On my hikes through the mountains here in western North Carolina, I often pass all manner of trees and shrubs heavy with fruit and nuts, and wonder whether if I could be bringing home enough free local food to feed me and my husband for a week. Here, we have black raspberries, acorns and so many other things ripe for the picking. And whether you live in a rural area or in the middle of a big city, you do, too – the mulberry tree at the park, for example, or a neighbor’s ‘ornamental’ sour cherries.

The best way to forage for nuts and berries, whether in the woods or an urban environment, is simply to take a walk, armed with a good foraging guide relevant to your area. If you spot something tasty on a neighbor’s property, chances are, they’ll give you permission to take a bit for yourself.

The following six wild berries and nuts are easy to identify, commonly found all over the U.S. and easy to harvest. When picking edibles, whether wild or cultivated, avoid plants within 100 feet of a major road or highway and those that may have been sprayed with chemicals.

Fruit

Mulberries – They look sort of like raspberries or blackberries, but instead of growing on thorny canes, they grow on trees. Mulberry trees are often found in public areas including parks, and are known for making black squishy messes on sidewalks and cars, so why not harvest some and make some mulberry cobbler? Pick the darkest ones for best flavor.

Rose Hips – You know those little red berries that appear on rose bushes once the blooms have withered? Best harvested after a frost when they become soft and ripe, rose hips are full of vitamin C and have a slightly sour flavor that’s reminiscent of roses without being floral. They’re often used for syrup, jam and tea.

Neighborhood Fruit Trading – Perhaps your neighbor has an orange tree so full it’s arching toward the ground, or you spotted unharvested pears dropping in a nearby park. Fruit trees on private property often produce more than the owners can handle, so it’s always worthwhile to ask if you can take some off their hands. And if you’ve got fruit growing in your yard and want to trade some of it for other varieties, share the love and reap the bounty through trading websites like neighborhoodfruit.com.

Nuts & Seeds

Walnuts – When growing on the tree, walnuts resemble tennis balls. Once they drop, break open that green hull and you’ll find the familiar textured shell you’re used to seeing in store-bought walnuts. Wear gloves when handling them – the shells contain natural dye (which can be harvested as well). To sort out the bad ones, drop them all in a bucket of water and discard the ones that float. Let them dry out for a few weeks in their shells before cracking.

Hickory Nuts – These tasty nuts might be present all around your neighborhood, but they’re rarely on grocery shelves due to the difficulty of cracking the shell. Ready for harvesting in early autumn, hickory nuts are rich and sweet and their shells can be used to impart a smoky flavor on barbecued meats. See Mother Earth News for tips on cracking them.

Pine Nuts – While many of the pine trees in America produce nuts that are too small to bother with, the Southwest is particularly populated with fine pine nut-producing trees like Pinyon, Ponderosa, Jeffrey and Stone Pines. Harvesting pine nuts is really easy, and they’re delicious in salads and of course, as a crucial element of pesto.

Images: seph swain, mauroguanandi, ndrwfgg, andydr, chris breeze, tandemracer, babbagecabbage

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This post is our contribution to Sustainablog’s Pedal-a-Watt Powered Blogathon this weekend. The long-running green blog (and new green shopping site) is publishing for 24 hours straight to raise funds for the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Northeastern Missouri. Go join the fun: Read post contributions from around the green blogosphere, leave a comment to be entered in a drawing for some great green prizes, and join in the Tweetchat at #susbppb.

The theme? “Radical Sustainability, Ordinary People” – so we’ve picked a few of our recent stories on people making a difference with wit, flair and a healthy dollop of determination. All rise once more for Trees For Cities, The Ditty Bops and Neighborhood Fruit.

Ever been struck dumb on a first date with someone special? That anxious feeling of your brain slamming into reverse, leaving you to fill the conversation with noises that suggest some food’s got stuck? What better way to relax than to share a common goal that isn’t romantic – such as planting trees? And what better way to show what your bod is capable of? (Well, apart from the obvious).

