It is "weird" that you apologized for your channel'name...weird,yes You are... Paw paw...every year I watched treasure hunter aquachigger eat that. And we know you like yuca...
I have maypop which grows seasonally in my yard, they take ages to ripen here in Northern North Carolina but they taste like a milder and sweeter purple passion fruit (sorry not super imaginative, my sense of taste isn’t great) with a noticeable tang at the end. Also there ain’t no “may” about them popping when you step on em, it’s like stepping on a small balloon
When I was a young kid like 7/8 we had a persimmon tree in our back yard, every year I'd gorge myself on persimmons. We only stayed in that house for a few years and after we moved I greatly missed that tree. When I got older I went on a hunt for persimmons like the ones we had at that house but I could never find them. Every time I described them as small and black with a large seed I'd get strange looks, thank you for helping me find an actual name for the persimmons I ate as a kid!
We had persimmon wars with the neighbor kids. Stick a semi mushy persimmon on the end of a long flexible stick or branch and give it a fling. They'd whistle through the air.
I feel the same way about the giant gravinsteen apple tree in my grandmas back yard. Every couple years they would grow as big as grapefruit and juicy as pears. I would give about anything for one more basket of them to turn into apple butter or just one to eat.
What parts of Texas were y’all in? I loved in Dallas for years and never saw those, although we did have Osage orange there. We called them horse apples
The Osage Orange is known to my family as Spider Balls. We leave them whole in a bowl as decor and noticed we were no longer plagued by wolf spiders when they were present. Huge improvement to our quality of life, plus they are visually cool.
thats funny im from indiana and call them the same thing grew up with my dad putting them in when it starts to get cold and the usual 10-20 wolf spiders would go too almost zero it seems, always wondered if they were a fruit.
Growing up we called them 'hedge trees' and the fruit were hedge balls. That's because the wood was often used in fences. They were notorious for re-growing from the stumps and even from the cut trunks when used as fence posts. The 'fruits' were also notorious. Supposedly if cows ate hedge balls it would taint their milk and turn it green. There were several trees in our neighborhood, and the kids were set to policing the hedge balls and disposing of them before they could rot and release their seeds.
I used to pick cloud berries when I lived in Alaska. There was never enough to make jam but I cut it with salmon berries & that was some of the best jam I ever had. It definitely didn't last long.
My grandma Susie had a Yucca plant out by the driveway. She called it "Soapweed," because one could make soap from the roots. I thought she was making it up. "Oh, Grandma Susie, why would you say a thing like that?" She was so tolerant and kind. I wish I had been less skeptical.
Isn't it peculiar how we disregard the words of our elders and all our "kooky aunts" and "weird uncles" as children, but as we get older, and they invariably vanish into time, we realize how wise and full of useful tidbits they were?
@@ralphralpherson9441 Hence my Grandfather and I Quote... ' Wish in one hand , Shit in the other, See which one fills up first! ". Wise words right there... Applies to Sooo Much ...
@@ralphralpherson9441 yes .. but all too often, for many of us, also bound up W complex family issues, old biases, old attitudes, and/or inherited familial abuse behaviours. Trying to filter the wisdom & the good memories & retain them can be hard.
Yucca leaves can be used to make soap as well. just pull apart the fibrous strands and rub them back and forth in your hands with some water and it will lather right up. learned that trick on a school field trip decades ago.
I have pawpaws in my yard. We considered them a weed tree because they grew everywhere. Thought they were poisonous until recently. Probably should try them.
I recently planted a few pawpaw trees. I did my homework on them and found out why most people don't grow them. 1. they have a tap root so growing them in pots is problematic 2. they need shade when small and sun when big if you want to get a good harvest 3. they require a lot of water but will die if their roots stay wet 4. they are not self fertile and you need 2 different verities to cross pollinate 5. they are pollinated by flies and carrion beetles as their flowers smell like rotten meat. 6. mine are struggling because some bug has been eating the leaves
@@Fiona2254 Last year I planted 4 of them. 1 was cut about 2 inches from the ground. That one is behind the others but it still has green buds now. Good luck
When I was about 5 or 6 I noticed that There was a fruit tree in our yard and no one in my family knew what it was. After finding out it was loquats we tried them and they are really delicious.
Loquats are very popular here in Greece; funnily enough, both my family and my wife's have a loquat tree, in spite of being in very different regions in the country!
I’m watching loquats flower at my workplace and looking forward to eating them. Best (generally) free fruit in Australia! Also just a beautiful tree, I’d love one in a garden even if it never fruited.
@@uiomancannot7931 so true I've never thought about that it's always stealing them from a neighbour's tree haha I wonder why they don't get sold much here 🤔
I've picked and enjoyed Texas persimmon around every year. Because the seeds are toxic but the pulp clings to it, and the skin is pretty papery and easy to remove, I crush it and wash the pulp in a sieve, then cook it into a rich, molasses-black fruit butter. Highly sweet, tastes like cooked apple with cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and vanilla, a little chocolate
There's a similar plant that tastes better with a bigger fruit (Diospyros californica). Unfortunately, it's very rare and as the name suggests it's probably from somewhere around California. It's hard to find seeds only. It's hardy to zone 8-ish (there's no problem growing in zone 9 and it can be grown in a container it's a relatively slow grower)
Texas persimmon seeds aren't toxic to humans or animals, they are commonly eaten by animals and end up in their feces which is a big part of the persimmon's reproduction strategy. Where did you get the idea they are toxic?
Paw Paw fruit grows here in Michigan. I know where a lot of Paw paw fruit trees are along the Clinton River trail. I have a strong allergic reaction to Paw paw fruit for some reason. I blended paw paw up in smoothie machine
As a fruit enthusiast i was really happy to discover this channel. I actually have 5 of these growing in my yard ( pawpaws, mayapples, maypops, thimbleberry and spicebush. )
Fruit gang, makes you feel like it's 1969 peace movement when you grow rare fruit, but you're also an Idian, but you're also spiritually ascended, but also... Well... I'm insanely mentally ill sometimes but that's not my problem.
I was looking at the time stamps like where is hedge apple?? didn't realize it had a different name, and my parents /most the family always thought they were poisonous....lol I'll have to try it, my step dad has a tree in the back pasture that drops these like crazy & damn I didn't know mayapples fruited either!! I just always see them before flowering in the spring while hunting morels
When I was like 8 I found a patch of may apples in the woods and checked them every day to see if they were ripe. My mom and I decided it would be ripe tomorrow, but the next day they were all gone and I was mad about not getting to try it for a while. That was a really weird flash back of something I totally forgot about.
Thank you for solving an argument I was having with my dad intermittently for ~6months. He's Polish, and he was telling me that I should look for the seeds and grow some "Black Cranberries" which he was insisting are an American fruit. I thought he might have meant blackcurrant since the plants are kinda similar but he said it wasn't, but there's no such thing as black cranberries. Now I get that what he meant was Aronia.
Been growing maypops since the 90s. Very easy to grow. They're aren't any commercially available named varieties so I have been breeding for the last few years. I've mostly been breeding fro productivity and size. My record plant was 33' tall. I've propogated it twice and had similar results.
You might be able to make money by selling Seeds or graphs. Not sure what would be the best way to grow. There seems to be more people than ever looking for new varieties to grow.
I love this so much!!! THANK YOU!!! We have tons of beautiful, huge hedge trees on my property. I wanted to tell you many, many people I know including myself and my family STILL use hedge tree branches as fence posts! Man it is the hardest, most rot resistant wood I've personally ever encountered so they indeed do make incredible fence posts. We burn branches we've trimmed or that have blown down in our fun firepit outside & it kicks some serious heat. Amazing heritage tree. Thanks for bringing it up! I did also watch your video dedicated to the hedge apples as well. We all swear they keep bugs away & toss fresh ones around our garage & basement each fall😂 Thanks so much for your educational & fun videos🎉
Cloudberry is eaten as a Christmas dessert in Norway. You eat it together with white cream or some likes to pour high concentrated fat milk on them. We also eat kromkake Christmas crackercake with it too. Cloudberries can be found in the Norwegian mountains. They are hard to find, and that's why they cost a lot in the stores too.
My friend made kromkake for all of his friends for Christmas one year. He did it because he was a poor college student and couldn't afford to buy presents, and also he'd learned how to make it from his grandmother. After that, he was never so poor as that ever again, which is kind of sad, it's been many years and he's never made it again. :(
My wife questions me whenever we go to the supermarket or farmers market and I buy a bunch of different things I’ve never even heard of. I’ve found some really great flavors. The funny thing is that she absolutely loves fruit and vegetables but refuses to try anything new, or if she doesn’t like the way it looks. She doesn’t know what she’s missing, but that’s okay, more for me. Thanks for the great videos and info. Safe travels and good hunting.
I do this too 😂 any new fruit is fair a game and I make my whole family try it. I’ll buy maybe 2 fruits and cut them up so if we don’t like it I haven’t wasted too much money.
@@homesteadgamer1257they’re pretty good, we have a bunch on my property. Taste pretty similar any raspberry or blackberry but maybe a little sour and a bunch of seeds. I have no idea how they got on a list of the weirdest fruits though because they’re one of the least weird wild growing fruits I can think of
15:45 found a bunch of spicebush in Southern Indiana. I dried them and ground them up with serviceberry and chaga to drink as a tea. They smell far better than they taste raw 😂
My neighbors had an Osage orange tree when we were little in California. We were told it was poisonous. We never ate them but used them as soft balls. But we did enjoy their tamarind and pomegranate trees.
It amazes me that I've been watching this channel for 3-4 years and when you publish these top ten videos, I still discover new fruits from old videos that I missed. This video really brightened my day and as always, it makes me excited to buy my own land because I'm going to start collecting interesting and rare plants. Jared, once I'm established in Maine, you and your friends and family will be welcome! 😊❤️
I didn't realize that thimble berries were on the rarer side, we have them growing like crazy on our property, right alongside the blackberries and various other bramble berries. Interesting!
As someone from Missouri and who has been to pretty much every state on the Eastern half of the US, I've been aware of pawpaws my entire life and somehow never had one. I'll have to grab one next time I'm at a farmer's market. I think I've also seen them at our Apple Butter Festival.
