Foraging as a child

I'm curious to know how many of us picked wild food when we were children and whether you encourage your own children to do the same. 

Do families still go out to forage or are we frightened to by internet scare stories?
Do we have sufficient money that there is no need to find food for free? 
Or, don't we have the time or the inclination? 

When I was a nipper, it would be a family day out. My parents knew the best places to find mushrooms (only field mushrooms - they wouldn't risk eating any other fungi).
There was a clean stream where we'd stop to pick watercress.
We'd pick blackberries every weekend for a couple of weeks so Mum could make jam.
Elderflower for cordial 
Dewberries in the sand dunes and whinberries on the hillside.
A couple of wild trees for damsons and apples.
We'd also gather winkles (yuk) when we went to the seaside.

Whilst we only picked a few, easily identifiable items, we also learnt the ones to avoid - the strange coloured fungi, the dirty streams, fruit on twining plants in hedges.

We foraged lots as kids. I love blackberry picking but my boys were never interested and ended up having blackberry fights... so annoying
We also fished lots. My brothers would go shooting with my Dad - that wasn't for me. We more often than not ate game.

We have apples and pear trees - my boys would pick those but they never really picked much on our walks.

Only thing I remember doing was going strawberry picking once. They loved me at the farm because I didn’t eat any strawberries. Horrible things. So not really foraging. I do a lot more now. Still not as often as I should.
I just remembered I used to go winkle picking & cockling with my grandad every year when we were on holiday in Devon.

Cob nuts was the main thing for me or green walnuts....my ole pops used to like them pickled

I grew up on a farm in Sweden that had a fair bit of land with it, and with the land came the right to hunt. My dad was a hunter and we often had moose, deer and hare for dinner.

I'd go fishing for rainbow trout in the river. We had our own cattle and pigs so we often did a slaughter at home, all of which I helped with. I can skin most animals and know how to treat the carcass.

We used to pick strawberries at a pick-your-own place and we used to ache for days after. We had black and red currant bushes at home, and wild raspberries nearby. Lingonberry and blueberry (or bilberries as you call them) was readily available in the forests around my parents' farm and we used special rake bags to pick them. We'd freeze some to have for pudding, but mum would make jams and cordials too.

We never used elderflowers, I don't think, but we did use rowan berries to make a jelly to go with meat dishes - delicious.

Cob nuts was the main thing for me or green walnuts....my ole pops used to like them pickled

Forgot those - but we called them hazelnuts. Never seen a walnut tree as a kid.

We used pick crab apples, blackberries, damsons, sloes hated them, hazelnuts, wild raspberries and wild strawberries, also field mushrooms.
My mam would make jams and jellies out of the fruit, we would cook the mushrooms straight on the hob of the range just put a pinch of salt in the cup after removing the stem and let the juice develop.
We also picked wild sorrel in the fields it was very bitter, I think we used call it cuckoo spit, and picked young nettles and learned how to eat them raw without stinging which was something to show off to the townies when they visited. Later in life we picked elderberries to make elderberry wine, and apples to make cider, it was more a cidré than a cider.

I still go blackberrying each year to my old haunts, same with elderflowers and sloes where the bush positions were closly guarded secrets  

. Tickled small brown trout and ate them around a small fire in the woods. Gathered rose hips when they were in season and used to get 5 old pence per pound if you took them to school where they were sold for rosehip syrup. Scrumped apples and got a clip round the earhole for doing so off the local bobby. Went tattie picking for 50p per day. went grouse beating for considerably more and 5p for every lead shot that was in you at the end of the day. Turnip or 'snadger' harvesting and leading in strawbales and haybales which made your wrists blead.
Rabbiting by smokig rabbits out of holes so dog could catch them as they came out.
Mushrooming for field mushrooms (in the dark with a torch) and puffballs, blewits and inkcaps.
Pinching moorhen eggs and having a fry up next to the river.

Happy days!

Not much foraging here, moving countries a lot as a child meant we had no knowledge of where to go pick things. We blackberried on trips home. In NZ dad used my brother and I as lookouts when he scrumped oysters at the beach (which was obviously illegal). Not foraging really, but remember a large peach tree in one rented house garden, my little friends and I would sit underneath, bash the tree trunk and peaches would fall which we would gorge on.
In Thailand there was a vine that grew in the hedges that we used to search for that was a spinach like leaf, very nice stir fried with garlic, no idea what it was called.

JJB, Maybe that Thailand vine was Hablitzia/Caucasian Spinach or Malabar Spinach https://worldcrops.org/crops/malabar-spinach .