Foraging for sloes and crab apples in hedgerows

Why the hedgerow rewards a slow walk in autumn

Come late October, the lanes around the village start to look quietly generous. Blackthorn bushes hang heavy with fruit the colour of ink, field maples have turned, and the crab apple trees that nobody planted and nobody pruned are dropping small, sour little apples onto the verge. For anyone who keeps a kitchen, a preserving pan and a few empty bottles, this is the best fortnight of the year.

Hedgerow foraging is not really about free food, although that is part of the pleasure. It is about learning a lane properly, knowing which bush fruits first, which tree the fieldfares always strip by December, and what your grandmother would have done with a bag of sloes before she thought about gin. The rules are simple: know what you are picking, pick kindly, and stay away from the busy roads.

Identifying sloes on the blackthorn

Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, and once you can recognise the bush you will never mistake it again. Look for a dense, dark-barked shrub with long, sharp thorns along the twigs, small oval leaves and, in autumn, a mass of round, blue-black fruit about the size of a small cherry, dusted with a pale, powdery bloom. The taste is mouth-puckeringly sharp, which is exactly why they are almost never eaten raw.

• Size: roughly 1cm across, often slightly oval rather than perfectly round.
• Colour: deep blue-black with a grey-white bloom you can rub off with a thumb.
• Flesh: greenish, clinging tightly to a large stone.
• Avoid: any fruit from a hedge on a fast road or beside a sprayed field.

Blackthorn flowers in early spring on bare wood, before the leaves appear, which is why a good fruit year is often a good spring memory of white blossom along the same lane.

Reading the frost, and why the old rule still half works

The traditional advice is to wait for the first frost before picking sloes. The logic is sound: freezing splits the skins and softens the fruit, so the flavour comes out of the sloe and into whatever you steep it in. The trouble is that a proper frost now arrives later, or not at all, in many parts of the country. Do not sit at the window waiting. Pick when the fruit is fully ripe, usually from mid-October into November, and then put the bag in the freezer for a night or two at home.

Pick by hand where you can, gently rolling the fruit off the twig rather than tugging, and leave the branch intact. Gloves are sensible, since blackthorn thorns have a way of finding the web of your hand, and a walking stick with a hooked handle will bring down a few clusters from the higher branches without breaking anything.

Crab apples: small, sharp and quietly useful

Crab apples are the wild cousins of the orchard apple and they turn up in the most unexpected places, often at the field edge where a hedge has been left to grow into a small tree. The fruit is small, usually two or three centimetres, green-yellow flushed with red, and hard and sour enough to make your eyes water. What they lack in sweetness they make up for in pectin, which is why they set jellies so beautifully and why a handful added to a softer fruit, such as blackberry or rowan, will firm up a reluctant preserve.

A simple crab apple jelly is the best introduction: cover the fruit with water, simmer until soft, strain overnight through muslin without squeezing, then allow 450g of sugar to every 600ml of juice and boil until it wrinkles on a cold saucer. The result is a clear, rosy jelly that belongs on a plate with cold pork or a sharp cheese.

Leave plenty for the birds

A hedgerow is not a shop with unlimited stock. It is a winter larder for redwings, fieldfares, mistle thrushes, blackbirds and, in a good year, waxwings, and those birds have nowhere else to go if we strip the bushes bare. The sensible rule is to take no more than a third of the fruit from any one bush, and to work along the front and lower branches while leaving the top and the far side untouched. That top crop is the birds' insurance against a hard January.

If a particular hedge is close to home and you visit it every year, take less. Rotate your picking between several stretches of lane, and never clear a bush just because you happen to have a spare afternoon and a large bag.

Roads, sprays and other things to leave alone

The verge is not always the safest place to harvest. Hedges beside busy roads collect exhaust particulates, tyre dust and heavy metals on leaves and fruit, and a sloe picked from a hedge within a dozen metres of a fast A road is not something you want steeping in gin for three months. Choose quiet lanes, footpaths and field edges instead.

• Spray drift: avoid hedges bordering arable fields that show fresh spray marks or chemical smell, and leave any hedge for at least a week after the farmer has been through.
• Recently flailed hedges: cut sides regrow, but the fruit is usually gone or damaged.
• Nature reserves and managed sites: local bylaws often forbid picking entirely, so check before you fill a bag.
• Permission: most hedgerows sit on private land. Ask the landowner or farmer, and always leave gates as you find them.

Wash your haul, pick out any bruised or mouldy fruit, and get sloes into the freezer or the gin within a day or two of picking. Then all that is left is the waiting, and the quiet satisfaction of a lane well walked.