Last night before dinner I sent the kids into the woods to hunt for berries for dessert. I wasn’t sure what they’d find, but I figured something must be growing in the new clearings where the loggers worked last year.

After about an hour, I had to go hunt them down. They had picked over the first clearing for the last of the wild strawberries and the first of the wild blueberries, and were deep into a distant brushy place filled with raspberries. We brought home enough for dessert and breakfast, and staked out three other patches to pick today.

Our fondness for wild food translates into a bounty this time of year. We’ve been having pancakes and shortcakes with wild strawberries. We’re letting the edible weeds grow in the vegetable garden, and supplementing our dinners with amaranth, goose foot, clover flowers and catmint (the purslane is too stringy this late in the season). We’re sauteing milkweed flowers and daylily buds with chives and garlic. (Warning: Some people are alergic to daylilies.)

The real treat now is the berries. My friend Kelly and I might have cleaned the bike path out of strawberries last month on our noon walks. This week I found black raspberries on the side of the road near the Gazette. I can’t reach the mulberries that are ripe on the bike path, but my pal Natalie has found a sure-fire way to pick the ones in her back yard: She lays a mosquito net on the ground as her husband stands on a stepladder and shakes the branches with a rake. She’s made mulberry muffins, mulberry sauce, mulberry ice cream, mulberry pie. She reports that the best so far has been the mulberry-strawberry pie, the wild fruit complemented by her bumper crop of strawberries. (Years ago my kids befriended an aged mulberry tree in a park, a twisted, low growing one perfect for climbing and munching. They named her Grandmother Mulberry, and I guess it’s time for a visit.)

Wandering the woods for raspberries and blackberries is rewarding in many ways. The fruit is fresh and delicious. It’s free, when supermarket berries are priced like jewels. It’s good for you: most berries are loaded with vitamin C, antioxidants, minerals including manganese, and high in fiber. There’s the thrill of the hunt — we never know what we’ll find when we head out with out buckets — or who we’ll meet. Once I startled a huge buck, eating blackberries off the far side of a bush I was picking from.

About the author: Margaret Hartley is Sunday and projects editor at the Gazette.

Are you hunting for wild food? Share your tales with Greenpoint readers by posting a comment below or emailing greenpoint@dailygazette.net.