I found a nice pawpaw patch on a nature preserve just north of Kansas City. The trees scatter the understory along most of the trails but they aren’t quite big enough or maybe don’t get enough sunlight to produce fruit. There is one secluded area that’s a little bit off the trail right by a stream and that’s where I found the largest pawpaw trees I’ve ever seen! They get loaded with fruits around September/October. I call it the pawpaw grove
I'm always on the lookout for these round September and October. My patch in Kansas can produce hundreds of pounds of large sweet fruits if you catch them at the right time of year
@@KyleTheShaman pawpaws actually are super shade tolerant trees especially in their youth, you may be right that they're not getting enough sunlight to make fruit right now but their evolution strategy essentially boils down to "grow in the shade of a large tree and wait for it to get old and let sunlight release to it later," I'm planting pawpaws in the shade of a giant ash on my property that's on its way out so that there's a nice thicket there in the future :)
@AJ Mentel , I agree that’s what I’ve observed from what the location I mentioned. the paw paw trees on the edge of clearings in dappled shade, or the larger trees which can reach the canopy bear fruit. The young trees are very prevalent in the shady understory, but I think they are waiting their turn for a large shade tree to fall and take advantage of the opportunity before they can fruit.
We are trying to do a orchard of “native” fruit trees. This gives us some good ideas! Thank you. I grew up in NM and never had Yucca fruit. I’m a little upset about it.
My family has lived here in New Mexico since the 1500's and I never knew or heard of the pods being edible. It must be a certain time of year. I'm gonna ask around and see if any of the elders or my Native friends know anything about it. I was super surprised seeing how delicious it looked and will definitely be checking out those yuccas after they flower.
@@discgolfcasados2024 right! I had many friends who families were just like yours figured someone would’ve said some thing. At least my friends that were Navajo. But then maybe they assumed I knew. 🤷♂️
What About Mayhaw? My parent's came from the Georgia range of the plant and their hometown has one of the Mayhaw festivals. Unfortunately the last we got was far too sweet.
Thimbleberries grow *everywhere* in my hometown and you can see them at any roadside in late summer. It's a big local specialty with people selling jams and stuff.
The hedge apple (osage) doesn't repel ALL insects, but its particularly good for spiders. I've witnessed the Wolf (North American tarantula), black widow, and yellow writing spiders fleeing areas where we've placed the cut open portions. Weve used them for generations...
OK first of all, your opening defense of "weird" was fierce and adorable, and we need more of that! Second, the homage to Troy McClure's "juice loosener" was sublime. But honestly, if you're going to make fruit maps of America including Alaska, would it be too much trouble to include your Canadian devotees in the delicious red circles? Or did all the best fruit skip us on the way north? Great video though! Ever thine.
As a Canadian living in the Thousand Islands, many of the native plant life that grows in Northern New York, can be found in my area as well. You just need good eyes to spot them in forested areas, or grow your own versions of these plants in your home garden, if you are able.
First time watching, very entertaining and informative. Love learning about different things from around the world. Also love your T- shirt in this episode.
Living in Australia it has always kinda depressed me that we don’t widely eat *any* of the native plants and even eating things like kangaroo meat are a bit of a fringe phenomenon. I mean I can name about five native plant food sources (and I’ve tried four of them) but realistically there are so many more. Indigenous people still would consume these plants and know traditional cooking and preparation methods but it’s like not a single bit of that knowledge has been disseminated in the wider population. *if anyone reading this thinks I’m wrong GOOD! I would love to be proven wrong on this subject, and please tell me what native plants you eat, grow, forage etc regularly.
I am growing a few different "Kangaroo Apples" here in the United States. They seem to hybridize easily. Some species are tolerant to salt, wet soil, dry soil, shade. Seems like it would make a decent crop, don't know why more people grow it.
Me and my family would always eat the north American passion fruit mentioned in the video and prickly pear cactus fruit. I live in Arizona though so there isn't much fruit growing in this arid hellscape. I agree that native fruit and vegetables should be cultivated and consumed.
@@kylenevel8809 You can process the seed/pod of a few palo verdes(blue and foothills), and ironwood(olneya tesota). You can go to riparian-oasis parks and forage for them. For mesquites, you should watch the mesquite video he did.
It's easy to forget macadamias are Australian natives. Also, a lot of lemon-flavoured things are actually made with limonene extracted from the leaves of Australia's Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) instead of lemon peel, because the process is more cost-effective industrially.
@@kylenevel8809 wolf berries and lots of different cactus fruit besides prickly pear (including many non native ones which are common in yards/landscaping). I think there are a few other kinds of wild berries too.
I live close to Minnesota, and my family does a lot of foraging and hiking. I'm definitely going to be on the lookout for cloudberries this year! Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
My family foraged in Wisconsin and Michigan. 😊 I seem to remember seeing them there. But I don't remember tasting that, so I must have not known what they were.
@@avlinrbdig5715 Yeah, I'm done foraging in marshes or swamps. The one and only time I harvested cattail pollen I waded in the mucky water to get to them. I came out of the water with some kind of very strange bites all over my legs. Big purple sploches that itched like mad and stayed for weeks. I've never stuck a toe in mucky water again. Lol
@@anyascelticcreations might be a lot of weird bugs if you are going bareback into the quagmire... I dont know what you call them, but we have a thing called waders.. used by salmon fishers and others they are like a merger of long waterproof boots and pants in one. They are awesome for many things. However, it isnt allways easy to know how deep you'll sink tho. Long waterproof boots will help alot too, but not for wading through the quagmire. It is allways smart to have some extra "area" of dry boot to protect in case you suddenly sink unexpectedly deep.. instead of spending all the real-estate all at once and gambling
Once my grandmother was picking cloudberries she unexpectedly dropped into the quagmire and got stuck up to her shoulders. Was lucky to have my aunt pull her out :D
This video was very informative. I didn't realize that there were so many exotic and mostly unknown fruits that grow wild in the USA. Thank-you, Jared, for sharing this knowledge with us.
7:59 I've found this berry and eaten it while I've gone on hikes near where I live. I thought it was a wild raspberry. Cool to learn it is called a thimbleberry.
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I ate it in canada, there was an old lady who seemed to know a lot about foraging and she showed us thimbleberries (she called them salmon berries), gooseberries, and she made us tea out of staghorn sumac berries. It was a great experience
If you're in the east, we don't have wild red raspberries as far north as Thimbleberries grow. Ours are black. They're smaller than the blackberries & hollow on top, plus often more of a dark purple color than straight black.
Again, utterly fascinating. I want to try all of those fruits and berries now. Also, the short scenes of Lapland at the end were just gorgeous - this is why it's always watching your videos right to the end. Oh, and the Divine t-shirt has me consumed with envy. All round, many thanks, as usual.
As I suspected, 10,000 -13,000 years ago, woolly mammoths, ground-sloths, and several other now extinct mammals ate the Osage orange fruits. Which is why the trees are so rare now...
Jared, you should get in touch with Matt and Megan from Wanderlust and ask them about the Osoberry. Osoberry is a tiny little stone fruit native to the PNW west of the Cascade range (in fact, I think it's one of the few edible fruits that's actually native to the area). I spent most of my life being completely ignorant to the existence of these things and as soon as I identified them, I started spotting them everywhere. It's weird how that works... "were these always here like this?"
Osoberries are delicious! There were some growing near a house I rented in Seattle. I lived there several years, and picked and ate osoberries every year.
I've been picking thimble berries in NH and vt my whole life and really thought they were wild raspberries. They always seemed to grow around blackberries which are my favorite. I got lucky and had a house beside an abandoned blueberry farm in Bath,NH and would mow in-between the rows and have fresh berries all season. To keep thimble berries we would freeze on a cookie sheet before bagging and had wild berries all year for many years. And I ended up growing strawberrys. Started with 6 plants and learned fast they run and my garden became my strawberry patch and made a new garden beside it.. well worth it.. Sure miss that house for the berries.
The pawpaws that grow where i live in Northern Virginia are smaller than all those you showed, and look like skinny mangoes. The skin is green and yellow when ripe. It has a very large pit, with sweet fruit reminiscent of both banana and mango. i know where to find them, and it’s a highlight of late July/early August for me on one of my hiking trails.
Try making aronia-berry kombucha. I did it with blueberry and elderberry. The kombucha is slightly sweet and it adds the sweetness to the boring, or tart berries (like blueberries), and the berry gives the kombucha a fruity flavor. It’s my favorite flavor of homemade kombucha. And you can’t taste the 1% alcohol.
Very informative and entertaining. Can relate, being a frog nerd for over 40+ years. Everything is connected and the more you learn about a specific topic (plant, animal, etc.) you realize you learning information you had no intention when you embarked on the initial journey. I have assimilated so much by studying/researching/keeping 1 species versus what I learned in school/college. Just learned more about native fruit in U.S. just by watching you vid. Thanks buddy.
Dude, you've definitely inspired my buddy Jeff and me to buy tons of tropical fruit (usually from Miami Fruit, or at Wegman's or the local farmer's market) and we've discovered that buying and discussing fruit is a hobby we both really enjoy. And I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't searched for "weird fruit" on TH-cam and found you! Thanks so much, Jared!
I remember running into a rare fruit I was told was "Bush fig" They are very good, and made some of the best jam.. thimble berries, huckleberry, salmon berry.. so many wonderful native fruits in the USA
Finally some stuff that I'm actually growing! Many of these are actually available to buy in various nurseries, and have done relatively well in western Washington. I'm hoping that I'll begin to be able to eat some of these fruits pretty soon.
The intro to this is exactly why I've said good things about you, it's literally what i see. Thank you. Also i had this thought before i had ever seen that this is going to somewhat answer a fruit question i had. Thank you for that too. Edit: (after watching more than just the intro when i had commented this) You've answered so many questions that i didn't even know/think i would have with this one video that i still don't know what to say other than your videos are some of the best I've ever seen. I've seen many and often enough it's a visual portion of research but i think it's maybe that your's has a better intention.
Holy s*** I've never known anyone outside of my immediate family to know what a pawpaw is. We have a decent chunk of land in southwest MO where the pawpaw tree grows wild, and I absolutely love them! The taste to me is similar to a mango, we also made wine with them and that was great too!
Thimble berries were a super fun treat we would find while hiking in Oregon, want a fun outdoor activity the whole family will love find a guide, or a book and stroll down a hiking trail looking for edibles. Usually the lesser known trails offer the best gifts. Ask locals is also a good way to find gifts.
I lived in Oregon for a couple years. I really loved the availibility of the the " pick your own fruit" berry farms. That is where I discovered Huckleberry, and Marion Berry. I worked as an arborist and was amazed how well Blackberries take over areas that were disturbed then not maintained. I'm from Ohio and Blackberries are very common here but they don't grow like trees lol. Also Hazel Nut trees grow here but not like they do out there. My employer sent me to a job with instructions to remove a row of "Filbert" trees and their saplings from a customers property line. I told my boss that I hadn't ever seen a Filbert tree. He said thet the home owner would point out the trees needing removal. The home ow er showed me a row of Hazelnuts and I told her that they were. She replied with "Yeah I know." Lol I didn't but now I do. Also I was so cool buying smoked Salmon from the Natives when I worked closer to the coast.
These are great! In eastern Ohio, I've found and consumed the pawpaw, thimble berry, mayapple (only one or two a year and only the whiteish ones!) and spicebush (not my favorite, kind of turpentiny pepper). Autumn olive (not native and pretty invasive) is pretty common and very tasty, though also has a big seed versus flesh, so another one good jam. Osage orange, though... Well done. I like the child learning aspect... Haven't found persimmon, maypop, cloudberry. I've seen yucca plants as an ornamental, but haven't thought about harvesting the fruit.
Central/southern Ohio here. Never find ripe mayapples, always green or gone... But will have to look harder. Never seen a cloudberry, and never considered yucca, but have seen it. Osage orange is not something I'd ever considered eating, though it makes for great throwing across the road at a target tree :). It's heartwood is very pretty too. I've ejoyed persimmons, pawpaw, maypop, and spicebush. My favorites not listed today • service or saskatoon berry • autumn olive • ground cherry • elderberry Guess they're not weird enough!
I got lucky with some Mayapples last year. They were growing along a railway line, under some bushes. I think it was too much in the open for the animals to risk it, so they left a few alone down there. I guess the plant produces an irritant oil similar to poison ivy, but you collect the fruit in August, when the plant begins dying, & is no longer producing those oils. Plus, you wouldn't eat the skin. From Northeast Ohio. So far, I've tried wild strawberries, chokecherries, nannyberries, mulberry, Mayapple, haws, black raspberry, blackberry & dewberry. We also have Juniper berries, a small patch of native wild roses, hickory nuts, butternut, hazelnuts & a handful of other edibles I haven't tried yet. Also been planting some other natives lately- blueberry, ground cherry, deerberry, persimmon, cranberry, bearberry, chokeberry, strawberry bite, black cherry, Hackberry, Kentucky Coffeetree, etc- so we'll see what comes of all that over the next few months.
@@mannurse7421 I get it. I have only tried the whitish ones and usually find a few "ripe" ones in large patches that hadn't been thoroughly rooted through or isolated plants that are just missed. I usually chomp into it and then spit out the seeds. Worth a taste of you find one. When I first tried autumn olive, my friend was sceptical and said, "We have an hour walk to get back here... If you are still alive and not puking your guts out, I'll give them a try." And, he did...
I've eaten them all, except for mayapple, because we were taught they were poisonous. You may want to look into the mayhaw, not related at all, which grows in the South and is mostly used to make very delicious jelly, plus, no chance of getting poisoned. Also, the people of Sápmi generally considered the term lapland to be a derogatory term.
I grew up on my grandparents (plant) nursery in Ohio. Along the edge of the property, we had these weird green things that we couldn't eat. Grandma told me they were called Monkey brains. Wood was very very hard as I recall and had thorns I think. Later on, I learned about the Osage orange and realized that's what they are. Likely that property was originally a farm in the early 1900s and they used that tree as a hedge. Pretty neat.
Yep. Osage is an amazing tree. You really only find it, in the northern Midwest states, in fence rows that people intentionally planted century’s ago. The wood is insanely hard, strong and resistant to rot. Posts made from the wood can last centuries unlike most other North American woods that become weak after less than a decade of exposure to the elements.
We had these all over the woods where I lived in southern Missouri when I was growing up. We called them Horse Apples. I had never heard of any part of them being edible before though and we just ignored them.
Osage oranges are here in Tennessee as well. We have always called them hedge apples. I had no idea they were edible either, although the horses love them.
@@Banapis I'm from southeastern Ohio and we call them hedge apples here too. I've use them around the perimeter of my home to keep vermin out. Critters do. It like the sticky interior of the fruit and others do not like the vapors put out by the fruit when cut open.
I live in Texas and have tried the flower of the yucca plant. It's tasted like soap and flower, but still fun to try out. Perhaps next year I can try cooking the petals
When I lived on Kodiak Island I had a secret blueberry patch, and I was delighted to find that cloudberries grew all around them. I searched out a tidy amount, and then took a break and ate them slowly, enjoying the scenery and listening for bears!
Really cool video man. I never knew that Osage orange fruit had any uses. I have several growing in my yard. They are also called Bois d'arc which is French for wood for bows.
I live in Alaska and we have those thimble berries, as well as raspberries growing in our yard, quite delicious. Finally got a large amount of low-bush blueberries as well! Fantastic video! Got my sub!
Hey, thimbleberries used to grow on my grandparents farm! Also had them in the backyard of a house they got later on. Love those things! Greetings from Wisconsin :D
The Osage Orange now grows here in Nebraska . . . there's a row planted along the country dirt road about 4 miles from me. However, I learned about them in North Carolina. We use the whole fruit, set on a plate, to keep our basement spider-free. A grove in the pasture provides an insect-free shade space for livestock, if the trees are limbed up.
Cloudberries are also known as bake apples, and grow in the Atlantic provinces, and are especially abundant all over Newfoundland. Newfoundland and Labrador are also home to squashberries. These are deep red berries, from which a luscious red jelly is made. It is served like cranberry sauce, but has a more complex flavor. The drawback? The jelly smells like dirty socks when you open the jar
Thimble berries are great! I love finding them around town in my western city. I have never heard of a Texas persimmon, before, but I would LOVE to try one!
For getting rid of insects and spiders, you scatter Osage oranges around your the outside of your house. Inside, you put the WHOLE fruit into a paper bag, set it in a corner of a room, and let it dry out. It doesn't rot - it gets hard. While drying, it releases a chemical that works sort of like deet to repel insects. On the years I forget to scatter them around my porch, we will have a ton of spiders during the summer, but on years I remember them, we have almost zero spiders.
Love your shirt! I have a Pink Flamingos shirt in white that I have worn for about thirty years. I have never seen another Divine shirt. Great video too!
I was heart broken when I found out not only mangos, but also my favorite fruit, sapotes (aka custard apple, right?) were high fodmap, but hearing paw paw is similar (and according to the internet, Low fodmap!) is wonderful news! 🥳💚 Thanks again WE! Ooo, and looking ahead I see you’re covering one of my other faves, Thimbleberries! They grow like mad on my dad’s property so every summer I’m grabbin all I can reach! Can’t eat the blackberries anymore, so I’m very thankful for those & huckleberries! Here’s hoping you mention the texture, one of the many reasons I love them.
Thanks for reviewing these! Speaking of Aronia, do you remember in the 90s when Ocean Spray introduced Aronia juice blends? The Cran-Aronia was really good.
I'm fairly positive I've seen cloudberries grow out here in Portland. The first time I came here I stayed at a hotel just outside of PDX and encountered a bunch of plants growing a single fruit that looked exactly like cloudberries. Later that day I would see some homeless dude frolicking up the street and would pick these berries, eat them, then continue onto his adventure.
I found you purely by accident and am just delighted by your exploration of fruit. And you ranked one of my favourites as 1: Bakeapples, as we call them in my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, or cloudberries as they are called elsewhere. I've picked a few here in Nova Scotia too, but mostly I just buy the cloudberry and partridgeberry preserves from Ikea.
In my hometown in VT we call thimbleberries "purple flowering raspberries". Also, there is a species of serviceberry that grows locally around Killington which has delicious berries, I'm not sure which species it is but we call them "shadberries".
@@jonathanielpringlemaniii maybe? The ones I'm thinking of are red when ripe, I've never seen them go purple or blueish colored. Also they have very few berries on each tree, a 15-foot tall tree would have roughly 100 berries total on it. Perhaps the low number of berries is because they're growing wild - I've never seen cultivated ones.
I don't drink either and I love everything about your description of the chokeberry juice! I also want to try the spice bush because I love the flavor of black pepper but I don't do too well with heat because for some reason it makes me cough. I grew up in NY and a neighbor in my building enlightened me about mulberries in Central Park. I love the white mulberries because they don't stain and I think they taste the best.
So cool! We have thimbleberries in Massachusetts I guess. I remember putting what I thought was wild raspberries on my fingers when I was a kid. They still grow near my house. I love this channel. When I was little we didn’t have much money but my mom always bought weird or different fruit when she saw it for us to try. I do this now with my own daughter.
Man, I feel like I missed out. At my childhood home, we had plenty of Maypops. My dad taught us that you can throw them on the ground and they "may pop" when they land. Me and my brother had fun finding and throwing them. I always thought they looked kind of slimey and gross on the inside, but after hearing about his experience, I realize I probably missed out on good treat, that grew wild in my area.
I've been trying to identify a fruit I encountered on the Yucatan Peninsula, when I was a kid. According to locals stories it's one of those fruits that makes the monkeys drunk. While the fruit is still in the tree it is about the size of a golfball or a pingpong ball. It has a thin, hard, leathery, shell or peel. The fruit has the color, texture, and firmness of ripe Cantaloupe. I think it also tasted like super sweet Cantaloupe, but that memory is tougher to recall. They looked like yellow eyeballs and the Spanish name fore them might have referenced that. I was only 13 at the time (1984) but I remember fighting tree climbing goats, iguanas, and waves butterflies for the eyeball fruit. I was probably trying to see if they actually made you drunk. Stick me in the wilderness and I'd still figure out how to get in trouble, lol! I'm thinking that to get the drunk part of the story you might have to be willing to eat the rotten ones off the ground.
@@M3GAM0LLY I'm gonna say most who experience this fruit, get lost thinking its name containing lime or referring to limes, due to its appearance, are what causes people to think these aren't tasty to directly eat. They are amazing, actually. I remember the cruise I took with family in 95', we where around the Carribean, and my friend on that cruise was a young Spanish youth. He showed these to my brother and I and said they where his favorite thing about returning home. I now wondered for years what these where. These are what those where, after careful reading and comparison to memory.
@@samsmom1491 Cape Gooseberries are actually sold in farmer's markets and stores like Whole Foods, though I prefer not to shop there. They're nightshades, so they're related to tomatoes and goji berries, and I'm hoping they grow in the same conditions as my tomatoes. They're not the same as the gooseberries that are perennial to zone 7 where I live, but they can still be grown as an annual, which I'm doing now with seeds I saved from a batch. The ones I originally got the seeds from were slightly smaller than grape tomatoes.
Sounds like Quenepas to me. Pretty popular in Puerto Rico and they sell them in NYC during the summer. The skin is more of a rind/shell, the pulp is orange/yellow and soft while being quite fibrous. It may sound gross but the pulp always reminds me of a moist fur texture. Very large pit. Like 80% if it's total size is a round pale pit. Definitely a unique fruit, nothing else quite like it from what I've come across.
This has been such a fascinating video, my life is so blessed that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted when asked last Christmas. My husband surprised me with a TH-cam subscription and I love watching videos like this one, seeing people like yourself sharing their passion. Plus I learned that if I was desperate enough I COULD eat a Horse Apple lol, since I’m here in Texas. Now my dearest friend a true Sage full of wisdom always gathered Horse Apples when they fell, and placed them around the exterior perimeter of her home, and never had issues with spiders, bugs, insects etc. I have forgotten about this, and she’s in an Alzheimer’s unit now, thanks for this reminder.
I found a cloudberry for the first time last summer, while I was working in northwestern Quebec, Canada! I recognized it on the forest floor thanks to your video. It was very tasty!
We definitely have the same problem in Australia of native fruits being really rare here. Exception being macadamias, of course, though even then you'll never see fresh ones in most of the country
As a kid in Hawaii I used to be able to buy a bag, 1-2 lbs, of raw macadamias in the shell for only a few dollars. I'd sit on the rough asphalt of our driveway (kept them in place) and would pop 'em with a hammer and eat them.
To be fair, Australia has a vibrant population of large bird species like magpies and cockatoos. They would be the ones who feast heartily on those native fruits.
Americans shamefully neglect native treasures while spending insane amounts of money on delicate exotics.They have been brought up to think of native plants as "weeds"and to value something difficult to grow from a faraway and unsuitable climate.More stuff like this video should be made to educate them.I has some native persimmons and a yard man I was interviewing was so ignorant he wanted to cut them down and take the wood for his brother's BBQ pit.He did not get hired.
I have seen it blamed on decades of extremely effective marketing from herbicide companies. That’s why everything that naturally wants to grow in your area is a “weed.”
Thimbleberries: add the Olympic Peninsula of Washington to its range. I grew up with them in Forks. We had a wild one growing next to the garage. They are mostly seeds and not all that tasty, IMO.
Damn, must be a regional variety or something then? The seeds on the ones here aren't very noticable, not anymore than other brambles. They're like a sweeter softer raspberry.
Yeah we have them on Vancouver Island, they are soft and rather tasteless, with lots of tiny seeds. I prefer raspberries. Thimbleberries are kind of like eating paper in flavour.
Mulberries are pretty common in the wild here in Michigan. I made a juice out of them once, it was pretty interesting. The fruit by itself is simply sweet and tasty, but in juice form was actually slightly spicy.
I used to eat myself sick on mulberries every summer as a kid, and you could tell if they were in season by checking the soles of my feet. We still have mulberry trees in the yard but now I leave the berries for the birds.
Lived in Grand Ledge, Michigan. Wild Mulberries were tall and cursed ! by Oldsmobile, and other car owners, as Mulberries in bird droppings etched the Merry Oldsmobile hoods. "HOODALUMES" -birds?
This is so cool, i never knew someone so fanatic of tasting all of the weird fruits in the world like me! You are awesome! A month ago i went to Ushuaia to try wild apples and "pan de indio", i also wanted to try calafate berries but for that i would have to go in november
my apartment complex in nashville tennessee had osage oranges EVERYWHERE on one particular street, it felt kind of magical because it was some random (mostly) inedible fruit that only grew in one single place. I always feared getting hit in the head with one because they were very hard, and the street always had a very distinct and kind of bitter smell to it. it's very nostalgic for me though and my dream house would have one in the yard if its legal to do that
Texas persimmons are really good and grow everywhere in the central TX hill country. I’ve notice certain bushes produce bigger, sweeter and more fruit than others and I visit these on hike when in season. Surprised that you haven’t had Turks cap (Malvaviscus arboreus) on here yet. The fruit is quite good.
I love pawpaw! A friend gave me some. It had been growing for a long time in her parents yard. They had no idea what it was. Took YEARS to finally put out fruit. I collected the seeds from the few pawpaw I ate, but don't have the space to plant them yet. (I live in Upstate NY)
Very cool video, I learned a lot. Surprisingly I've never seen the inside of a hedgeapple, we have a tree growing in our front yard for the past 20yrs and I've never thought to cut one open for a look, had no idea they were edible, even for animals. I also had no idea that mayapples produce a single edible, fruit. I live in Missouri, people always say when you see mayapples you will see morel mushrooms, but I've literally never once found morels by mayapples.
Also in Missouri, and I've only ever found one morel with a may apple, and this is YEARS of hunting. Lol they also say that may apples tell you it's time to look for morels, but I've always found morels first!
@@mistyize I must admit that it's been years since I last went morel hunting, and prior to that I didn't put in a ton of effort to find them, not the way some of my friends do, so that's most likely why I've been unsuccessful at finding large quantities... but, the few times I went hunting & found some, they were never by mayapples, but it was mayapple season. I have a friend (in Missouri) who is a total fungus nut, she finds all kinds of edible mushrooms in the woods around her house, including morels. It amazes me what she's able to find. She must live in an area that is packed full, b/c my parent's house is surrounded by woods in a remote area & we rarely find mushrooms.
The cloud berry is also called salmon berry by natives in Alaska. They use it for alot of things. They take groups of women out several days to gather them, then go home and process them together like a family gathering. It was alot of fun to participate in. I was living in Kotzebue AK at the time. An hour boat ride to the island where the berries grew.
Salmonberry is also the name of a different berry in the PNW, that looks similar to cloud berries (which we also have) but is definitely not the same. I have some salmonberries in my yard and they are flavorless.
Thimbleberries grow abundantly where I live! As well as blackberries. I pick them and freeze them and they last me the whole year; my daughter loves them as a frozen treat on the hotter days ❤
Full episodes of fruit featured in this video:
1. Pawpaw: th-cam.com/video/zUy2O3qDT8I/w-d-xo.html
2. Texas Persimmon: th-cam.com/video/uOVABtwmbmo/w-d-xo.html
3. Maypop: th-cam.com/video/HIHENM15__M/w-d-xo.html
4. Thimbleberry: th-cam.com/video/22zt5fyyG8Q/w-d-xo.html
5. Yucca: th-cam.com/video/2j_TvrLhoT0/w-d-xo.html
6. Osage Orange: th-cam.com/video/40U8F8ZD9f0/w-d-xo.html
7. Mayapple: th-cam.com/video/0vl8h0dN0e0/w-d-xo.html
8. Spiceberry: th-cam.com/video/PkD8KUjyRRo/w-d-xo.html
9. Chokeberry: th-cam.com/video/gnHvFhOjRpM/w-d-xo.html
10. Cloudberry: th-cam.com/video/agnuTbXuXu0/w-d-xo.html
Would like to see a review on a ripe Pink Crabapple, and a underrated species found in the Midwest, here in MN I'm always on the lookout for the trees
It is "weird" that you apologized for your channel'name...weird,yes You are...
Paw paw...every year I watched treasure hunter aquachigger eat that.
And we know you like yuca...
MayPop, when I was a small, we called them Railroad Fruit. Because we would find them near railroad tracks
I have maypop which grows seasonally in my yard, they take ages to ripen here in Northern North Carolina but they taste like a milder and sweeter purple passion fruit (sorry not super imaginative, my sense of taste isn’t great) with a noticeable tang at the end. Also there ain’t no “may” about them popping when you step on em, it’s like stepping on a small balloon
@@gonorrheadischarges3021 hhh
When I was a young kid like 7/8 we had a persimmon tree in our back yard, every year I'd gorge myself on persimmons. We only stayed in that house for a few years and after we moved I greatly missed that tree. When I got older I went on a hunt for persimmons like the ones we had at that house but I could never find them. Every time I described them as small and black with a large seed I'd get strange looks, thank you for helping me find an actual name for the persimmons I ate as a kid!
We had persimmon wars with the neighbor kids. Stick a semi mushy persimmon on the end of a long flexible stick or branch and give it a fling. They'd whistle through the air.
Texas. Black, marble sized very sweet persimmons. Trees grow wild. Called Black persimmons.
I feel the same way about the giant gravinsteen apple tree in my grandmas back yard. Every couple years they would grow as big as grapefruit and juicy as pears. I would give about anything for one more basket of them to turn into apple butter or just one to eat.
What parts of Texas were y’all in? I loved in Dallas for years and never saw those, although we did have Osage orange there. We called them horse apples
@@andrefromelpasotexas3236 At the time we were living just south of Corpus Christi
The Osage Orange is known to my family as Spider Balls. We leave them whole in a bowl as decor and noticed we were no longer plagued by wolf spiders when they were present. Huge improvement to our quality of life, plus they are visually cool.
God i thought these were fake, I've only heard of them from this youtube video doing a deep dive on Adult Swim's "This House has People in It"
thats funny im from indiana and call them the same thing grew up with my dad putting them in when it starts to get cold and the usual 10-20 wolf spiders would go too almost zero it seems, always wondered if they were a fruit.
If you're plagued by Wolf Spiders then you must have a lot of other venomous spiders as that is the Wolf Spiders favorite food.
Growing up we called them 'hedge trees' and the fruit were hedge balls. That's because the wood was often used in fences. They were notorious for re-growing from the stumps and even from the cut trunks when used as fence posts. The 'fruits' were also notorious. Supposedly if cows ate hedge balls it would taint their milk and turn it green. There were several trees in our neighborhood, and the kids were set to policing the hedge balls and disposing of them before they could rot and release their seeds.
We also call them Horse Apples in Wichita
I used to pick cloud berries when I lived in Alaska. There was never enough to make jam but I cut it with salmon berries & that was some of the best jam I ever had. It definitely didn't last long.
Hell yeah
How weird would peanut butter and cloud berry / salmon berry jam be
At first I did think they were salmonberries. I lived in Western Oregon and could find salmonberries in the forests but there were never very many.
My grandma Susie had a Yucca plant out by the driveway. She called it "Soapweed," because one could make soap from the roots. I thought she was making it up. "Oh, Grandma Susie, why would you say a thing like that?" She was so tolerant and kind. I wish I had been less skeptical.
Isn't it peculiar how we disregard the words of our elders and all our "kooky aunts" and "weird uncles" as children, but as we get older, and they invariably vanish into time, we realize how wise and full of useful tidbits they were?
@@ralphralpherson9441 Hence my Grandfather and I Quote... ' Wish in one hand , Shit in the other, See which one fills up first! ". Wise words right there... Applies to Sooo Much ...
@@ralphralpherson9441 yes .. but all too often, for many of us, also bound up W complex family issues, old biases, old attitudes, and/or inherited familial abuse behaviours.
Trying to filter the wisdom & the good memories & retain them can be hard.
Yucca leaves can be used to make soap as well. just pull apart the fibrous strands and rub them back and forth in your hands with some water and it will lather right up. learned that trick on a school field trip decades ago.
@@nothxkbai Cool! Good to know, thanks!
I have pawpaws in my yard. We considered them a weed tree because they grew everywhere. Thought they were poisonous until recently. Probably should try them.
They taste like a chalky banana. Big black seeds.
Where are you? I want to try but I'm in mid mo. The little black berries and hedge apples are all I see around me.
@@michaelblackwell7408 paw paws thrive in Mid MO! The state wildflower nursery in Jeff and University KC both sell trees for planting.
Shoot I'll send you some $ for some to try.
Do it!! They truly are tasty
I recently planted a few pawpaw trees. I did my homework on them and found out why most people don't grow them.
1. they have a tap root so growing them in pots is problematic
2. they need shade when small and sun when big if you want to get a good harvest
3. they require a lot of water but will die if their roots stay wet
4. they are not self fertile and you need 2 different verities to cross pollinate
5. they are pollinated by flies and carrion beetles as their flowers smell like rotten meat.
6. mine are struggling because some bug has been eating the leaves
I just planted two and my goats ate the new leaves🤦🏻♀️ my husband forgot to close the gate. They are leafing again so I’m hoping they survive.
@@Fiona2254 Last year I planted 4 of them. 1 was cut about 2 inches from the ground. That one is behind the others but it still has green buds now.
Good luck
You should be able to hand pollinate them but that sounds like the least of you problems. i really enjoy your videos.
I have a few tree in my yard. The damn racoons eat them just before they get ripe.
Also they are prohibitively expensive to buy. 75$ for a twig half the size of a pencil and you need 2 for this 150$ experiment
When I was about 5 or 6 I noticed that There was a fruit tree in our yard and no one in my family knew what it was. After finding out it was loquats we tried them and they are really delicious.
Loquats are very popular here in Greece; funnily enough, both my family and my wife's have a loquat tree, in spite of being in very different regions in the country!
I’m watching loquats flower at my workplace and looking forward to eating them. Best (generally) free fruit in Australia! Also just a beautiful tree, I’d love one in a garden even if it never fruited.
@@jayolovitt5969 Yeah, here in NZ we have a lot of loquat trees. Never see the fruit for sales though.
@@uiomancannot7931 so true I've never thought about that it's always stealing them from a neighbour's tree haha I wonder why they don't get sold much here 🤔
Used to live in Florida where there are tons. It’s one of my favorite fruits, I wish they shipped/ had any sort of shelf life.
I've picked and enjoyed Texas persimmon around every year. Because the seeds are toxic but the pulp clings to it, and the skin is pretty papery and easy to remove, I crush it and wash the pulp in a sieve, then cook it into a rich, molasses-black fruit butter. Highly sweet, tastes like cooked apple with cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and vanilla, a little chocolate
Good to know!
There's a similar plant that tastes better with a bigger fruit (Diospyros californica). Unfortunately, it's very rare and as the name suggests it's probably from somewhere around California. It's hard to find seeds only. It's hardy to zone 8-ish (there's no problem growing in zone 9 and it can be grown in a container it's a relatively slow grower)
I just eat the seeds, how toxic are they?
@@WeirdExplorer I was expecting to see mayhaws and crabapples included
Texas persimmon seeds aren't toxic to humans or animals, they are commonly eaten by animals and end up in their feces which is a big part of the persimmon's reproduction strategy. Where did you get the idea they are toxic?
Paw Paw fruit grows here in Michigan. I know where a lot of Paw paw fruit trees are along the Clinton River trail. I have a strong allergic reaction to Paw paw fruit for some reason. I blended paw paw up in smoothie machine
As a fruit enthusiast i was really happy to discover this channel. I actually have 5 of these growing in my yard ( pawpaws, mayapples, maypops, thimbleberry and spicebush. )
Fruit gang, makes you feel like it's 1969 peace movement when you grow rare fruit, but you're also an Idian, but you're also spiritually ascended, but also... Well... I'm insanely mentally ill sometimes but that's not my problem.
I have the paw paws and persimmon!
Timestamps
1:18 - Paw Paw
3:30 - Brightland Ad
5:11 - Texas Persimmon
6:43 - Maypops
7:56 - Thimbleberry
9:35 - Yucca
10:56 - Osage Orange
13:55 - Mayapple
15:45 - Spiceberry
16:56 - Chokeberry
18:56 - Cloudberry
Thanks.
A true hero
I was looking at the time stamps like where is hedge apple?? didn't realize it had a different name, and my parents /most the family always thought they were poisonous....lol I'll have to try it, my step dad has a tree in the back pasture that drops these like crazy
& damn I didn't know mayapples fruited either!! I just always see them before flowering in the spring while hunting morels
Rambutan?😊
@@deminybsosage orange
When I was like 8 I found a patch of may apples in the woods and checked them every day to see if they were ripe. My mom and I decided it would be ripe tomorrow, but the next day they were all gone and I was mad about not getting to try it for a while. That was a really weird flash back of something I totally forgot about.
Haaaaa Ha (nelson muntz voice-from the Simpsons)
Thank you for solving an argument I was having with my dad intermittently for ~6months. He's Polish, and he was telling me that I should look for the seeds and grow some "Black Cranberries" which he was insisting are an American fruit. I thought he might have meant blackcurrant since the plants are kinda similar but he said it wasn't, but there's no such thing as black cranberries. Now I get that what he meant was Aronia.
Hellothere. Polak, wegier, dva bratanki, am I right?
Been growing maypops since the 90s. Very easy to grow. They're aren't any commercially available named varieties so I have been breeding for the last few years. I've mostly been breeding fro productivity and size. My record plant was 33' tall. I've propogated it twice and had similar results.
You might be able to make money by selling
Seeds or graphs. Not sure what would be the best way to grow.
There seems to be more people than ever looking for new varieties to grow.
Yeah let me know if you start selling cuttings!
I'd also be interested
I love this so much!!! THANK YOU!!! We have tons of beautiful, huge hedge trees on my property. I wanted to tell you many, many people I know including myself and my family STILL use hedge tree branches as fence posts! Man it is the hardest, most rot resistant wood I've personally ever encountered so they indeed do make incredible fence posts. We burn branches we've trimmed or that have blown down in our fun firepit outside & it kicks some serious heat. Amazing heritage tree. Thanks for bringing it up! I did also watch your video dedicated to the hedge apples as well. We all swear they keep bugs away & toss fresh ones around our garage & basement each fall😂 Thanks so much for your educational & fun videos🎉
I also watched your cloudberry video😂 I absolutely LOVE your videos & exploration so very much😊
Cloudberry is eaten as a Christmas dessert in Norway. You eat it together with white cream or some likes to pour high concentrated fat milk on them. We also eat kromkake Christmas crackercake with it too. Cloudberries can be found in the Norwegian mountains. They are hard to find, and that's why they cost a lot in the stores too.
i had no idea it is native to the US. I allways had it when visiting firends in Narvik
My friend made kromkake for all of his friends for Christmas one year. He did it because he was a poor college student and couldn't afford to buy presents, and also he'd learned how to make it from his grandmother. After that, he was never so poor as that ever again, which is kind of sad, it's been many years and he's never made it again. :(
My wife questions me whenever we go to the supermarket or farmers market and I buy a bunch of different things I’ve never even heard of. I’ve found some really great flavors. The funny thing is that she absolutely loves fruit and vegetables but refuses to try anything new, or if she doesn’t like the way it looks. She doesn’t know what she’s missing, but that’s okay, more for me. Thanks for the great videos and info. Safe travels and good hunting.
I do this too 😂 any new fruit is fair a game and I make my whole family try it. I’ll buy maybe 2 fruits and cut them up so if we don’t like it I haven’t wasted too much money.
I have always wondered about Osage orange. Thanks.
Thumbleberries filled with a lil bit of softened and sweetened cream cheese is INSANELY good.
My God that sounds amazing. Like dates almost.
@@homesteadgamer1257they’re pretty good, we have a bunch on my property. Taste pretty similar any raspberry or blackberry but maybe a little sour and a bunch of seeds. I have no idea how they got on a list of the weirdest fruits though because they’re one of the least weird wild growing fruits I can think of
i do that with raspberries, i stuff the inside with yogurt lol
I live in NH and know where alot of thimble berries grow wild. They're so freaking good
Ohh that sounds good
The truly weird fruit were the friends we made along the way .
Isn't that what we're here for?
Best comment 🤣
ayo?
Wdym?
Weren't they made into fruitcakes?
15:45 found a bunch of spicebush in Southern Indiana. I dried them and ground them up with serviceberry and chaga to drink as a tea.
They smell far better than they taste raw 😂
My neighbors had an Osage orange tree when we were little in California. We were told it was poisonous. We never ate them but used them as soft balls. But we did enjoy their tamarind and pomegranate trees.
Have these growing in bergen County nj at the post office.... I been trying to figure out what it was
Same here in northeastern Oklahoma.
It amazes me that I've been watching this channel for 3-4 years and when you publish these top ten videos, I still discover new fruits from old videos that I missed.
This video really brightened my day and as always, it makes me excited to buy my own land because I'm going to start collecting interesting and rare plants. Jared, once I'm established in Maine, you and your friends and family will be welcome! 😊❤️
I didn't realize that thimble berries were on the rarer side, we have them growing like crazy on our property, right alongside the blackberries and various other bramble berries. Interesting!
As someone from Missouri and who has been to pretty much every state on the Eastern half of the US, I've been aware of pawpaws my entire life and somehow never had one. I'll have to grab one next time I'm at a farmer's market. I think I've also seen them at our Apple Butter Festival.
