Wild Food of the Month November: Autumn Olive & of Little Helpers

To those of you who have been following my recent posts it will come as no surprise what the wild food of the month for November is going to be.  NO! NOT the coypu, i still haven't managed to catch one, it's the autumn olive berry.

Now I have identified it with the help of my dear friend Mr'H. in Idaho I can't stop singing it's praises!  The name comes from the silvery olive colour of its foliage.  It's a shrub or low tree, not at all related to the actual olive, native in Eastern Asia and producing oodles of bright red, juicy berries.  Eaten raw they taste somewhere between a redcurrant and a cranberry, both fruits that I can't grow to save my life in our climate.

Further research revealed that the berry is not only edible and tasty, but extremely good for you with up to 16 times as much Lycopenes as raw tomatoes, making it a potentially powerful cancer preventative.  The plant is regarded in many places as an invasive non-native species, which has been planted along river banks to prevent erosion, but because of its high germination success has been known to displace native flora in some places.  The site where we found it there are only about half a dozen or so trees, absolutely laden with fruit.

Due to it's ability to absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere in can thrive on extremely poor soils and fix nitrogen in the soil and make it available for other plants.  The wood makes good fire wood, carving wood or can be used to build solid wooden posts.  The fruit, apart from simply enjoying it raw, can be juiced, made into jam, fruit leather, dried, added to cakes etc. etc. etc...

Now I want to save some seed to plant on my land.  Non-native it maybe, but something that prevents erosion, a recent problem as you'll have noticed, and has so many other uses, sounds just like the thing I like to grow.

On a slightly different note, this week we are having a little helper staying with us, Cat from Oregon.  We have recently signed up with a website called helpX, that brings together people who travel on a budget and would like to experience their destination more intimitely and are willing to work for a bed and meals, with people who can do with a hand with something.  So Cat became the first in hopefully a long line of people who decide to share our lives with us.  So today and yesterday we gave her an introduction into our lifestyle by taking her wild food foraging and then turning our spoils into lovely preserves.

It's the season for 3 different fruits at the moment.  One is the fruit of the strawberry tree, which Cat is picking up there and of which I have spoken extensively last year in a post which is proving to be the most googled post on my blog.  The recipe of a strawberry tree fruit jam I posted at the time was only a limited success.  We ate it, but I wondered if it was worth our while again as it turned out to be a bit bland.  So this year I decided to add some different ingredients to make a Christmas Jam.

This is what we did.  We picked about 500g strawberry tree fruit.  Then we added 500g of autumn olive berries.

and maybe 150g myrtle berries

Here's Susan in action picking some of them:

To those 3 fruits we added a chopped apple, zest and juice of one orange, a spice mixture consisting of cinnamon, vannilla flavoured sugar, nutmeg, ginger and cloves.  We cooked that until soft, than added 500g sugar and boiled fast until setting point.  After that we pressed this through my tomato mill to get rid of the rough seeds and achieve a smooth consistency..

 Reheated it and bottled it in hot jars.  Boy was this delicious!  I shall make biscuits filled with this stuff for Christmas if I can keep my greedy mits off it for long enough.

The other experiment with autumn olive berries was along the lines of my (in)famous "I can't believe it's not mango chutney" chutney, in the sense that we made a "I can't believe it's not cranberry chutney" chutney consisting of unweighed and unmeasured quantities of autumn olive berries, apples, onions, ginger orange zest and juice and white wine vinegar.

Mix up and boil for a couple of hours until a good consistency is achieved and bottle into hot jars.  Again, absolutely delicious and will make a great accompaniment for turkey or chicken.

Wild food of the month October & a bloggy visit

Yesterday we had another bloggy visit. Stefani of Sicilian Sisters Grow Some Food came to see us all the way from California for the second time this year.


This time she didn't only bring her husband Eric along, but her 4 children as well, which insisted on being introduced to all the animals around our village.


Here's her youngest trying to feed grass to a donkey's bottom...


So, if you were wondering why she hasn't posted anything on her blog for a while, here's the answer: She's been taken her family on tractor rides in Italy amongst other things.


On another note, it's time for the wild food of the month feature. For October this should normally undisputedly be the chestnut. However, I have in the past written extensively about this beautiful fruit (here for instance), and this year we have an exceptionally bad year for them

Initially I had put that down to the vagaries of nature until I realised that just a few km up the valley, they have an extremely good year for chestnuts. Due to the above average rainfall this year, they have grown to a larger size and the crop is particularly healthy. The area around and just above our village on the other hand seems to have produced hardly anything and on closer inspection the leaves on the trees have started turning autumnal at least a month ahead of normal.

A chance meeting in the woods gave part of the explanation: insects have spread a virus amongst the trees and helicopters have already dropped large quantities of predatory insects to control the harmful ones, but it may already too late to save the extensive woods for a few km around us.

Further research on the internet seems to suggest that we are suffering from a twin attack of chestnut blight, which has caused famines in some of the remoter valleys shortly after the war, and the Oriental chestnut gall wasp. Over in Arcola we have a tree on our land which has not been affected so far, but we do have to go further afield for our chestnuts this year. I hope they'll manage to control these outbreaks, it's one of the most calorie-rich wild foods we gather.

So instead I'll write something on the little blue myrtle berry.


It may be a bit of an exaggeration to call it a wild food. The main use for it is as an ingredient for a Sardinian liqueur called mirto. There are 2 versions of it mirto bianco, made from the extremely aromatic leaves, and mirto classico, a dark red liqueur made from the berries. I have made neither so far, but I've picked a mixture of the berries and leaves today to dry for later use. The berries are also said to be good used cooked with venison or wild boar. The leaves, as I have already found out can be used in these essential oil burners instead of essential oil to spread a pleasant aroma in the room. I imagine they'd be good as part of a stuffing for some rabbit or grouse for example, although again not tried yet. Anyboy knows of any other uses, I'd love to hear.