Foraging

Once, when I was a kid, we had a visit from the family of my mother’s uncle, a preacher who at the time was living in Macon, Georgia. For some reason, we decided to take them, including his mostly grown sons (my first cousins once removed) on a little excursion to one of our favorite spots in the foothills of the Cohutta Mountains, a place called Bear Creek, a place I’ve taken my own children many times for picnicking during summer visits back to the States. 

I only remember this little outing because, as we walked along the graveled Forest Service road deep in the woods, my brother, sister and I spotted some ripe blackberries growing on the sunny slope of the road bank. We immediately started helping ourselves to the berries, while our city cousins looked on, almost regarding us as feral children, wild people of the mountains. At least they declined to join in the berry picking themselves.

I thought of this earlier this summer when my wife and I were walking along a similarly graveled road near the little sauna-cabin we’ve been building not far from Helsinki. We spotted some ripe wild strawberries (metsämansikoita, or “forest strawberries”) on the side of the road and started sampling them. No one passing by would have batted an eye at this. 

Foraging for wild food like this is extremely typical in Finland, and one of the local customs that unexpectedly echoes a familiar way of life in faraway North Georgia. 

In the past few weeks, all along the road to our cabin we have been seeing cars parked in every little pullout or side road, a sign that the blueberry- and mushroom-picking season is well underway. With the summer so cool and rainy this year, everyone is expecting the season will be exceptionally good, and in fact we’ve already found keltavahvero (chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius) in places where you don’t normally see them. I didn't grow up foraging for fungi in Georgia, and I'm far from being an expert. Even now, chanterelles, along with suppilovahvero (winter mushroom, Cantharellus tubaeformis), are the only ones I can safely identify by myself.

My first haul of suppilovahvero, winter mushrooms.

Growing up in Georgia, we didn’t really do much foraging for blueberries, either. What we did go after was blackberries. I remember our whole family, donning boots and long-sleeve shirts in the middle of the sultry Georgia summer heat to wade chest-deep into a thicket of blackberry vines (as we called them), an almost impenetrable tangle of thorns. It was worth it. My mother would turn our haul of fruit into jellies and jams and usually more than a few blackberry cobblers that I can still almost taste.

Blackberries (called karhunvatukka, “bear raspberry”) don’t grow wild in Finland, but their cousin, the raspberries, do. The converse is true in North Georgia – raspberries are the less common of the two, as I recall.

The woods where I grew up didn’t off much in the way of blueberries. There was something we called “huckleberries”, growing low to the ground and bearing tiny, round fruit full of gritty seeds. They were probably poor specimens of what the British call “bilberries” (Vaccinium myrtillus) and basically the same thing as Finnish blueberries, only apparently not as well suited to the habitats of Georgia.

The “huckleberries” we knew as kids weren’t very good or abundant, and reaching down to pick them at ground level seemed a risky proposition in the snaky country I grew up in. It was therefore a revelation when we discovered a higher alternative.

It was on a short hike with our parents one summer day to the summit of Springer Mountain (3780 ft., 1150m), the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, literally at the very edge of my home county. On the approach trail, we noticed blueberry bushes, not at ankle level, but five feet or more in height. And they were full of large, tasty berries.

Although spending a lifetime in the woods, we’d never run across these “high-bush” blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) before, and maybe they’re not all that common in Georgia anyway. We only ever encountered them in the cooler, open forests of the state’s higher ridge tops, a fairly limited environment after all.

The much more mountainous landscape of western North Carolina is another matter, however. I used to go hiking regularly in a slice of that landscape called Shining Rock, a federally protected wilderness area of stark, 6000-foot peaks that are mostly bare of the dense forests more typical of the Appalachians. The scenery there is much more “western”, completely out of place in the Southeast.

Often on the way to Shining Rock, I would stop at a spot along the Blue Ridge Parkway where a slope of brush and grass, interspersed here and there with clumps of trees, rises gradually from a high-country stream. This place, Graveyard Fields, already a bit magical and mysterious, was also rampant with high-bush blueberries.

When the berries were ripe, the “fields” would be filled with Cherokees, from the small reservation nestled next to the Smokies, foraging no doubt in the manner of their ancestors.

You might think the berries there would also be a big draw for foraging bears. I never saw one in Graveyard Fields itself, though I know of at least one instance in which a bear got a taste of its berries.

This was on a camping trip with my parents along the Parkway one summer. We had picked some berries at Graveyard Fields that day, and my mother had used them to whip up a pie back at our campsite. Since we weren’t able to finish the pie before bedtime, we put the rest in an ice chest, which we (unwisely) left sitting on the tailgate of our truck. It didn’t sit there unnoticed for long. We awoke in the night to the sound of the ice chest crashing to the ground and a bear devouring what was left of the berry pie.

