By Taylor Smith 
taysmith@lc.edu 

Summer is a season often associated with growth and transition. You leave your normal day-to-day life at the end of spring and when you return at the beginning of fall you find that you have become a completely different person. Over the summer, despite being incredibly pale, I spent a lot of time outside. Training my cat to walk on a leash, going to the library down the street from my house every day, spending lots of time at the park, and of course seeing what edible things I can find.  

These past few months have been an excellent way for me to expand my skills when it comes to foraging, and while I found a lot of excellent stuff while foraging there are a couple of items that really stood out to me.  

Mulberries were my first foraging find during the summer. These fruit-bearing trees are native to the Midwest and produce lots of compound fruits that have a similar appearance to blackberries. These fruits have a flavor profile like a fig combined with a blackberry. I don’t care much for figs, so it’s understandable that I didn’t care much for mulberries either. However, my niece adored them. I found that the park up the street from my sister’s house was lined with trees filled with these early summer fruits. So, with a plastic bag in hand, I tasked my niece with picking them. Although, with how much she loved them, my bag ended up fuller than hers.  

We didn’t do anything special with the mulberries, she loved eating them just as they were and was even snacking on them as we headed back. However, the time for this fruit was short lived, and even though I don’t like the taste of them much I am looking forward to picking them again next year in May and June.  

Purple leaf plums are another item that I foraged a lot of during the summer. Up the street from my house, there is a small park with winding paths that are great for walking around. I had found these fruits completely by accident when I stopped to sit on a bench in a shady spot and noticed a lot of small purple fruits on the ground. At first, I thought somebody’s child spilled their snack, but then I noticed the fruits were growing on the trees. I picked one and using a plant identifying app I took a couple of pictures and found that I was looking at the fruits of the purple leaf plum tree.  

These trees are not native to Illinois, and I could not find anything about them being invasive either. However, in certain areas of the country they can pose a problem. I walked to each tree in the area and gathered some plums from each one, filling my bag with these fruits. Every resource told me that they were perfectly safe to eat, and I went home after noticing the fur around a squirrel’s mouth was bright purple from eating one of the fruits. When I got home, I carefully cut a piece off the pit and ate it. The taste had an astringent quality to it, much like a cranberry, and the pit was determined to hold onto the fruit. So, I decided to boil them with lots of sugar until the pits finally let go of the flesh of the fruits. I then continued to boil it until it was well reduced and put the resulting candy like jam in a container.  

Foraging is a fantastic way to develop knowledge about the world around you. It allows you to find out different things, explore different areas, and take notice of things you may have never noticed before. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime, and the same can be said for foraging as well.