Foraging for Wild Strawberries 🍓

One of my earliest foraging memories is crouching in my childhood backyard. I nudged the leaves of a low-growing plant aside with a tiny, slightly grubby finger, and the white flowers that were there a week ago had changed into dimpled green spheres. I asked my mom, and she said that they were strawberries. But these were nothing like the giant, hollow, triangular things I'd seen at the grocery store. I watched them carefully as they transformed from green, to a white, to a jewel-like red. They were no bigger than my smallest marble. How could these be strawberries? And they were growing outside in the lawn of all places. My young mind thought strawberries came from the store. I never did get to find out what those strange berries tasted like. As soon as they turned red, they vanished. The chipmunks knew what I did not. When you find a ripe strawberry, you grab it before someone else does. What I did taste, however, was a new revelation. The thought of food coming directly from the ground under my feet, food that we hadn't planted or bought, planted a seed in my mind. I didn't understand what it meant yet, but it fascinated me. The tiny, mental seed planted by the first wild strawberry slowly and surely grew into a lifelong journey of enjoying and celebrating the free food that bursts from every nook and cranny of the wild places, if you know where to look. And now when I find wild strawberries, I give the chipmunks a run for their money. Once upon a time, some well-meaning person coined the phrase, probably as an attempt to prevent children from playing with poison ivy. It's one of those axioms that sounds helpful, but in reality is pretty much useless to the forager. There are lots of plants with three-parted leaves, and many of them are very useful. I'm sure many people have backed away in fear from the low-lying leaflets of wild strawberry or even drowned the poor undeserving things in roundup as an attempt to protect themselves. Let's be smarter than that. Wild strawberry grows much like its domesticated counterpart. It's a low-growing plant that spreads by runners, often carpeting a suitable area of ground in dense yet never overgrown colonies. They always seem to leave room for other plants to share their space. Its leaves are born aloft on hairy petioles, and are usually coated with a fine layer of soft down on their undersides. These leaves are made out of three leaflets that are the same size and shape, something that distinguishes them from poison ivy, by the way, and the edges of the leaflets are toothed. Though the fruit and the flowers are truly seasonal, the persistent leaves are basically evergreen, offering a glimpse of green in the worst of winter. The blooms arrive mid-spring, and are incredibly delicate white five-petaled flowers. Locating a strawberry patch in bloom is an excellent way to scope out your fruitier berry forays. As soon as the flowers are fertilized, the petals fall to the ground like they were sorry they existed in the first place. In their place, stalks of green embryonic berries develop. They'll shift from green to white to red, and then, hopefully, you'll be the one out there picking them. There are several species of wild strawberry to be found in the United States, and they can all be used as you would any strawberry. The strawberry featured in this video is Phrygaria virginiania, the common wild strawberry. Its fruits are small and intensely flavored, with seeds resting in tiny dimples across the typically round surface. Another wild strawberry you might encounter is the slightly larger woodland strawberry, Phrygaria vesca. It has more elongated fruits, and the seeds rest on a flatter surface rather than settling in dimples like the common strawberry. Both the common and woodland strawberry are found in much of North America, thriving in most sunny locations aside from the deep south and any desert area. I have found that the ideal wild strawberry habitats are usually areas at the edges of forests, places with ample light during the day, but also some shade and not too much standing moisture. The best strawberry on my land, for example, grows on a slope in a dappled area of the ground of our just-established timber lot. There, since the sun isn't quite so direct as it passes through the young trees, the strawberries grow bigger and have longer stalks holding them clean from the ground. And the ducks haven't found them yet. Please don't tell them. There are several plants, particularly those also in the rose family, that bear leaves that may be confused with wild strawberries. They include, but aren't limited to, the syncophoils in the Potentilla genus and the low-growing brambles in the Rubris genus, but none of them produce a strawberry-like fruit. The only risk you run with them is missing out on the real strawberries while you wait for them to produce red berries that they're never going to produce. The plant that really may mess with you is Duchesnia indica, otherwise called the mock strawberry or false strawberry. This plant produces