Harvest time

Jouni Laaksonen 19.8.2019

Autumn is coming. I love summer, but even more I love the fact that there are four distinctive seasons. After summer it’s great to slowly fall into autumn, with perfect temperatures for hiking. Autumn is also a great time of harvest, both in gardens and fields, and in forests as well.

If it’s not allowed to pick wild berries and mushrooms in forests in your country, see my blog post about Finnish Everyman’s Rights. And naturally Everyman’s RIghts is one topic thoroughly discussed in guidebook Hiking in Finland.

Let’s see some pics in chronological order. First berries:

Some years this is reality, but this summer this many cloudberries was just a dream for us. These delicacies grow on bogs in July, but they are not abundant every summer.

Right now, in August, blueberries (bilberries) are ripe, and we already picked as much of them as we need through the winter.

Lingonberries are starting to slowly get red. They will be ripe in September. Lingonberries are very important for our family, we drink lingonberry juice through all the winter.

And the last species of berries to ripen are cranberries. They will be picked from bogs only in late September or October.

Those are the four most important wild berries we collect in our family. Oh, and also we pick raspberries, but them we can find in our garden. There are many other good tasting wild berries, too, see an introduction by Arktiset Aromit.

Then let’s see some mushrooms: 

We have found the first chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) and ceps (Boletus edulis), though these pics are from another year. There aren’t many mushrooms yet in the forests in Northern Finland, but there will be in August and September.

I’m expecting northern milk-cap (Lactarius trivialis) and many other mushrooms to appear soon, but so far I haven’t seen them. There grow dozens of tasty mushrooms in Finnish forests, and if you know for example the ones Arktiset Aromit introduces here, you will certainly find something to eat when hiking in forests in autumn. Note, however, that there are also many poisonous mushrooms, so you need to know for sure which ones to pick.

Funnel chanterelle (Craterellus tubaeformis) will only appear in late September. They are sometimes hard to find, but when you hit a right spot, you can get your basket full!