For this reason, environmentalists and singletons alike can give thanks to the people behind Trees For Cities, combining speed-dating and urban renewal in a series of events across the UK. Now we want to see it worldwide – but no pressure, guys.

They’re witty, quirky, fabulously talented and at the top of their musical field (Grammy-nominated last year, no less) – and they set a sustainable example that’s simply dazzling. The Ditty Bops are on a mission to prove that the music industry doesn’t have to ride roughshod over the environment, and since they believe none of the major labels fit that bill they’re doing it independently. Setting up an award-winning sustainable nonprofit, cycling across America to promote their work, producing album sleeves from personally sourced eco-friendly materials – they’re grounded, principled and apparently unstoppable, as this interview confirmed. Talk about individual action.

Every year, good food goes to waste. We’re not talking about the third of groceries that head straight into the garbage (although of course we should) – it’s the fruit we’re concerned with here, the untold tons overproduced in backyards or going to waste on common land. What’s needed is some way to collect and distribute this produce to those who need it. Enter Neighborhood Fruit, brainchild of Kaytea Petro and Oriana Sarac. Through an online registration service, surplus fruit in the SF Bay Area is offered up to first-comers entirely free of charge. If you live further afield, it’s a hot urban trend that’s spreading fast…so keep your ear to the ground. Or, hand to the bark, as it were.

Last but certainly not least, check out our interview with Sustainablog’s host for the Blogathon, Alline Anderson, founder of Milkweed Mercantile. Have a successful weekend, guys!

Images: alexindigo, The Ditty Bops, DieselDemon and Sustainablog.

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If you want a glimpse of our world in centuries to come, stroll round a city. Dystopian-mongering pessimists will now be holding their heads in their hands and groaning. Can we blame them? Urban areas are too commonly associated with poverty, pollution, neglect and a brutalizing of the environment for the sake of a fast buck. Pretty? Only from high up.

But that’s the old model of city life. Crocodile Dundee wasn’t too far off the mark when he said cities must be friendly because so many people want to live together. They’re the biggest physical expressions of our social nature on this planet. They’re filled with people, every one of them an individual – and so in these eco-conscious times where everyone can step up and contribute, cities are where things happen.

Here are 10 urban trends that will shape of the cities of tomorrow.

Keep The City Buzzing

Bees are on the wane, and we have no idea why. Entire populations are dying or disappearing as part of the baffling phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Bad news in itself, but the sting in the tale is that without bees, many of our staple crops are doomed. While scientists search for the answers, the urban backyard remedy is obvious – and here’s how it works. Bee hives only need a little land to thrive – and you’d be following in the footsteps of committed enthusiasts like Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L Jackson. Further incentive needed? One word: honey.

Urban Growth

Escalating food prices, and all that land out back? Put the two together and turning your place into an edible garden is a no-brainer. But even if you’re squeezed into a concreted corner or you’re halfway up a towerblock, there’s still room for some horticultural creativity. Agricultural skyscrapers are on the rise (as it were) but while city-planners develop a coherently green strategy, it’s all about self-expression. Snake some vines over your balcony or up the wall. Let your potted plants grab onto windows and railings. Make your city come alive!

Up Where The Air Is Green

But whatever is done in the vertical is being done tenfold in the horizontal. Green roofs have captured the urban imagination like no other eco-craze, and it’s not hard to see why: they’re beautiful, they have a deeply practical element, and…did we say how beautiful? Of course there are new architectural challenges that come with having tons of topsoil and greenery piled on your ceiling – and there’s the usual amount of half-hearted bandwaggoning. (Yes, Astroturf is cheating). But wouldn’t it be nice to have a little less of the “concrete”, a little more of the “jungle”? I bet the local wildlife would think so.

Seed-Bomb It Back To The Stone Age

If you’re heartsick of seeing drab, neglected patches of municipal land blighting your neighborhood…you could be a guerrilla gardener waiting to join the green revolution. “Fighting the filth with forks and flowers”, these law-skirting folk are on a mission to bring budding life to every corner of our cities by any means possible. They sneak out at night with seeds and trowel, beautifying furiously before daylight exposes their efforts to the cops, or they plant greenery while hidden in full view. Sound like your kind of thing? Sign up here (you rebel, you).

