Feral Fruits Forever!

A FEAST OF FERAL FRUITS!

Foraging is all about following seasons and cycles.

Find the fruit trees and edible colonies in your area and keep an eye on them, so that you will be ready when the fruits are!

Right now it’s feral apple season in Australia, just at the end of summer/early autumn when the renegade trees of regional roads offer bags of fruits.

Feral apples are the wild leftovers of abandoned orchards and self-started trees that grow when they find suitable conditions. The trees in abandoned orchards tend to be old varieties and many gardeners collect cuttings and graft them onto their own trees, to bring some diversity and resilience into their stock.

The apple trees along the roads tend to grow out of discarded apple cores, thrown out of people’s car windows. An old story has been shared around that where the Cobb & Co coach once ran its original line, crab apples and plums grew. The coach drivers scattered the seeds as they did the run so that they had fruit along the trip. Edible highways!

Whether they are from an old orchard or an apple-eating driver, the fruits from these trees tend to be sharper and less sweet. Often enough they have blemishes from pests and they hardly ever fully mature on the trees, as birds love them too.

The best advice for people who would like to bring some wild flavour to their meals is to collect the fruits when they start to change in colour and then let them finish the ripening at home.

They tend to be sour and therefore make for excellent pies and cider. I love to make feral apple cider vinegar each year. This would last me for ages and flavours anything on my table, from salads to pickles.

Check the full article here with a map of where to find feral apples in Australia and recipes for when you found them>>