http://www.npr.org/2013/06/22/...

NPR featured a story this morning about people who graze their back yards for wild plants now gourmet salad bars!

Did you have the little wild strawberries where you grew up?

My kind of article, G! Thanks for the link. I had several lunches of henbit, dandelion, and chickweed earlier in the spring. Added a bit of early lettuce to cut the bitter taste of the 'weeds'. But I don't graze during summer, too many people around me spray, spray, spray and I see the lawn care truck often around here - the same company that makes products that kill good insects and birds and back yard kitties. So my grazing days are numbered. I keep my tomatoes and peppers up near my patio or on it and wash everything very carefully before eating. But I have to always be very careful.

Anyway - we did have the tiny strawberries in the mountains and I have them here, but again, I have to be very careful about eating them.

Living off the land...literally:) I enjoyed the article and it took me back to my childhood when we ate rabbit grass and gooseberries, and who knows what else!

During blackberry season, we would have to get up very early in the morning, put on long pants and shirts, get sprayed on our pants cuffs with Off bug spray and gather all the buckets in the car. Then Mom and Dad would drive out to a couple of places where they knew the wild blackberries were, usually where an old farmhouse once was. What an adventure! To get to the blackberries we had to wade through tall weeds, cross ditches and fight the bramble, but they were so worth it

I am really concerned that so much of our food is sprayed. I think the idea is that a little won't hurt you. But if you live to be 70 plus that cumulative amount does compromise your health! I wish this stuff had to be tested on 80 year olds before it is given ok for use on our food.

Blue 23 rose. Gooseberries! I haven't had them since I was a kid! They grew in our woods back in N. Michigan but they don't grow here in Alabama.

Berry picking. I remember once on one of those excursions, we somehow forgot my younger brother and left him in the berry patch over night. He was terrified and never let us forget it --even 60 years later.

Oh my goodness, Hazelnut! I bet he was scared, poor little guy.

I had a crop of black berries in a disturbed area here and I was really looking forward to eating them. But they disappeared before I could get them--they don't last long and a lot of critters have their eye on them!

They aren't quite ripe here, soon though. I love raspberries too, but haven't had them in years. They both grew wild in the mountains where I grew up. Might have to go back home soon.

We had black caps --wild black raspberries in our woods (N. Michigan). So good, but as I remember not something you could put in your pocket at eat later! Juicy and stains on hands, teeth, and clothes.

http://www.google.com/imgres?i...

Exactly, we had them too. Not so much the red ones, I think the reds came along later or elsewhere.

Not for overall pockets for sure, but little tin pails were always handy.

we didn't have tin pails. All you got was what you could stuff in your mouth. same with the little strawberries. Some things --like wintergreen and June berries (amelanchier) and mushroom, or crab apples you could carry by tying your shirt tail up like a handercheif.

Lard came in tin pails. Sometimes I managed to grab one of them.

Oh. smarter than me. I think there were some galvanized buckets for milking the cows. But lard came from hogs--not tin buckets where I came from (!).

Not smarter, but we quit having hogs after Dad came back from the war. Sometimes he and his uncles killed their hogs, but seems like we most always purchased our lard. I do remember having enough for making soap though, and that was from Uncle Dock's hogs. Funny what we remember when we think about it.

Funny how we remember irrelevant things and can't remember important things such as, 'Who Wrote Gone with the Wind" -- my puzzler for the day.

Thank goodness for Google!

I do wish you had not said that.
Mitchell?

But I can't remember a first name.

http://www.nytimes.com/learnin...

Margaret Mitchell. See you are smarter than you thought.

Half right.