About Urban Forage
Urban Forage is the first winery to be founded in the city of Minneapolis and St Paul since the end of Prohibition. Using crowdsourced fruit, flowers and honey as well as locally sourced fresh juice, we produce top quality fruit wines, hard cider and honey mead. By the beginning of 2017, we’ll add a taproom for your enjoyment.
Gleaning fruit from a decentralized city orchard will require significant community engagement and partnerships. We welcome making these connections. They make our company unique and our mission worth doing. They deepen our roots in the community. We think that’s really important.
About the project
Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. By quantifying this resource on an interactive map, we hope to facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods. Not just a free lunch! Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.
When I was a kid growing up in Alabama, my parents would find wild blackberry patches and force the entire family out to pick them. We’d have to wear long sleeves and long jeans due to the stickers. We’d start early in the morning but soon enough we’d be out in 95 degree sweltering heat complete with the dog days of summer humidity. All for a bucket of wild blackberries.
Then dad would make them into the best cobbler ever.
When I tell people about this, they feel that their parents making box cake mixes really did not invest in the romance of food. However, as the kid who survived the trauma, it’s much more fun in retrospect than it was at the time.
Also, the domestic blackberries totally do not taste as good.
I have eaten the greens boiled and sauteed. They are quite good with a good olive oil, and a touch of salt. Now is the best time to pick them, because spring greens are less bitter.
Treat them like spinach: whatever steaming, sauteing, roasting you would do for spinach works for dandelion greens as well. Baby dandelion greens are great raw in salad as well, but as they age they’re better cooked in some way.
My old job was on a farm in Cumbria, with literally miles of bramble hedges on their land. The ones on the riverbank were the fattest, most beautiful blackberries I’ve ever tasted. They made glorious blackberry wine that tasted like a Portuguese rose. About halfway through the second week in October, I had to stop eating them, as I’d had so many, the fruit acids had started to eat holes in my tongue and cheeks. The job was frequently hell, but god I miss that beautiful field by the river.
ETA: blackberry story #2: when we were kids, we went out picking blackberries by the river Wear in Durham, which has very steep banks (drunk students fall in & drown several times a year). We found a little old lady completely upside down in a bramble bush about twenty feet down the bank who’d leant out a little too far to get that One Perfect Blackberry and gone flying. We had to make a human chain to pull her out. She’d been there all morning.
Now that is a story to put in a book!!! Love the lady who fell into the brambles seeking that one perfect blackberry! I hope she found it. There is little better in the world.
