Every spring, outdoor writers regale us with tales of mushroom pickers. Our scribe spends a day tramping in the woods with some expert (either grizzled or gourmet) who leads the writer to a secret patch of morel mushrooms. They pick some and then return from whence the came to cook them up with the expert’s favorite recipe.  At this point in the tale, amidst many adjectives, the writer describes the morel’s culinary attributes. So goes the annual ode to fungus.  You have to forgive outdoor writers for telling the same story year after year. Morels are the one mushroom virtually everyone can safely identify, and they are good to eat. The morel season happens at a time when there isn’t much going on, so the mushroom-picking story is likely to be recycled from year to year with no complaint from readers.

But once the mushrooms wither up and the fishing season opens, outdoor writers forget all about foraging. When was the last time you read an outdoor story about berry picking? Surely, more than a few of us who hunt and fish will stoop for blueberries or Nature’s other sweet treats.

I’m a berry picker—always have been. Now I’m not the sort of picker who measures success by quarts or gallons gathered. For me, a double handle plucked beside the trail will do. Berries are a bonus on summer walks or the main ingredient for a batch of muffins or pie.

As much as I enjoy fishing, a berry-picking expedition is a suitable substitute for a day or two. This summer, I’ve made a couple of trips just across the border into Canada for strawberries at a pick-your-own farm. The place is always busy and the customers are a cross-section of folks. Fresh strawberries have a lot of fans.

Of course, picking berries at a farm isn’t really foraging. When I was a small boy, my grandfather showed me how to pick wild strawberries. Although they delicious, wild strawberries aren’t much larger than a pea and they are rarely found in great abundance. It seems to take forever just to pick a cup of the tiny berries. Grandpa used to pick enough for my grandmother to make wild strawberry jam.

When I am out walking, I monitor the progress of wild strawberries from the first blooms to the last berries. Living on the North Shore, where summer temperatures are cooler near the lake, it is possible to encounter various “crops” of strawberries for several weeks.  I like to pick a handful of berries and pop them all into my mouth at once. They immediately melt in your mouth with a sweet taste that is the essence of a northland summer.

Last weekend, I scouted out a blueberry patch we discovered a couple of years ago. It’s a logged over area with a mix of dry uplands and wet bog. You can find fat blueberries in both places. We like to pick enough to fill an ice cream pail so we can have a pie and muffins and put a few berries in the freezer.

Although the berries were a week or more from ripening, the patch held promise. I saw shrubs that were loaded with berries. Some had even begun to turn blue. These early berries seemed extra-sweet.

In the North, blueberry picking is an annual ritual. Not so long ago, gathering and preserving lots of berries was important for your winter menu. Today we have fresh produce year-round, but the hunter-gatherer instinct still runs strong in most blueberry pickers. The fortitude of hardcore blueberry pickers is legendary. Production picking is hard, hot work, but the rewards are sweet.

Recently disturbed areas—logging sites or burned areas—are the best places to find northwoods berries. Looking around my blueberry patch, I also found plenty of unripe wild raspberries and a few June berry bushes. You may know the latter as serviceberries or Saskatoons. Generally, all three of these berries ripen around the same time, so you can pick a “mixed bag.”

In early August, Vikki and I usually take a day to go for a long ride on dusty roads in a quest for berry mixed bag. Sometimes we roam around the North Shore near home, but if we get an early start, we head for Canada—the Promised Land for berry pickers. Although we’ve never found a mother lode of Canadian berries, we always see new country, which is just as good.

Aside from the pick-your-own farm, something notable about our berry picking adventures is that we never encounter any other pickers. This is less a reflection of berry picking’s popularity than a testament to the sheer abundance of summer’s sweet edibles. When it comes to berry picking there are no seasons or bag limits. You can pick all that you want and there will still be plenty left for the birds, the bears, and other critters.

Still, you won’t get directions to my favorite berry patch. Finding your own picking place is part of the adventure. Start looking.