This post was inspired by the @naturalmedicine wild edibles challenge, and although I was too late in noticing the challenge to get my post done by the deadline, I still wanted to share my own personal fun experience picking wild huckleberries and mushrooms last year for the first time in my life.
Last summer turned out to be an amazing season for wild huckleberries and chanterelle mushrooms in the mountains of southwest Montana that surround the little town of Bozeman, where I was living at the time. Typically we do not get any huckleberries, or so few that it isn’t worth looking for them, and the edible mushrooms are not nearly so abundant; but this year just so happened to be one of those rare seasons in which there was an over abundance of moisture causing the huckleberries to thrive, and creating the ideal conditions for mushroom growth as well.
The huckleberry bushes are always there, but only once in a blue moon are there the conditions that cause the berries themselves to actually grow and ripen, so I had actually been unaware that we even had huckleberries around these parts! Normally one must travel to the northwest corner of the state to find an abundance of this rare and tasty wild fruit, but this year was an amazing exception. It had been a very snowy winter, and extremely wet spring, with above average rain throughout the summer as well, creating the ideal conditions for these wild edibles. Huckleberries are unique in that they only grow naturally in the wild, for no one has yet been successful at getting them to grow in domestic gardens.
A roommate - Nate - took me and some other friends up to a popular local recreation area in late August, and began to show us where the huckleberries could be found. I was blown away, as I had recently gone biking up some of these trails and hadn’t even noticed them. Once you know they are there, and know what to look for, it’s like they suddenly materialize all around you.
It wasn’t long before we were all finding patches of ripe huckleberries to pick, and began to fill up our little sandwich bags with the ripe fruit. There were large patches of mushrooms scattered about as well, and we stumbled upon a few without even looking for them. The top photo shows our little harvest from just an hour of evening pickings!
I went back up the next weekend, and got another bag full, and more mushrooms than I could use, in just a couple hours. So many chanterelles, and they are a such a tasty little gourmet mushroom too!
I was blown away not only be amount of ripe huckleberries, but at the size of some of them - as large as blueberries.
Dakota also thoroughly enjoyed the adventure, and was just happy to be exploring about in the woods...
Nate went huckleberry picking a few more times after that and managed to pick many more than I ever did; and made a number of jars of huckleberry jam, which was absolutely delicious. They are so tasty on there own, and so it is hard to resist the urge to just eat them by the handful as you are picking them, but somehow we still managed to collect sizable amounts. I had some frozen pumpkin leftover from my own homegrown pumpkins from the previous year’s garden, and so I used the majority of my huckleberries to make huckleberry pumpkins bread, which was absolutely delicious. The rest I used to make huckleberry pancakes.
Soon I was also looking for ways to use mushrooms in every meal I could, which were best sautéd. I used them on homemade pizza, piled them high on black bean burgers, and stuffed them in veggie fajitas, sharing them with roommates at every chance I got. I just remember sautéing mushrooms what seemed like almost every evening for several weeks there, in an attempt to use them all, and I had only picked a fraction of one large patch I had found, among many such patches scattered all about. Nate had previously collected two 5 gallon buckets full in just one afternoon, and was trading them with acquaintances for all sorts of things, including beer from a local brewery.
I never realized how much fun it could be harvesting edibles from the wild, and am glad for the opportunity nature gave me last year in order to have that rare experience for that area. Later, as I travelled south when I embarked upon the journey of living the camping lifestyle for the winter, I was even able to harvest a few pine nuts produced by the abundance of pinion pines in the mountains of central Utah in late October, which were also quite tasty.
Besides picking wild green onions from our back yard in South Carolina as a kid, the extent of my picking wild edibles in the past had amounted to a tiny handful of wild strawberries here and there in the mountains of Montana during backpacking trips - nothing really substantial at all...
Here it was my first season doing much in the way of harvesting wild edibles, and I had managed to collect and eat a number of huckleberries, mushrooms and pine nuts - none of which I had ever harvested before! Pretty exciting, and not bad for a beginner, I don’t think :)
what wild abundance!!!!
I've never heard of huckleberrys, aside from Huckleberry Finn - I didn't even know they were a real thing!!!! They look like blueberries, though I read they aren't the same thing!
Totally loved this post. I'm looking for chicken of the woods here in England but with no luck so far. What abundance you have in your area!
I know you missed the challenge, but I'm sure glad you wrote this!
We have chantarelles also coming on in great abundance here in the Northern Thai mountains. Lovely!! I see them stir fried with garlic in my future! 😍
I've never SEEN huckleberry or how it grows so this was new for me.
Appreciating your contribution to the repository of Wild Edibles knowledge - bumer about the missed deadline cos this would likely have been a prize winner.
Hope to see you enter for the SMOKIN' Challenge which starts TOMORROW.
LOVE to see you write and share in our TOBACCO challenge - some seriously good Hive prizes! The How-To is here: https://peakd.com/hive-120078/@naturalmedicine/tobacco-poison-or-medicine-challenge
Hello @jasonliberty, this is @notconvinced on behalf of Natural Medicine.
That was a great haul. I myself have yet to come across chanterelles since I began to dabble in mycology, so I'm a bit envious.
I'm glad you still decided to publish on the topic, even though the challenge has past.
Nice you have chantrelles growing already? I'll have to be on the lookout here now. They are one of my favorite mushrooms.
No, this was last September when they were at their peak, harvested August and September...
I see, they usually start mid summer here in Illinois.