cranberry

• Mulberries

• Nannyberry

• Partridgeberry

• Pin Cherries

• Red Blackberries

• Saskatoons

• Solomon’s Plume

• Wild Strawberries

Edible wild nuts are a great option as well, and most are calorie-rich and sweet. Butternuts and beechnuts are some of the tastiest.

Wild hazelnuts are harvested earlier than most, and they’re best picked in Mid-August, then left to dry indoors for a month or so before cracking.

Wild Hazelnuts

And, of course, if you’re feeling ambitious, there are plenty of wild edible roots and tubers, as well as wild edible seeds and grains.

Things You Might Need This Week

• 15+ Ways to Use Borage ~ Borage is a fun annual flower, and the beautiful edible blossoms make their way into salads all summer long…but it has so many more uses too!

• Plantain Salve ~ Plantain is nature’s band-aid, and when you make it into a versatile salve, it’s perfect for all manner of cuts and scrapes year round (even when there’s no fresh plantain around).

• How to Process Clay into Soil for Pottery ~ This is a fun project for the whole family, and you’re never too old to play in the mud =)

Seasonal Preserving

Recipes to keep your larder full all year round…in season now:

• Dill Pickle Recipe for Canning

• Peach Jam

• Homemade Blackberry Wine

• Old Fashioned Grape Jam

What are you harvesting, preserving, building, or exploring on your homestead this week? I’d love to hear about it!

Leave me a note in the comments…

(Comments only, please. Emails tend to get lost in my inbox, and as much as I’d love to get back to each and every one, my screen time is very limited…and things fall through the cracks, and emails get buried in my inbox. If you comment here, they’re all in one place, and it’s much easier to get back to every single one.)

Until Next Time,

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance