Big kids in little woods

[Ben Casey]

Love the pics and story LOL

[Roadkillphil]

Last night Ash, his brother Joe and I went for a walk in a small woods nearby. We went to harvest some hazel but ended up grubbing up Pignuts instead.
We spotted one by an unusually large Alder tree and got my food for free book out to try and ID it. We thought we'd found one at Woodland Valley last weekend when we went on a wildfood walk, but none of us were 100% sure and we only found the one plant so was a little reserved about digging it up to find out.
So last night we decided again to leave it alone until our interest turned to the pair of enormous Alder nearby. We had a good look around and found a small Elm too. Then we started to see suspected pignut everywhere and our reservations about diggin them up dispersed.
Ash had a blast on my new Woodbee from Adam to make a diggin stick and Joe n he set to diggin up a morsel while I used the wonders of modern mobile technology to look up this article to positively ID.


Foraging Pignuts by roadkillphil, on Flickr

So after some tentative diggin, abandoning the stick after a bit to use his fingers, Ash pulled out the tuber and after a minute of cross referencing we chopped the bulb in half and had a taste... as the article suggests, it tasted a bit like hazelnut.


Pignut, stem n tuber by roadkillphil, on Flickr

Twas mighty tasty, and seeing as we'd found loads, I turned my hand to digging one up. I only used the diggin stick to make a shallow trench around the plant as they really are delicate, then I got my fingers in there. It's too easy to snap the stem and then finding the tuber is nearly impossible, also if you find it, there is so much other stuff growing, you can't be sure it's the pignut tuber. We dug up 3 in total and all the bulbs were different shapes. they all had a brown leathery coating on, but rubbbing this off exposes the fresh white bulb that is fine to eat raw.

I'm sure Ash will stick some more pics here later, showing the plant in more detail.

Twas an ansum evening, we spotted more wildfoods and was nice being out for a wander in the woods

Cheers

Phil

[Ashley Cawley]

I'm sure Ash will stick some more pics here later, showing the plant in more detail.

Even better I'll post up a vid...

Great photos & lovely write-up Phil, better than I could have put it. Was a ansum evening stroll.

[Roadkillphil]

Lovely write-up Phil, better than I could have put it. Was a ansum evening stroll.

Cheers Bud! Great vid meht!!

[AL...]

Cheers
AL