I haven’t heard of any encounters between people and bears in Finland over blueberries, but the competition between human foragers can sometimes get tense, as well, despite the fact that Finland's "everyman's rights" allow anyone to pick berries anywhere they please, including private land.

Last month, a popular tabloid asked its readers to share stories of the altercations they have experienced with other berry pickers. The resulting examples of marjaraivo ("berry rage") included tales of pickers being threatened by dogs, tractors, and a red-faced old lady, and in one instance the air being let out of a berry picker’s tires.

Normally, foraging competition is limited to keeping your favorite mushroom-picking spots a closely held secret, especially when it comes to the highly prized keltavahvero. 

Chanterelles from the Finnish forest.

(My parents exercised the same kind of secrecy when it came to the locations of ginseng, a slightly different kind of wild forest product that they loved to search for in the mountains of Georgia.)

Showing off the harvest from your undisclosed mushroom location on social media, is of course extremely typical. In summer, photos by Finnish friends of basketfuls of chanterelles or buckets of blueberries appear on my Facebook feed with the kind of regularity that American friends post memes praising Jesus. Foraging is that central to the Finnish way of life.

I once took an advanced Finnish-language course designed for immigrants to the country. In addition to grammar lessons, there were outings arranged with the purpose of introducing us foreigners to various aspects of Finnish life and culture. These included a visit to a Baltic herring festival, tours of a couple of national museums and, of course, a mushroom picking expedition.

Our little class assembled one autumn morning in Paloheinä, part of Helsinki’s Keskuspuisto (“Central Park”). Before we got started, our teacher briefly instructed us on which mushrooms were easily identifiable as safe, and which were obviously ones to avoid. She stressed that if there was any doubt, we should first check with her before picking something. Most of the class, those students from Algeria, Vietnam, Bangladesh and other such exotic places, stuck pretty close to the teacher as we combed the forest floor for edible fungi. I did likewise, since, even after over two decades of living here, mushroom picking is one aspect of Finnish culture this American has not yet managed to pick up.

One group of students, however, immediately disappeared, spreading out into the forest mostly on their own. The Russians. Well, the Russian-speakers, that is, which included Russians, Ukrainians, and one Azerbaijani. If there was one thing they required absolutely no help in, it was mushroom picking.

If anything, our boreal neighbors in Russia are even more dye-in-the-wool mushroom pickers than Finns are. I guess it’s one of those cultural things that transcends borders and languages when there are tasty things growing in the forest well worth foraging for. 

Everyman's Rights

Where I grew up in rural north Georgia, it often seemed to us locals that when “outside” people bought land in the county, the first thing they did was put up “Posted” or “No Trespassing” signs all along the perimeter of their property.

Now, maybe that’s not being completely fair, but that was the impression in my family. We – admittedly with a possible dose of hillbilly chauvinism – saw this practice as an example of city-dweller paranoia. Folks moving to the country from Atlanta often seemed to instantly suspect that the yokels that they had decided to live among were all itching to step foot on their newly acquired parcel of country paradise. They were, as we saw it, importing a “city” mentality into the countryside.

To be sure, not all newcomers were like that. And there were also some county natives well known locally for posting their woods. They were also locally famous for being unusually ornery characters, and not especially friendly.

In any case, it’s not as though most people where I grew up necessarily made a point of traipsing across other people’s land, though in my youth we sometimes did that.

As kids, we often roamed through the woods that surrounded our home situated below the 2000-foot Appalachian foothill that we partly owned. And when I say “woods”, I am talking about some pretty big tracts. Heading more or less due north, we could have walked from the barn behind my parents’ house all the way to Tennessee, over 15 miles away as a crow flies, without encountering another building or paved road. This was because what mostly stood between our place and the Volunteer State was the Cohutta Mountains, home to the largest federal wilderness area in the Southern Appalachians.

As a protected area, the 36,977-acre portion of the Cohuttas that made up the federally designated wilderness is public land. But nearer to our house, the woods on the backside of our little mountain were private. I think I know whose woods those were, but his house was nowhere near. Not in a village though. In fact, he was a local farmer who had quite a bit of land, and I’m sure he would not have been bothered by us kids crossing his property line to wander around a small part of it.

Part of the Chattahoochee National Forest,
where I roamed in my youth.

It’s not as though local people didn’t take property lines seriously enough in most cases. After my parents built their first house, the one I grew up in, my father had built a dog lot for our beloved English setter, named Rock. Like our later home at the foot of the mountain, the neighboring land on the backside of this property was unoccupied woods. Still, at some point the owner of that land noticed that, by accident, my father had built the dog lot about a foot or less over the mostly unmarked property line.

My father apologized. And, he felt it was a serious enough transgression that he offered to give Rock to the man as compensation. The neighbor didn’t want the dog, and he didn’t even want the lot changed, as I recall. He just wanted to make sure that the breach of property rights had been noticed, I guess in case there was ever any future disputes.