Cleaning The Streets: Electric Cars and Friendly Rides

It’s been on the horizon for years (far too many of them) but now the electric car is starting to make headway in the place it’s best suited for – the urban grid. Where else is it practical to build recharging stations at the kind of density that suits the electric car’s shorter range? Ah, but that’s changing too – some of the models on our 2009 roundup hold enough juice to compare favorably to their gas-powered counterparts. These admirable advances aside, do you really need your own car? If not, and if braving the public transport isn’t an option, grab a lift with someone else – because urban carpooling is here to stay.

Commute Yourself Slim

In the convenience-drugged city of tomorrow, the only sweat you’ll break is when you’re deciding which button to push. Utopian dream? We say: urban nightmare. We spend our day in the thrall of convenience technology…and then heads straight to the nearest super-expensive gym to compensate. With modern life in full swing, who needs The Onion? Luckily there are architects who recognise the danger and, like Nintendo, are sneaking gyms into our lives without us realising. Their thinking is: why consume electricity when calories can be burnt instead? So the urban fabric gets a healthy makeover, like the much maligned stairwell. Cars are zoned out of existence and replaced with their human-powered counterparts (saving you cash in all sorts of ways). Parks and paths are expanded, and everywhere can be reached by a sidewalk. Healthy commuter, coming through. For specifics, check out the New York City Department of Design + Construction’s Active Design Guidelines.

One for Me, One for You…

My mum has a logistics problem. Thanks to some absurdly prolific fruit trees, her freezer is permanently half-full with surplus she has to freeze or it goes to waste. What she needs is a local fruit exchange – a social network (online and offline) that collects and distributes surplus produce for the good of the neighborhood. Take San Francisco’s version, Neighborhood Fruit, working like a foodie’s version of Freecycle – the goods are there for free, you collect them yourself, and first come is first served. If you like free food (ie. if you have a pulse) or want to reclaim your freezer, find your local fruit exchange…and if there’s none at hand, why not start one (pdf)?

Serving the Needy (With Servings)

Gone are the days that it’s acceptable for shops to chuck unused food away at closing time (and having worked as a barista for a certain worldwide coffee chain, I’ve seen my fair share of that). While up to a third of household groceries still go into the trash, restaurants are acting rather more respectably by offering up their output to local charities and nonprofit organisations, or directly into the hands of the homeless on the street. Check out the National Restaurant Association’s food donation work, and their guide to doing it (PDF).

It’s Cheaper Online (or, How We Killed The High Street)

Here’s a phrase to fill a shopkeeper with dread: “No, I won’t buy it here, I’ll get it on eBay / Amazon /Craigslist”. Online retailing is gargantuan business, simply because it’s usually the way to pick up the best goods from anywhere in the globe at the best price. Is it green? With minimal packaging and low overheads, you’t think so – except it’s also the quickest method of wiping out profits for urban retailers and for killing small traders. (Even the big ones aren’t safe – take the fate of Borders UK.) However, counter that with the fact that they’re billion-dollar recycling machines that often do a lot of good.

No matter your view, the bottom line is that online retailing is on the rise – and shopping is changing forever.

Neighbors are a Big Deal

But why spend money at all? Before money there was bartering, and thanks to the people-connecting power of the Internet, it’s firmly back in fashion (although we wouldn’t say “money is dead” – merely looking a bit peaky). If it fits through the post, it’s being swapped: books, DVDs, clothes, gadgets, plant seeds and tons more. Yet cities are where this is taking place in person, exchanging goods and services and reinforcing social bonds. Bartering binds people together.

And for the more intrepid barterer – why not trade homes with a complete stranger?

Images: telmo32, NNECAPA, axiepics, bbjee, ubrayj02, frankh, emrank, Alex E. Proimos, eHow and paul(dex) busy @ work

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