Squantz Pond
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With its forests, lake, wetlands, fields, and edge habitats, this huge state park, a recent venue for "Wildman," promises top notch summer foraging.
If it's been a wet summer, the mushrooming should be superb. We'll be looking for gourmet chanterelles, smoky-flavored black trumpets, mild, brittle russulas, savory boletes, gigantic chicken mushrooms, flavorful aborted entolomas, and more. And we'll probably find may fascinating and beautiful inedible or poisonous species as well. You never know what kind of mushrooms are around in any year until you look. |
 This smoky-flavored gourmet mushroom is one of the tastiest foods in the world, and in 2008 it came up in limitless quantities here all summer. |
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This is a great time for berries. We may find quantities of flavorful elderberries, bittersweet black cherries, intensely tasty blueberries and huckleberries, and wonderful blackberries.
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 This native species' complex bittersweet flavor will remind you of commercial cherries mixed with grapefruit! Superb raw or cooked, the many trees in this park are laden with ripe fruit in mid-August. |
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Herbs and greens will abound in the forest, and at the edge between the woods and cultivated areas, and along trail sides. We should find spinach-flavored lamb's-quarters, sweet-sour purslane, wintergreen-flavored black birch, root beer-flavored sassafras, and even groundnuts, famed for saving the lives of the Lewis and Clark expedition! |
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The 3-hour walking tour begins at 1 PM, Sunday, August 16 at Squantz Pond State Park, 1/8 mile south of 178 Short Woods Rd. in New Fairfield, CT. Let the cops at the entrance know you're with the foraging group, and park near the park's entrance, not at the main parking lot.
Note: There's a parking fee of $10/state residents, $15/out-of-state residents. Call (914) 835-2153 at least 24 hours ahead to reserve a place. |