So, we were certainly conscious of property rights. I remember once, when fishing on a creek that passed right in front of someone’s house, we made sure to keep well on the far side of midstream, since it was well known (so we understood) that a landowner’s rights extended halfway across a waterway. (Though, if the house hadn’t been right there we probably wouldn’t have worried about it.)

And there were times when we did hunt or fish on private land, but I’m sure that was with prior permission or as part of a standing agreement my father had with the landowner.

Usually when we hunted or fished, however, it was on public land. Our house was just within the boundaries of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which covers a big swath of northernmost Georgia. It’s not all public land, by any means. Our home wasn’t.

Still, with at least 600,000 acres (almost a quarter-million hectares) of mountain land open to the general public for hunting, fishing, hiking, whatever floats your boat, my part of Georgia – especially compared to the rest of the state or, for that matter, the rest of the eastern US – did offer quite a bit of territory for free ranging recreation.

This was a fact much appreciated by my father, who used to talk about how these public lands provided an opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors for “the little guy”, you might even say for the “everyman”. Which brings me to Finland.

One of the things I truly value about life in this country is jokamiehen- oikeus (Everyman’s Rights). Basically, this is the legal right, based on ancient custom that allows anyone to cross anyone else’s land, kind of like forest without borders. It essentially means no one can post their land. For conservatives in the US, this probably would sound like a socialist nightmare. I think it's great.

As with all legal rights, there are some limits. While you may walk (or ski) across anyone’s land at will, you cannot do so in the immediate vicinity of a house. You can’t be destructive, so no cutting trees, littering, driving off-road, damaging property, wading through grain fields, etc. You cannot disturb wildlife or nesting birds. You can swim in private lakes and camp on private land, but not build fires or hunt without permission.

What you can also do – and this is why jokamiehenoikeus is so important to the Finnish way of life – is pick berries and mushrooms. Notably, collecting lichen and moss is not allowed – but other than my wife (who has studied bryophytes, among other forest life forms), I don’t know many people who would do that anyway.

Chantarelle, a prized takeaway from the Finnish forest.
Credit: Phobulos

While Finns, the most ardent nature-lovers you can imagine, don’t need much of an excuse to wander the forest, the gathering of berries and mushrooms does provide additional, even fruitful, motivation to get outdoors. Especially, this time of the year.

Along a winding country road that I’ve been driving frequently, I’ve seen cars parked lately at practically every turnout, indicating that mushroom hunters are somewhere out there scouring the woods. I’m sure none of them has a clue whom the woods belong to, and it doesn’t matter. The mushrooms (and berries) growing there belong to everyone.

I think this is an enlightened attitude, and not something you’d find in most other countries, though it’s not entirely unique to Finland. Similar rights to roam exist in other Nordic countries, and apparently also in Estonia. And I think Switzerland has a somewhat similar approach to common land use.

I was hiking once with my Swiss brother-in-law above the village of Disentis when he pointed out the irony of the sheep grazing around us. As someone with strong leftist sensibilities, he was amused how the villagers in the valley below, no doubt otherwise right-thinking capitalists, saw nothing inconsistent about grazing their sheep and cows on a common Alpine pasture, owned by no one and used by the whole community according to an ageless arrangement.

Finland’s Everyman’s Rights is an equally “ageless arrangement”, but has in recent years developed a thoroughly modern wrinkle.

Because the blueberries carpeting the forests here are free to be by anyone and sold tax-free, it does represent a business opportunity for folks willing to spend hours combing (almost literally “combing”, using special handheld berry scoopers) the forest floor.

Most Finnish berry pickers don’t bother, collecting instead only enough fruit for their own use. Starting around ten years ago, however, a new type of berry picker began appearing in the forests, seasonal workers from outside Finland, in fact from a country not normally associated with blueberries at all – Thailand.

A typical scooper for harvesting blueberries.

I’m not sure how picking wild berries in Finland became a niche for Thai seasonal workers. I suspect the practice spilled over from Sweden, where it seems years ago Thais started coming to harvest the vilda blåbär there.

Nowadays, three or four thousand Thais arrive in Finland every summer on tourist visas to pick berries, recruited by Finnish berry processors or middlemen who arrange food, lodging and transportation, at a cost, of course. It is by all accounts very hard physical work, with long exhausting days, but potentially rewarding – if it’s a good berry season.

While there are plenty of berries to go around for the most part (an estimated 90% go unpicked nationwide), the influx of south-east Asian harvesters hasn’t been without some friction or complications.

There have been complaints by locals of over-picking in some areas or litter left behind, but also concerns over the welfare and possible exploitation of the seasonal workers themselves, who often take on large loans in Thailand in order to travel to Finland. They are currently not covered under union agreements. The visiting Thais are not officially seen as independent entrepreneurs and, perhaps partly because the berries they pick are wild, free to everyone and not taxed, neither are they considered to be employees like the seasonal migrants (most from Ukraine) who work on Finland’s commercial berry farms.

