Hunting for dewberries is a spring ritual. Photographer Melody Lytle, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Native Plant Information Network Image Gallery

I have a rocky relationship with my Hill Country land. It's a little rough around the edges, wild and untamable, but through the seasons its gifts are generous.

On a spring evening as I'm driving home, the delicate perfume of blooming agarita wafts down from the hills. The agarita plant itself (Berberis trifoliolata) is intimidating, mostly prickly leaves and scraggly stems, but the tiny yellow blossoms make a splendid tea. A few weeks later, usually in May, the small red fruit ripens. Tart but sweet, filled with tiny seeds, they do not provide much sustenance but are fun to nibble on an evening walkabout. Birds and other wildlife consume agarita berries in great numbers--they seem to be the first fruit of the season in these parts. Interestingly, the agarita's wood and roots are a brilliant yellow color, used to make dye for parachutes during World War II.

Dewberries (Rubus trivialis) arrive in late May. Texas' wild blackberries are just as sweet or sweeter than their domestic cousins. You never know where you'll find these little treasures. New patches of dewberries seem to spring up at random and old patches are fickle, sometimes wildly productive and sometimes not. In April, before the grass gets tall, small white flowers appear in patches of green brambly vines low to the ground along the roadsides. Check back in a few weeks and bring a bucket!

Here's how to pick dewberries ... first, call in sick some glorious May morning and try to convince a partner in crime to do the same. Then head for the hills and start picking. The vines are so thorny, you'll probably only pick and eat until the pain from scratches outweighs the pleasures of harvesting. If you actually collect more than you eat, try making dewberry jelly. Dewberry ice cream is also a treat.

June passes into July's oppressive heat, and once again I question why I live here instead of some cool, dry mountain town in West Texas or New Mexico. But as I take my evening stroll, I notice the ripening wild persimmons (Diospyros texana). The little native persimmon trees have smooth gray bark, small oval leaves and the sweetest fruit you can imagine. Wild persimmons grow to the size of large grapes and are edible only when totally black.

I once had a dog with a serious weight problem, so I put her on a diet and she lost 30 pounds. Svelte and healthy, she followed me on my evening walks and noticed what I was eating. From mid-August through September, she packed away those persimmons and waddled off into October after regaining those same 30 pounds. Raccoons, opossums, foxes and other wildlife also rely heavily on the yearly persimmon crop to fatten up for winter.

The bad girl of native fruits is a hot little number called the chili petin (some say chili pequin or chilitepin). Capsicum annuum var. aviculare are tiny, but don't let their diminutive size fool you--they are a culinary force to be reckoned with. A pepper's firepower is measured on the Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) scale based on a subjective appraisal of how dilute a sample of pepper needs to be before it's undetectable. While a common jalapeño pepper may rank 4,000 heat units on the Scoville scale, the chili petin burns in at a fiery 40,000 to 70,000. The bell pepper ranks 0; the hottest of the habanero peppers--an unbelievable 350,000.

Birds relish the pea-sized chili petins. I've been told that sometimes wild turkeys will eat so many that their flesh will taste spicy hot. You'll find the small, ornamental-looking shrubs in shady, out of the way places--along the fence at the neighborhood pool, under a picnic table at a local taco stand, up under a live oak in your backyard. The fruit is reddish-orange when ripe; bushes sport the fruit all summer in various stages of ripeness.

One convenient way to use these little heat bombs is to toss a few into a small jar with vinegar, garlic and small onions, place it in the fridge, and let it sit for a few weeks. Use the vinegar as a hot sauce or drop a pickled onion or garlic into your stew to spice it up. A little bit goes a long way.

A word of caution about consuming native fruits: Always be certain regarding identification. A useful guidebook is A Practical Guide to Edible and Useful Plants by Delena Tull (Texas Monthly Press). Happy picking ... and eating!

Jeff Sargent wrote about collecting rainwater for the October 2003 Texas Co-op Power.

Comments about the magazine? E-mail Editor Kaye Northcott at kayen@texas-ec.org. ©2004 Texas Electric Cooperatives, Inc.