I found a nice pawpaw patch on a nature preserve just north of Kansas City. The trees scatter the understory along most of the trails but they aren’t quite big enough or maybe don’t get enough sunlight to produce fruit. There is one secluded area that’s a little bit off the trail right by a stream and that’s where I found the largest pawpaw trees I’ve ever seen! They get loaded with fruits around September/October. I call it the pawpaw grove
I'm always on the lookout for these round September and October. My patch in Kansas can produce hundreds of pounds of large sweet fruits if you catch them at the right time of year
@@KyleTheShaman pawpaws actually are super shade tolerant trees especially in their youth, you may be right that they're not getting enough sunlight to make fruit right now but their evolution strategy essentially boils down to "grow in the shade of a large tree and wait for it to get old and let sunlight release to it later," I'm planting pawpaws in the shade of a giant ash on my property that's on its way out so that there's a nice thicket there in the future :)
@AJ Mentel , I agree that’s what I’ve observed from what the location I mentioned. the paw paw trees on the edge of clearings in dappled shade, or the larger trees which can reach the canopy bear fruit. The young trees are very prevalent in the shady understory, but I think they are waiting their turn for a large shade tree to fall and take advantage of the opportunity before they can fruit.
There are some in some of the wilderness areas around Columbia, but the largest patch I've seen is south of Van Buren at Big Springs.
We are trying to do a orchard of “native” fruit trees. This gives us some good ideas! Thank you. I grew up in NM and never had Yucca fruit. I’m a little upset about it.
My family has lived here in New Mexico since the 1500's and I never knew or heard of the pods being edible. It must be a certain time of year. I'm gonna ask around and see if any of the elders or my Native friends know anything about it. I was super surprised seeing how delicious it looked and will definitely be checking out those yuccas after they flower.
@@discgolfcasados2024 right! I had many friends who families were just like yours figured someone would’ve said some thing. At least my friends that were Navajo. But then maybe they assumed I knew. 🤷♂️
What About Mayhaw? My parent's came from the Georgia range of the plant and their hometown has one of the Mayhaw festivals. Unfortunately the last we got was far too sweet.
@@JohnSheffield1963 we are actually looking at that.
I knew you could make soap out of yucca root but never knew you could eat the fruit!
Thimbleberries grow *everywhere* in my hometown and you can see them at any roadside in late summer. It's a big local specialty with people selling jams and stuff.
FOUND IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN. ALSO WINTER GREEN (A PITHY RED BERRIES) GROWING TIGHT TO THE GROUND.
The hedge apple (osage) doesn't repel ALL insects, but its particularly good for spiders. I've witnessed the Wolf (North American tarantula), black widow, and yellow writing spiders fleeing areas where we've placed the cut open portions. Weve used them for generations...
That's what I grew up calling them!
Yes, I grew up gathering them with my Grandpa to put around their house.
Spiders aren’t even insects, I think whoever advertised it as repellant got their bug types mixed up
its a old wives tale.... ive debunked it i put 12 hedge apples in a small shed n still had a crap ton of spiders... mind u it was a 8 x 10 shed
@@jlee438 I've seen spiders crawling on them at the grocery store we sold them at.
OK first of all, your opening defense of "weird" was fierce and adorable, and we need more of that! Second, the homage to Troy McClure's "juice loosener" was sublime. But honestly, if you're going to make fruit maps of America including Alaska, would it be too much trouble to include your Canadian devotees in the delicious red circles? Or did all the best fruit skip us on the way north?
Great video though! Ever thine.
As a fellow Canadian I agree with all of this
Yes please
As not a Canadian, yes please. This is the first video I've seen from this guy. Now I gotta go binge. Maps would be awesome.
As a Canadian living in the Thousand Islands, many of the native plant life that grows in Northern New York, can be found in my area as well. You just need good eyes to spot them in forested areas, or grow your own versions of these plants in your home garden, if you are able.
First time watching, very entertaining and informative. Love learning about different things from around the world.
Also love your T- shirt in this episode.
Living in Australia it has always kinda depressed me that we don’t widely eat *any* of the native plants and even eating things like kangaroo meat are a bit of a fringe phenomenon. I mean I can name about five native plant food sources (and I’ve tried four of them) but realistically there are so many more. Indigenous people still would consume these plants and know traditional cooking and preparation methods but it’s like not a single bit of that knowledge has been disseminated in the wider population.
*if anyone reading this thinks I’m wrong GOOD! I would love to be proven wrong on this subject, and please tell me what native plants you eat, grow, forage etc regularly.
I am growing a few different "Kangaroo Apples" here in the United States. They seem to hybridize easily.
Some species are tolerant to salt, wet soil, dry soil, shade.
Seems like it would make a decent crop, don't know why more people grow it.
Me and my family would always eat the north American passion fruit mentioned in the video and prickly pear cactus fruit. I live in Arizona though so there isn't much fruit growing in this arid hellscape. I agree that native fruit and vegetables should be cultivated and consumed.
@@kylenevel8809 You can process the seed/pod of a few palo verdes(blue and foothills), and ironwood(olneya tesota). You can go to riparian-oasis parks and forage for them. For mesquites, you should watch the mesquite video he did.
It's easy to forget macadamias are Australian natives. Also, a lot of lemon-flavoured things are actually made with limonene extracted from the leaves of Australia's Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) instead of lemon peel, because the process is more cost-effective industrially.
@@kylenevel8809 wolf berries and lots of different cactus fruit besides prickly pear (including many non native ones which are common in yards/landscaping). I think there are a few other kinds of wild berries too.
I live close to Minnesota, and my family does a lot of foraging and hiking. I'm definitely going to be on the lookout for cloudberries this year! Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
My family foraged in Wisconsin and Michigan. 😊 I seem to remember seeing them there. But I don't remember tasting that, so I must have not known what they were.
@@anyascelticcreations we usually go in pairs. they often grow in swamps and you might fall down and get stuck lmao
@@avlinrbdig5715 Yeah, I'm done foraging in marshes or swamps. The one and only time I harvested cattail pollen I waded in the mucky water to get to them. I came out of the water with some kind of very strange bites all over my legs. Big purple sploches that itched like mad and stayed for weeks. I've never stuck a toe in mucky water again. Lol
@@anyascelticcreations might be a lot of weird bugs if you are going bareback into the quagmire...
I dont know what you call them, but we have a thing called waders.. used by salmon fishers and others they are like a merger of long waterproof boots and pants in one. They are awesome for many things.
However, it isnt allways easy to know how deep you'll sink tho.
Long waterproof boots will help alot too, but not for wading through the quagmire.
It is allways smart to have some extra "area" of dry boot to protect in case you suddenly sink unexpectedly deep.. instead of spending all the real-estate all at once and gambling
Once my grandmother was picking cloudberries she unexpectedly dropped into the quagmire and got stuck up to her shoulders. Was lucky to have my aunt pull her out :D
This video was very informative. I didn't realize that there were so many exotic and mostly unknown fruits that grow wild in the USA. Thank-you, Jared, for sharing this knowledge with us.
7:59 I've found this berry and eaten it while I've gone on hikes near where I live. I thought it was a wild raspberry. Cool to learn it is called a thimbleberry.
I ate it in canada, there was an old lady who seemed to know a lot about foraging and she showed us thimbleberries (she called them salmon berries), gooseberries, and she made us tea out of staghorn sumac berries. It was a great experience
If you're in the east, we don't have wild red raspberries as far north as Thimbleberries grow. Ours are black. They're smaller than the blackberries & hollow on top, plus often more of a dark purple color than straight black.
@ salmon berries are a different thing, but at least where I'm from in Canada, we call thimble berries salmon berries too
I always thought they were mulberries
@@amethystleopard Not unless it grew on a tree.
Again, utterly fascinating. I want to try all of those fruits and berries now.
Also, the short scenes of Lapland at the end were just gorgeous - this is why it's always watching your videos right to the end.
Oh, and the Divine t-shirt has me consumed with envy.
All round, many thanks, as usual.
As I suspected, 10,000 -13,000 years ago, woolly mammoths, ground-sloths, and several other now extinct mammals ate the Osage orange fruits.
Which is why the trees are so rare now...
And what , pray tell , made you suspect of such ?
Jared, you should get in touch with Matt and Megan from Wanderlust and ask them about the Osoberry. Osoberry is a tiny little stone fruit native to the PNW west of the Cascade range (in fact, I think it's one of the few edible fruits that's actually native to the area). I spent most of my life being completely ignorant to the existence of these things and as soon as I identified them, I started spotting them everywhere. It's weird how that works... "were these always here like this?"
Osoberries are delicious! There were some growing near a house I rented in Seattle. I lived there several years, and picked and ate osoberries every year.
Paw Paw beer has been brewed by Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio breweries and is very special. I'd probably rather have the fruit but it is very unique.
beer, another word that has lost it's meaning and applied all kinds of concoctions.
14:15 I love these! They taste tropical. I know where to find dozens of them. I like to share them with fellow hikers
As a gardener I'm obsessed with this channel
I've been picking thimble berries in NH and vt my whole life and really thought they were wild raspberries. They always seemed to grow around blackberries which are my favorite. I got lucky and had a house beside an abandoned blueberry farm in Bath,NH and would mow in-between the rows and have fresh berries all season. To keep thimble berries we would freeze on a cookie sheet before bagging and had wild berries all year for many years. And I ended up growing strawberrys. Started with 6 plants and learned fast they run and my garden became my strawberry patch and made a new garden beside it.. well worth it.. Sure miss that house for the berries.
The pawpaws that grow where i live in Northern Virginia are smaller than all those you showed, and look like skinny mangoes. The skin is green and yellow when ripe. It has a very large pit, with sweet fruit reminiscent of both banana and mango. i know where to find them, and it’s a highlight of late July/early August for me on one of my hiking trails.
Try making aronia-berry kombucha.
I did it with blueberry and elderberry. The kombucha is slightly sweet and it adds the sweetness to the boring, or tart berries (like blueberries), and the berry gives the kombucha a fruity flavor. It’s my favorite flavor of homemade kombucha. And you can’t taste the 1% alcohol.
Great idea
I heard of pawpaws, but I never knew they were that big! I never knew American persimmons were different from the hachiya and fuyu either.
The channel Emmy Made did a video on Pawpaws.
I found a paw paw tree in franklin tn….I ate it and it was excellent
I have PawPaw trees. These things are all over Ohio in the woods.
Very informative and entertaining. Can relate, being a frog nerd for over 40+ years. Everything is connected and the more you learn about a specific topic (plant, animal, etc.) you realize you learning information you had no intention when you embarked on the initial journey. I have assimilated so much by studying/researching/keeping 1 species versus what I learned in school/college. Just learned more about native fruit in U.S. just by watching you vid. Thanks buddy.
Dude, you've definitely inspired my buddy Jeff and me to buy tons of tropical fruit (usually from Miami Fruit, or at Wegman's or the local farmer's market) and we've discovered that buying and discussing fruit is a hobby we both really enjoy. And I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't searched for "weird fruit" on TH-cam and found you! Thanks so much, Jared!