That might be changing. In line with a recent EU directive on seasonal labor, the Finnish government is working to clarify the berry pickers’ status, hopefully providing more protections for next season’s legion of foreign pickers exercising an ancient right by foraging in the Finnish woods.

Harvest

It’s mid September and the harvest season in Finland is, well, practically over. 

The rye and oat fields at the city-owned farm near our house were shorn already a few weeks ago and left empty for the pigeons, Canada geese, and other birds that often congregate there for pre-winter feasting. The farm’s fields of peas, free for visitors to harvest, have long been picked clean, and now its crop of sunflowers have also now been carried off by the general public. 

Our own private harvest is also almost complete. As usual, we got a few bowls full of strawberries and gooseberries from the bushes in our yard, and apples and cherries from our young fruit trees. 

What's left of our old apple tree.

This was the first year our cherry “crop” was decent enough that we had to fight off the magpies attracted by the reddening fruit. I even went so far as to buy a plastic snake at the local hardware store to scare the birds. 

When I was a kid, my parents did something similar for the cherry tree we had behind our house. I suspect back then you couldn’t buy commercial decoy snakes. In any case, my parents improvised by stringing the cherry tree with short lengths of green water hose. I have no idea whether this worked better than our modern fake cobra, but it couldn’t have worked worse. I’m guessing that, with snakes being so rare here, Finnish birds can’t take any snake in a tree as credible, let alone a species indigenous to south Asia. 

Besides a dwarf apple tree, we also have a full-sized “mature” one, whose crop is still ripening. It’s the last of the three apple trees that were here when we bought the house exactly twenty years ago, and it’s probably not long for this world. At the beginning of August, half of the tree, weakened by rot at the base, crashed to the ground, littering the yard with hundreds of half-grown apples. Even with that loss, there is more than enough fruit left on the surviving branches for my wife to make a lot of delicious pies and apple butter. It was indeed a bumper crop this year, which might have contributed to the tree giving up its fight against gravity.

While our strawberry plants and gooseberry bushes produced at least enough fruit for snacking this year, the crop from our single red currant bush, as usual, was so abundant that we could fill several containers for freezing, in addition to the berries that went straight from the bush to the pie pan. 

Red currants.
Photo: Lukas Riebling.

Currants (in Finnish viinimarja, or “wine berry”), a fruit I never saw growing up in Georgia is extremely common here, unlike our sea-buckthorn (tyrni, a little-known Old World berry). After reaping a big “crop” of these extremely tart and yellow berries a year ago, we harvested only a handful this year. 

Usually, the biggest part of the berries we cache in our freezer comes not from our own yard, but from my in-laws’. They have an old farmhouse where they tend a vegetable garden in summer, plus a patch of potatoes and enough berry bushes to keep them and us well stocked with currants (both red and black) for the winter. 

The urge to grow some of your own food seems to be very typical in Finland, and, of course, not unfamiliar to many Americans, as well. My parents always grew a garden, and my memories of summer meals from my childhood revolve around fresh corn, beans, okra, and other veggies from our garden. 

Sea buck-thorn.

One very noticeable difference in Finland is that here city dwellers also often get into the act. Scattered around many Finnish cities are plots of city-owned land, subdivided into tiny lots that are rented to anyone wishing to cultivate their own slice of earth. Even fourth-generation urbanites can tap into their agrarian roots by nurturing a small crop of vegetables or flowers, sometimes in the shadow of Helsinki high-rises. 

The simplest of these garden areas are made up of dozens of 50- or 100-square-meter plots rented for only about 40 euros ($50) a year. In Helsinki alone, there are nearly 40 of these viljelyspalstat (“farm-plots”) located around the city. 

A step up from these are the larger “allotment gardens”, apparently also common in other European countries, which can even function as small-scale summer homes. The Finnish name for allotment gardens is siirtolapuutarha (“settlement garden”), the word siirtola vaguely referring to “migrant” or “refugee”.  

The name seems to fit. Renters of these 250- to 500-square meter (around 4000 square feet) plots often set up caravan-sized cabins, giving some siirtolapuutarhat the feeling of miniature villages of urban farmers. Many garden tenants spend summer nights and weekends in these simple cabins, escaping from city life without leaving the city. 

If nothing else, the cabins provide gardeners with a quiet place to relax, read the paper or have a beer after the labor of watering and weeding their patch of dill, carrots and rhubarb, carrying on – in a small way – the 10,000-year-old tradition of coaxing a good harvest from plain dirt. 

Some of the garden plots at Vallila siirtolapuutarha
are practicably second homes.  

Chick here for information on Helsinki farm plots and allotment gardens (in Finnish).