Two hours in the woods = wild blueberries for days. Nearly all the fresh produce we’ve eaten this summer has come straight out of the CSA boxes we get each week from Local Roots Farm. While the farm has got all manner of vegetables covered, when it comes to fruit (besides tomatoes), we’re on our own. For the most part, we’re on board with the notion that you get what you pay for when it comes to food quality. But deep down, we are incredibly cheap and paying high prices for fruit, no matter how delicious, feels physically painful at times. Luckily, in this town we’re able to easily get our fill of apples and berries for the best price possible: free. While it’s true that the Himalayan blackberry is an annoyingly invasive species, it is also true that they are the most deliciously invasive plant around. In the last month, we’ve picked at least fifteen pounds of berries around the city (the most inexplicably plentiful patch is just five blocks from our house, in a bit of parking strip grass, halfway down the block of a crowded residential street), enough for preserves and countless cobblers. In August, I took to keeping tupperware in the car and in my purse at all times, because you never know when you’d come upon a pile of blackberries. Just this weekend, I encountered another sort of berry bounty that I wasn’t expecting. While hiking a high elevation trail near Mount Rainier, I noticed bushes (and bushes and bushes and bushes) of wild blueberries. Their color was so dark and intense, the flavor rich and just a bit more tart than what you find in stores, that we couldn’t keep our hands off of them. We polished off all the water in our water bottles and filled them with berries within minutes. From just a short walk in the woods, we now have a dozen blueberry muffins, a cobbler, and a sense of amazement that will feed us for days. Foraging for food certainly isn’t a new concept, but sometimes you just have to take a moment to recognize how awesome it is.