Blackthorn and Sloes
This prickly bush has deep purple fruits in the Autumn, these Sloes are best used for making Sloe Gin as they are really tart and not what you want to be eating. Sloe Gin is really easy to make and even easier to drink, the hardest part is waiting months for it to infuse.
Click here for my Sloe Gin recipe
Elder
The elder is a vigorous shrub cum tree, sprouting up anywhere and growing incredibly quickly through the year. In spring it’s laden with delicate white flowers that make an excellent sparkling drink, Elderflower Champagne. By the time the Autumn rolls around those flowers have transformed into deep black berries which can be made into the best country wine ever.
Elderflower Champagne Recipe
Elderflower champagne is a delicious light and fizzy summer drink, it’s also explosive as the yeasts keep working in the bottles, and I mean seriously explosive, only use champagne bottles or better still put it in plastic 2 litre fizzy drink bottles. Normal wine bottles are no good, it will explode and coat wherever you store it in broken glass and sticky juice. So with that in mind here is the recipe if you dare…
Click here for the Elderflower Champagne recipe
Elderberry Wine
There’s a whole world of ‘country’ wines that seem to include any ingredient culled from a flower bed or veg patch, the goal seeming to be to prove that you can make wine out of absolutely anything. The results are decidedly mixed and very few of them repay the effort you go to by being even remotely pleasant to drink, but elderberry wine is the great exception and produces remarkable results. Assuming you can wait the months it takes to ferment and then mature of course
Click here to read my easy to make Elderberry Wine recipe
Wild Rose and Rosehips
These look incredible on a frosty morning, vivid splashes of red that provide sustenance for the likes of Thrushes, Blackbirds, Redwing, Feildfare and Waxwings throughout the winter. The best use of them is in making jam or jelly, I’ll hold my hands up and confess I’ve never made it, but here is a good recipe on BBC Good Food.
Hazel
Hazelnuts are delicious, unfortunately squirrels also know this. If you grow them in the garden I’d recommend standing nearby with a gun as soon as the nuts ripen, or grow them under nets if you’re serious. You will find them in the hedgerows if you’re lucky but be prepared to fight it out with the wildlife.
Bramble and Blackberries
Brambles, the gardeners nightmare, springing up everywhere and growing like wildfire. Yet in the wild they provide cover for wildlife, badgers especially seem to like a burrow deep in a thicket of this thorny barrier. For the forager they produce an abundance of blackberries in the Autumn that can be scoffed straight from the bush or made into really nice jam.
The quality of the berries varies from year to year, this year they’re hard and small, in others squishy and juicy, just depends on the weather. I avoid picking them by roadsides by the way, all that exhaust fumes can’t be good, but then the ones on the edge of arable fields have probably been doused with clouds of pesticides. Just make sure you wash them.
Cover pic: Iain Hazlewood – Other images: Adobe Stock