Glad to hear that!
I remember running into a rare fruit I was told was "Bush fig"
They are very good, and made some of the best jam..
thimble berries, huckleberry, salmon berry..
so many wonderful native fruits in the USA
Thimble berries grow around Skagit River in NW Washington as well. Grew up eating them - they are spectacular!!! 💕
Finally some stuff that I'm actually growing! Many of these are actually available to buy in various nurseries, and have done relatively well in western Washington. I'm hoping that I'll begin to be able to eat some of these fruits pretty soon.
The intro to this is exactly why I've said good things about you, it's literally what i see. Thank you. Also i had this thought before i had ever seen that this is going to somewhat answer a fruit question i had. Thank you for that too.
Edit: (after watching more than just the intro when i had commented this) You've answered so many questions that i didn't even know/think i would have with this one video that i still don't know what to say other than your videos are some of the best I've ever seen. I've seen many and often enough it's a visual portion of research but i think it's maybe that your's has a better intention.
Holy s*** I've never known anyone outside of my immediate family to know what a pawpaw is. We have a decent chunk of land in southwest MO where the pawpaw tree grows wild, and I absolutely love them! The taste to me is similar to a mango, we also made wine with them and that was great too!
I like the (I tried them) since pretty much every Top 10 is fake from copying articles and not actually tasting them
stolen footage, copied information, fake photoshopped thumbnnail, 5 million views. Its infuriating.
don't you get mad when people say cracker lmao
@@LovelyLori193 never
@@WeirdExplorer Bullshit wins in today's algorithm
@@WeirdExplorer lol I'm sure a few will come along and steal this list soon
Thimble berries were a super fun treat we would find while hiking in Oregon, want a fun outdoor activity the whole family will love find a guide, or a book and stroll down a hiking trail looking for edibles. Usually the lesser known trails offer the best gifts. Ask locals is also a good way to find gifts.
I lived in Oregon for a couple years. I really loved the availibility of the the " pick your own fruit" berry farms. That is where I discovered Huckleberry, and Marion Berry. I worked as an arborist and was amazed how well Blackberries take over areas that were disturbed then not maintained. I'm from Ohio and Blackberries are very common here but they don't grow like trees lol. Also Hazel Nut trees grow here but not like they do out there. My employer sent me to a job with instructions to remove a row of "Filbert" trees and their saplings from a customers property line. I told my boss that I hadn't ever seen a Filbert tree. He said thet the home owner would point out the trees needing removal. The home ow er showed me a row of Hazelnuts and I told her that they were. She replied with "Yeah I know." Lol I didn't but now I do. Also I was so cool buying smoked Salmon from the Natives when I worked closer to the coast.
I live in oklahoma and ALWAYS saw osage oranges on the ground (guess we had some trees that grew them) and never knew what they were. So cool!!
These are great! In eastern Ohio, I've found and consumed the pawpaw, thimble berry, mayapple (only one or two a year and only the whiteish ones!) and spicebush (not my favorite, kind of turpentiny pepper).
Autumn olive (not native and pretty invasive) is pretty common and very tasty, though also has a big seed versus flesh, so another one good jam.
Osage orange, though... Well done. I like the child learning aspect...
Haven't found persimmon, maypop, cloudberry.
I've seen yucca plants as an ornamental, but haven't thought about harvesting the fruit.
Ohio is great for rare native fruit
I have mayapple that grows on my land but I'm scurred
Central/southern Ohio here.
Never find ripe mayapples, always green or gone... But will have to look harder. Never seen a cloudberry, and never considered yucca, but have seen it.
Osage orange is not something I'd ever considered eating, though it makes for great throwing across the road at a target tree :). It's heartwood is very pretty too.
I've ejoyed persimmons, pawpaw, maypop, and spicebush.
My favorites not listed today
• service or saskatoon berry
• autumn olive
• ground cherry
• elderberry
Guess they're not weird enough!
I got lucky with some Mayapples last year. They were growing along a railway line, under some bushes. I think it was too much in the open for the animals to risk it, so they left a few alone down there. I guess the plant produces an irritant oil similar to poison ivy, but you collect the fruit in August, when the plant begins dying, & is no longer producing those oils. Plus, you wouldn't eat the skin.
From Northeast Ohio. So far, I've tried wild strawberries, chokecherries, nannyberries, mulberry, Mayapple, haws, black raspberry, blackberry & dewberry. We also have Juniper berries, a small patch of native wild roses, hickory nuts, butternut, hazelnuts & a handful of other edibles I haven't tried yet. Also been planting some other natives lately- blueberry, ground cherry, deerberry, persimmon, cranberry, bearberry, chokeberry, strawberry bite, black cherry, Hackberry, Kentucky Coffeetree, etc- so we'll see what comes of all that over the next few months.
@@mannurse7421 I get it. I have only tried the whitish ones and usually find a few "ripe" ones in large patches that hadn't been thoroughly rooted through or isolated plants that are just missed. I usually chomp into it and then spit out the seeds. Worth a taste of you find one.
When I first tried autumn olive, my friend was sceptical and said, "We have an hour walk to get back here... If you are still alive and not puking your guts out, I'll give them a try." And, he did...
As a forager in the US I LOVE seeing and learning about native edible plants!! Thank you :)
Same!
This was great to watch, thanks for the video! Going to steam mine with Cajun seasoning... Keep you posted!
I've eaten them all, except for mayapple, because we were taught they were poisonous. You may want to look into the mayhaw, not related at all, which grows in the South and is mostly used to make very delicious jelly, plus, no chance of getting poisoned.
Also, the people of Sápmi generally considered the term lapland to be a derogatory term.
And? It's not their land
I grew up on my grandparents (plant) nursery in Ohio. Along the edge of the property, we had these weird green things that we couldn't eat. Grandma told me they were called Monkey brains. Wood was very very hard as I recall and had thorns I think.
Later on, I learned about the Osage orange and realized that's what they are. Likely that property was originally a farm in the early 1900s and they used that tree as a hedge. Pretty neat.
Yep. Osage is an amazing tree. You really only find it, in the northern Midwest states, in fence rows that people intentionally planted century’s ago. The wood is insanely hard, strong and resistant to rot. Posts made from the wood can last centuries unlike most other North American woods that become weak after less than a decade of exposure to the elements.
we always called them crab apples
We had these all over the woods where I lived in southern Missouri when I was growing up. We called them Horse Apples. I had never heard of any part of them being edible before though and we just ignored them.
Osage oranges are here in Tennessee as well. We have always called them hedge apples. I had no idea they were edible either, although the horses love them.
@@Banapis I'm from southeastern Ohio and we call them hedge apples here too. I've use them around the perimeter of my home to keep vermin out. Critters do. It like the sticky interior of the fruit and others do not like the vapors put out by the fruit when cut open.
I live in Texas and have tried the flower of the yucca plant. It's tasted like soap and flower, but still fun to try out. Perhaps next year I can try cooking the petals
When I lived on Kodiak Island I had a secret blueberry patch, and I was delighted to find that cloudberries grew all around them. I searched out a tidy amount, and then took a break and ate them slowly, enjoying the scenery and listening for bears!
Really cool video man. I never knew that Osage orange fruit had any uses. I have several growing in my yard. They are also called Bois d'arc which is French for wood for bows.
We call them hedge apples here in Missouri.
We always called them horse apples. We were also told they were poisonous haha
I live in Alaska and we have those thimble berries, as well as raspberries growing in our yard, quite delicious. Finally got a large amount of low-bush blueberries as well! Fantastic video! Got my sub!
Hey, thimbleberries used to grow on my grandparents farm! Also had them in the backyard of a house they got later on. Love those things! Greetings from Wisconsin :D
The Osage Orange now grows here in Nebraska . . . there's a row planted along the country dirt road about 4 miles from me. However, I learned about them in North Carolina. We use the whole fruit, set on a plate, to keep our basement spider-free. A grove in the pasture provides an insect-free shade space for livestock, if the trees are limbed up.
Beau d'arc
Amazing, I’m learning to subsistence live, and your channel is exactly what I was looking for education wise thank you
Cloudberries are also known as bake apples, and grow in the Atlantic provinces, and are especially abundant all over Newfoundland. Newfoundland and Labrador are also home to squashberries. These are deep red berries, from which a luscious red jelly is made. It is served like cranberry sauce, but has a more complex flavor. The drawback? The jelly smells like dirty socks when you open the jar
Thimble berries are great! I love finding them around town in my western city.
I have never heard of a Texas persimmon, before, but I would LOVE to try one!
You have one of the coolest jobs ever. I loved this particular video. You have definitely made a new fan.
Yay! Thank you!
Great compilation! Osage orange is definitely the weirdest fruit I’ve ever come across in person. They look like something from an alien planet.
Yes, and hedge apples are sticky as heck!
For getting rid of insects and spiders, you scatter Osage oranges around your the outside of your house. Inside, you put the WHOLE fruit into a paper bag, set it in a corner of a room, and let it dry out. It doesn't rot - it gets hard. While drying, it releases a chemical that works sort of like deet to repel insects. On the years I forget to scatter them around my porch, we will have a ton of spiders during the summer, but on years I remember them, we have almost zero spiders.
Love your shirt! I have a Pink Flamingos shirt in white that I have worn for about thirty years. I have never seen another Divine shirt. Great video too!
I was heart broken when I found out not only mangos, but also my favorite fruit, sapotes (aka custard apple, right?) were high fodmap, but hearing paw paw is similar (and according to the internet, Low fodmap!) is wonderful news! 🥳💚 Thanks again WE! Ooo, and looking ahead I see you’re covering one of my other faves, Thimbleberries! They grow like mad on my dad’s property so every summer I’m grabbin all I can reach! Can’t eat the blackberries anymore, so I’m very thankful for those & huckleberries! Here’s hoping you mention the texture, one of the many reasons I love them.
Thanks for reviewing these! Speaking of Aronia, do you remember in the 90s when Ocean Spray introduced Aronia juice blends? The Cran-Aronia was really good.
I ❤ the way you make your presentation. Entertaining while being informative😅😊
I'm fairly positive I've seen cloudberries grow out here in Portland. The first time I came here I stayed at a hotel just outside of PDX and encountered a bunch of plants growing a single fruit that looked exactly like cloudberries. Later that day I would see some homeless dude frolicking up the street and would pick these berries, eat them, then continue onto his adventure.
Those may have been salmon berries, which look like orange blackberries. Salmon berries are native to the Pacific Northwest.
