A hedgerow larder at its peak

By mid-August, the British countryside is quietly tipping into its most generous month. The hawthorn hedges that lined every lane in spring with may blossom are now heavy and dark, and the blackberry canes have started to buckle under their own fruit. Walk any footpath between now and early October and you will pass a free larder that has been stocked without any effort on your part at all.

Late summer foraging is one of the simplest pleasures of home and garden living: a walk that ends with a stained bucket, purple fingers and a kitchen that smells of sugar and fruit. You need very little kit — a shallow container rather than a bag, so the berries do not crush; gardening gloves if you value your hands; and long sleeves, because brambles and nettles keep close company. Take a walking stick too, for hooking high branches down towards you.

Picking blackberries: sweet, sun-warmed and slightly out of reach

Blackberries (Rubus fruticosus to the botanist, brambles to everyone else) are hard to misidentify. The canes are arching, thorny and often reddish where new, and the fruit is a cluster of tiny drupelets that comes away from the stem with a soft tug. The skill is in the picking, not the finding.

• Colour is not enough. A ripe blackberry is dull black, not glossy, and gives slightly under the thumb. Any berry with red or purple patches still has acid to lose — leave it.
• Pick the ones that fall into your hand. If you have to pull, it is not ready. Come back in three days and the whole bush will be transformed.
• Look low and shaded. The sweetest fruit often sits in the awkward middle of the bush, out of full sun and out of the reach of passing dogs.
• Avoid busy road verges and sprayed ground. Anything within a metre of a footpath used by dogs is best left alone, and never pick where you suspect herbicide or pesticide use.

Late August berries are good; September berries, after a few cool nights, are better. The season generally runs into October in milder regions, though damp weather turns them mouldy quickly, so pick on dry days and never after heavy rain if you can help it.

Elderberries: dark, clustered and best cooked

Elderberry bushes are easier to spot now than they were in June, when their flat creamy flower heads were their best feature. Look for Sambucus nigra — a scrubby shrub or small tree with opposite, pinnate leaves and, by late August, heavy drooping clusters of small, glossy, purple-black berries on red-purple stalks.

Do be careful. Elderberries are not edible raw; they contain compounds that cause stomach upsets, and the stalks, leaves and seeds are worse. Cooking destroys them, so every elderberry that leaves your bucket should end up in a pan. Dwarf elder (Sambucus ebulus) looks similar but grows low and herbaceous and its berries are best avoided; if in doubt, walk on. Ivy berries, which ripen later and sit in rounded umbels rather than flat sprays, are also poisonous — a good reason to check the leaves, not just the fruit.

Harvest elderberries by running a fork down the stalk to strip the berries into a bag. Do this at home rather than in the field; the juice stains everything it touches.

Forage kindly — the hedgerow rules worth keeping

A hedgerow feeds far more than foragers, and the code is simple common sense rather than red tape.

• Never strip a bush. Take a handful from each plant, no more than a quarter of what you see, and leave the rest for blackbirds, thrushes and field mice.
• Ask first on private land. Most footpaths allow you to pick fruit for personal use, but the hedge itself belongs to someone. On nature reserves and Sites of Special Scientific Interest, picking is usually not permitted at all.
• Pick above knee height. Below that, you are competing with dogs.
• Tread lightly. Do not push through hedges or break branches to reach fruit — the hedge is a habitat, not an obstacle.
• Only eat what you can identify with certainty. A pocket field guide earns its keep within a single afternoon.

From bucket to kitchen: jams, cordials and pies

Blackberries and apples are the great late-summer partnership. For a reliable jam, use equal weights of prepared blackberries and peeled, chopped Bramley apples with the same weight of preserving sugar, plus the juice of a lemon. Simmer the fruit until soft, add the sugar, then boil hard until a spoonful on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Pot into sterilised jars while hot. A jar of this in January is worth every bramble scratch.

Elderberry cordial is the other essential. Simmer 1kg of stripped berries with 500ml water, 500g sugar, a few cloves and a thumb of sliced ginger for about half an hour, mashing as you go. Strain through muslin overnight, then bottle. It keeps for a few weeks in the fridge or freezes well in small bottles, and a spoonful in hot water is a fine thing on a cold evening.

For a pie, toss blackberries and a chopped apple with a little sugar and cornflour, pile into a butter pastry case and bake at 190°C for about 40 minutes. Elderberries work best mixed with apple rather than alone, and always cooked through. Freeze any surplus berries in a single layer before bagging them — they will keep their shape and their colour, and taste of August long after the hedges have gone bare.

So put on a long-sleeved shirt, take a shallow tub and a stick, and walk the lanes this weekend. The blackberries will not wait, and neither will the elderberries.