a very strawberry-looking plant. Although the leaves are smaller, less hairy, and just don't look quite right if you're expecting a true wild strawberry plant. It notably has yellow flowers, while wild strawberries bear white flowers, but nonetheless, it's the sort of plant you can mentally force to be a wild strawberry if you don't know the real plant instinctively. The shenanigans continue, however, when it produces a small, bright red seed-covered fruit that looks very much like it should be a delicious strawberry. The seeds sit on the surface like the pins in a pin cushion rather than settled in the dimples, and the fruit is suspiciously held above the leaves rather than hidden beneath them, but the hopeful novice forager may be too busy collecting them in glee to notice. And then comes the punchline. The taste. Or rather, the lack thereof. These berries, while totally edible and non-toxic, taste like absolutely nothing. Or rather, they taste like disappointment, perhaps, and may be the reason why many people who have been likewise duped write off the real wild strawberries as a waste of time. One of the biggest aids in harvesting wild strawberries may surprise you. It's a flower. Oxeye daisy is a wonderful plant in its own right. Its young leaves are edible, the blossoms make a healing poultice for bruises, and it grows freely. But it also happens to bloom at the exact same time that wild strawberries ripen. If you have a stand of these sunny white flowers, watch them in the spring, and as soon as a few start to open, grab your basket and get out to your berry patch. In my area, this happens around the last week of May, but it may be as late as mid-June, depending on where you live. Though ripe berries are bright red, they are typically hidden beneath their leaves. You'll have to creep along the ground, brushing the foliage apart to find clusters of the fruit. Generously, the berries are held off the ground by a helpful little stalk. So even though they're a low-growing plant, they're typically perfectly clean to pick. If you are so blessed to find a loaded patch of berries, bring a big bowl with you to harvest. Though you may never get enough berries to totally fill it, a large bowl will allow you to harvest a lot of the delicate things without them crushing under their own weight. Now a second, less popular product to be made from wild strawberries is their leaves. They make a gentle and pleasant tea that basically tastes like strawberries if they were translated through a leaf. It's a golden color and will be nice either hot or iced. If you can identify wild strawberries in the early spring, the tender, new-growing leaves are best. But if you can't locate wild strawberry leaves without the aid of their distinctive fruit, only harvest leaves at the same time you're enjoying the berries. They can be used both fresh or dried, and I particularly like a steaming cup of strawberry leaf tea in the dead of winter. This fragrant steam smells like late spring embodied, reminding me that the cold won't last forever. Most wild strawberries, I imagine, are immediately enjoyed out in the field where they grow, sparkling on the tongue with their perfect balance of sweet and tart. But if you do find that elusive patch of berries that gives you the opportunity to make an actual harvest, you can do the exact same things with them that you would with their store-bought counterparts. The only difference with wild strawberries is that you need to use them immediately, and that their taste is 100 times better than the store-bought ones. Wild strawberries are the definition of ephemeral delight. A cup full of berries, picked fresh in the early summer sun, are already a little bit overripe by the time you get into the kitchen an hour later. And if you ever make the mistake of putting a bowl of fresh picked berries on the counter or in the refrigerator with plans to get them later, you run the very real risk of coming back to a pile of mold-fuzzy despair. So either plan on eating or processing wild strawberries as soon as possible. I typically freeze the bulk of what I pick within an hour of bringing them home. As long as you picked it cleanly, there's no need to wash the berries. Merely pinch off their greenish calyx and freeze them in jars. I use half pint canning jars and they work great to portion them out. Wild strawberries also make amazing preserves or fruit leather if you have enough to make it. And for the ultimate in summer on a plate, use wild strawberries with your best strawberry shortcake recipe. You'll have a hard time going back to the store-bought berries after that. Some people measure their riches in expensive cars, nice vacation homes, or luxury clothing. But that's only stuff you can buy with money. When I stand in my secret berry patch with a handful of strawberries, or when I look at a freezer full of wild berries tucked away, awaiting the blustery winter day when I bring them out to give us a breath of spring hope, I feel blessed beyond measure and rich in something that no dollar could possibly buy.