Lucky you! I’ve never seen more than two or three wild strawberries at a time.
My daughter lived in an area of Germany where wild strawberries are so common that in addition to eating them regularly, she even at one point made 3 jars of jam with them. Who makes JAM with wild strawberries? Imagine living someplace where that’s a reasonable thing to do!
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Wow. I’m red with envy!
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We used to make jam with wild strawberries when I was a kid (northern WI). When I had a craving, I could head out to the field an pick a large drinking glass full of them in a relatively short time.
There are some large “tame” strawberries that remind me of wild ones – never found them myself, but a friend used to get them at a farmer’s market.
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That’s what my mother says too…you know, the side of the family we’re related on?! She was born and raised in northern WI and won’t eat store-bought strawberries because what she had back then was memorable enough to make modern strawberries not worth eating.
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Last time that I was up there during strawberry season they didn’t seem very plentiful. We had horses back then, so I’m assuming that having the horses keeping the grass relatively short either helped the berries grow or just made it easier to find them.
Maybe so, but I think it was a load of horseshit about all the strawberry plants back then.
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They’re very common in fields up here (Southern Quebec and Ontario), fruiting in June before the grasses have grown enough to really block their light. Wild berries in general do well up here.
I worked in a technology park across the river on the outskirts of Hull, Quebec for quite a while: it was a dead-end road paralleling Highway 5, with a cluster of about 3 buildings at the start of the street and then fallow fields for about a kilometer (the City of Hull never was able to sell those lots) until you came to a single building at the end of the street, which was Digital Equipment Canada’s main service centre where I worked. I normally commuted by bus to the foot of the street and walked the rest of the way. During strawberry season, if I wasn’t pressed for time, I’d keep an eye on the thinner patches of grass along the side of the road during the walk and gather a small snack on the way - not terribly substantial, but very nice.
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I expect you’re correct. Wild strawberries are very low-lying plants, and they tend to thrive where the grass isn’t quite so high or dense.
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I really miss all the wild berries, morel mushrooms, and apple varieties… I now have mangos, bananas, guava, lemons, pomegranates, and oranges in my backyard (which is cool), but I would gladly trade them…
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Yes! wild June berries, huckleberries, raspberries, blackberries, black raspberries and choke cherries too… I just throw the huckleberries in with the blueberries, since they grow in the same places.
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I have two main knives I rely on - a serrated paring knife for detail work (like coring berries), and a 5" ulu that my aunt got me waaaaay back when she was still living in Alaska - so I’ve had it for over 15 years. It sharpens like a dream! The length of the blade is smooth and the end points are still piercing-quality. I can poke through a pepper without squishing it under the force.
I don’t know if the quality is what it used to be, but if they’re still as good, I can give full recommendation on one of these!
I hear you. The only thing I miss in Ottawa that we had in the 'burbs of Montreal are the plum trees that everyone seemed to have in their backyards and the wild grapes that tended to grow around fences. On the other hand, blueberries grow not too far from here, but the only place they seemed to grow in Southern Quebec was on the top of Mount Orford (the highest peak in the region).
I’ve often wondered if anyone has ever considered a hybridisation programme for the wild grapes - they are a particularly hardy variety that thrive in a harsher climate with poorly drained clay soils (and they taste very nice, albeit they’re very small).
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I miss blackberries and elderberries.
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We have a ton of both - what do you do with the elderberries though? We made a couple of jars of jam today, but there’s another tree in our garden that should be ready to harvest this week. I have about 8kg of blackberries in the freezer and a cupboard full of assorted jams, so I was thinking of making something else with the rest of the elderberries.
When we lived in the Canary islands, I’d pick these cactus all the time. We’d eat the fruit raw or in jam, then the main plant was good as a vegetable. We also found guava and a few other fruit that @crenquis mentioned.
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You can also make fruit vinegar - which you use as a base for glazes and dressings. That really is a “fruit vinegar”. If you’re more adventurous, you can try a shrub syrup which is a condensed vinegar, fruit, and sugar syrup - I love tangy, so these are right up my alley!
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Thanks for the advice! We’ve actually been having fun with stone fruit this year too - apparently fruit growers are suffering from the ban on exports to Russia, so that may be why it’s really cheap here. Peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums are all under 1 Euro for a kilo, so we go through quite a lot at the moment.
My pleasure! I found out about shrubs randomly, and now use them as a way to extend the life of fresh cranberries. You can make some awesome drinks with a cranberry shrub.
I miss elderberries a lot because my family gave up ranch property in central CA about ten years ago. Elderberries and blackberries both grew wild there. I can still get blackberries, but it’s harder to get elderberries.
Up to your armpits in Elderberries? My French blood is now suppressing a taunt…
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Blackberries can be a bit rare up here. We had a country place on Lake Memphremagog near Magog, Quebec when I was a kid (Newport, Vermont is at the Southern end of the lake, to give you an idea of the location), and one of the neighbours had a blackberry bramble as an ornamental shrub. It seemed to grow well enough, but it was the only one around for miles. I don’t know why that should be: raspberries and loganberries grew like weeds.
I had to look up elderberries, though. I gather they grow all through my stamping grounds, but, looking at the pictures, I suspect it was something we avoided because the raw fruit is toxic. In my younger, berry-picking days, more than half the berries we were gathering never made it to the kitchen. 
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