I love your videos so much! Keep doing what you do, you are as special as the fruits and adventures that you share with us ❤
I found you purely by accident and am just delighted by your exploration of fruit. And you ranked one of my favourites as 1: Bakeapples, as we call them in my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, or cloudberries as they are called elsewhere. I've picked a few here in Nova Scotia too, but mostly I just buy the cloudberry and partridgeberry preserves from Ikea.
In my hometown in VT we call thimbleberries "purple flowering raspberries". Also, there is a species of serviceberry that grows locally around Killington which has delicious berries, I'm not sure which species it is but we call them "shadberries".
those are Saskatoon serviceberries!
@@jonathanielpringlemaniii maybe? The ones I'm thinking of are red when ripe, I've never seen them go purple or blueish colored. Also they have very few berries on each tree, a 15-foot tall tree would have roughly 100 berries total on it. Perhaps the low number of berries is because they're growing wild - I've never seen cultivated ones.
I don't drink either and I love everything about your description of the chokeberry juice! I also want to try the spice bush because I love the flavor of black pepper but I don't do too well with heat because for some reason it makes me cough. I grew up in NY and a neighbor in my building enlightened me about mulberries in Central Park. I love the white mulberries because they don't stain and I think they taste the best.
I never ate a white mulberry. I didn't know that they existed. I picked a lot of purple ones though.
So cool! We have thimbleberries in Massachusetts I guess. I remember putting what I thought was wild raspberries on my fingers when I was a kid. They still grow near my house. I love this channel. When I was little we didn’t have much money but my mom always bought weird or different fruit when she saw it for us to try. I do this now with my own daughter.
Man, I feel like I missed out. At my childhood home, we had plenty of Maypops. My dad taught us that you can throw them on the ground and they "may pop" when they land. Me and my brother had fun finding and throwing them. I always thought they looked kind of slimey and gross on the inside, but after hearing about his experience, I realize I probably missed out on good treat, that grew wild in my area.
I've been trying to identify a fruit I encountered on the Yucatan Peninsula, when I was a kid. According to locals stories it's one of those fruits that makes the monkeys drunk. While the fruit is still in the tree it is about the size of a golfball or a pingpong ball. It has a thin, hard, leathery, shell or peel. The fruit has the color, texture, and firmness of ripe Cantaloupe. I think it also tasted like super sweet Cantaloupe, but that memory is tougher to recall. They looked like yellow eyeballs and the Spanish name fore them might have referenced that. I was only 13 at the time (1984) but I remember fighting tree climbing goats, iguanas, and waves butterflies for the eyeball fruit. I was probably trying to see if they actually made you drunk. Stick me in the wilderness and I'd still figure out how to get in trouble, lol! I'm thinking that to get the drunk part of the story you might have to be willing to eat the rotten ones off the ground.
Quenepas?
It could be a Cape Gooseberry or Pineapple Ground Cherry or Craboo (Nance in Spanish). My money's on the Nance.
@@M3GAM0LLY I'm gonna say most who experience this fruit, get lost thinking its name containing lime or referring to limes, due to its appearance, are what causes people to think these aren't tasty to directly eat. They are amazing, actually. I remember the cruise I took with family in 95', we where around the Carribean, and my friend on that cruise was a young Spanish youth. He showed these to my brother and I and said they where his favorite thing about returning home. I now wondered for years what these where. These are what those where, after careful reading and comparison to memory.
@@samsmom1491 Cape Gooseberries are actually sold in farmer's markets and stores like Whole Foods, though I prefer not to shop there. They're nightshades, so they're related to tomatoes and goji berries, and I'm hoping they grow in the same conditions as my tomatoes. They're not the same as the gooseberries that are perennial to zone 7 where I live, but they can still be grown as an annual, which I'm doing now with seeds I saved from a batch. The ones I originally got the seeds from were slightly smaller than grape tomatoes.
Sounds like Quenepas to me. Pretty popular in Puerto Rico and they sell them in NYC during the summer.
The skin is more of a rind/shell, the pulp is orange/yellow and soft while being quite fibrous.
It may sound gross but the pulp always reminds me of a moist fur texture. Very large pit. Like 80% if it's total size is a round pale pit.
Definitely a unique fruit, nothing else quite like it from what I've come across.
The last minute of the video definitely earned my subscription. I love the personality and knowledgeability that you bring the video
This has been such a fascinating video, my life is so blessed that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted when asked last Christmas. My husband surprised me with a TH-cam subscription and I love watching videos like this one, seeing people like yourself sharing their passion. Plus I learned that if I was desperate enough I COULD eat a Horse Apple lol, since I’m here in Texas. Now my dearest friend a true Sage full of wisdom always gathered Horse Apples when they fell, and placed them around the exterior perimeter of her home, and never had issues with spiders, bugs, insects etc. I have forgotten about this, and she’s in an Alzheimer’s unit now, thanks for this reminder.
I found a cloudberry for the first time last summer, while I was working in northwestern Quebec, Canada! I recognized it on the forest floor thanks to your video. It was very tasty!
Omg! I love your couch!❤ and I love food history! Fascinating!
Hey love your content. We need more flavors in our food arsenal
We definitely have the same problem in Australia of native fruits being really rare here.
Exception being macadamias, of course, though even then you'll never see fresh ones in most of the country
As a kid in Hawaii I used to be able to buy a bag, 1-2 lbs, of raw macadamias in the shell for only a few dollars. I'd sit on the rough asphalt of our driveway (kept them in place) and would pop 'em with a hammer and eat them.
@@alexcarter8807 damn I wish I could do that. Macadamias are so ludicrously expensive
To be fair, Australia has a vibrant population of large bird species like magpies and cockatoos. They would be the ones who feast heartily on those native fruits.
These days finger lime is a delicacy too.
The shells are ridiculously hard. My father bought some unshelled once.
Americans shamefully neglect native treasures while spending insane amounts of money on delicate exotics.They have been brought up to think of native plants as "weeds"and to value something difficult to grow from a faraway and unsuitable climate.More stuff like this video should be made to educate them.I has some native persimmons and a yard man I was interviewing was so ignorant he wanted to cut them down and take the wood for his brother's BBQ pit.He did not get hired.
Ermmm west has fallen and billions must die….
I have seen it blamed on decades of extremely effective marketing from herbicide companies.
That’s why everything that naturally wants to grow in your area is a “weed.”
It’s called botanical colonialism. Interesting stuff.
From Florida and I totally agree.
Thimbleberries: add the Olympic Peninsula of Washington to its range. I grew up with them in Forks. We had a wild one growing next to the garage. They are mostly seeds and not all that tasty, IMO.
The ones I tried were smooth and didn't notice the seeds as I ate them.
Damn, must be a regional variety or something then? The seeds on the ones here aren't very noticable, not anymore than other brambles. They're like a sweeter softer raspberry.
Yeah we have them on Vancouver Island, they are soft and rather tasteless, with lots of tiny seeds. I prefer raspberries. Thimbleberries are kind of like eating paper in flavour.
Mulberries are pretty common in the wild here in Michigan. I made a juice out of them once, it was pretty interesting. The fruit by itself is simply sweet and tasty, but in juice form was actually slightly spicy.
I used to eat myself sick on mulberries every summer as a kid, and you could tell if they were in season by checking the soles of my feet. We still have mulberry trees in the yard but now I leave the berries for the birds.
We got a mulberry tree in my backyard. Very tasty.
Lived in Grand Ledge, Michigan. Wild Mulberries were tall and cursed ! by Oldsmobile, and other car owners, as Mulberries in bird droppings etched the Merry Oldsmobile hoods. "HOODALUMES" -birds?
This is so cool, i never knew someone so fanatic of tasting all of the weird fruits in the world like me! You are awesome! A month ago i went to Ushuaia to try wild apples and "pan de indio", i also wanted to try calafate berries but for that i would have to go in november
my apartment complex in nashville tennessee had osage oranges EVERYWHERE on one particular street, it felt kind of magical because it was some random (mostly) inedible fruit that only grew in one single place. I always feared getting hit in the head with one because they were very hard, and the street always had a very distinct and kind of bitter smell to it. it's very nostalgic for me though and my dream house would have one in the yard if its legal to do that
Texas persimmons are really good and grow everywhere in the central TX hill country. I’ve notice certain bushes produce bigger, sweeter and more fruit than others and I visit these on hike when in season.
Surprised that you haven’t had Turks cap (Malvaviscus arboreus) on here yet. The fruit is quite good.
I wish I had enough turks cap to make jam from, but it's hard to get enough of the fruit to make into jam
I love pawpaw! A friend gave me some. It had been growing for a long time in her parents yard. They had no idea what it was. Took YEARS to finally put out fruit. I collected the seeds from the few pawpaw I ate, but don't have the space to plant them yet. (I live in Upstate NY)
Very cool video, I learned a lot. Surprisingly I've never seen the inside of a hedgeapple, we have a tree growing in our front yard for the past 20yrs and I've never thought to cut one open for a look, had no idea they were edible, even for animals. I also had no idea that mayapples produce a single edible, fruit. I live in Missouri, people always say when you see mayapples you will see morel mushrooms, but I've literally never once found morels by mayapples.
Also in Missouri, and I've only ever found one morel with a may apple, and this is YEARS of hunting. Lol they also say that may apples tell you it's time to look for morels, but I've always found morels first!
@@mistyize I must admit that it's been years since I last went morel hunting, and prior to that I didn't put in a ton of effort to find them, not the way some of my friends do, so that's most likely why I've been unsuccessful at finding large quantities... but, the few times I went hunting & found some, they were never by mayapples, but it was mayapple season. I have a friend (in Missouri) who is a total fungus nut, she finds all kinds of edible mushrooms in the woods around her house, including morels. It amazes me what she's able to find. She must live in an area that is packed full, b/c my parent's house is surrounded by woods in a remote area & we rarely find mushrooms.
The cloud berry is also called salmon berry by natives in Alaska. They use it for alot of things. They take groups of women out several days to gather them, then go home and process them together like a family gathering. It was alot of fun to participate in. I was living in Kotzebue AK at the time. An hour boat ride to the island where the berries grew.
In Washington and Oregon the name salmonberry refers to a bramble.
Salmonberry is also the name of a different berry in the PNW, that looks similar to cloud berries (which we also have) but is definitely not the same. I have some salmonberries in my yard and they are flavorless.
Thimbleberries grow abundantly where I live! As well as blackberries. I pick them and freeze them and they last me the whole year; my daughter loves them as a frozen treat on the hotter days ❤