Foraging

When I left Wales, I was especially sad to leave the easy access to wonderful, free blackberries. Whenever I went hiking, my pace would be significantly slower than usual because I couldn't help but stop every few feet to pick some of the blackberries that quite literally lined the path. To the locals, the berries are just commonplace and viewed almost as weeds, albeit delicious ones. Compared to buying overpriced and not especially good grocery store blackberries in Boston, simply going to the blackberry bush next to the front door and picking some for my breakfast felt quite luxurious.

Turns out, I need not have worried. Sweden has berries, too! Not blackberries, but at the moment, blueberries and lingonberries are in season, in addition to apples and mushrooms and, no doubt, other delicious things I don't know about yet. Here, there's Allemansrätten, which allows anyone to pick flowers, mushrooms, and berries on just about any land (with some caveats - which can be perused here - but not ones that are particularly limiting).

Today I got to take advantage of that, on a supposed mushroom picking outing in Uppsala. There weren't a whole lot of edible mushrooms - only two left the forest with us - but nobody particularly cared because as soon as we started walking, we realized that blueberries and lingonberries were everywhere. I spent the next few hours wandering around the forest filling the container that had been intended for mushrooms with berries.

As I write this, apple-lingon-blueberry jam is bubbling away on the stove with the berries from earlier and apples picked from a tree nearby. Is it too much to ask for this free wild berry thing to come to the U.S.?

I leave you with some pictures from today, though I didn't actually take pictures in the forest because I was too busy staring at the ground and shoveling berries into my mouth.

I have an almost identical picture from somewhere in the White Mountains. A nice reminder, since fall hikes around New England are one of the rings I miss most about the U.S.

An old mill.

I took a tree selfie. Undignified and unflattering, yet here I am posting it on the Internet.

My foraging companions (taking pictures of me as I took pictures of them).

A wonderful picnic spot at the top of a hill somewhere in Uppsala.