My freezer is bursting.

It is full of bags of frozen brambles and frozen apple. It will keep me in pies for the whole of next year.

In fact, I am still making pies with the fruits I picked from local hedgerows last year.

Sadly, there’s only me in the house who likes home-made bramble and apple pie. It’s way too natural a product for the rest of my family, preferring shop-bought desserts laden with fat and sugar.

But that’s the way of the world. I pick brambles along a well-used local cycle track in the middle of a residential area. People walk along it all day - commuters use it, families teach children to ride bikes on it, people walk their dogs along it.

So many people use it, that every time I go there to bramble I expect the bushes to be stripped bare. Yet no-one bothers. No-one seems to be interested in what is, essentially, free food. And not only is it free, it is totally natural, completely untainted.

When we were children my parents would taken us brambling every year, usually to a spot on the edge of the Cleveland Hills. We also went bilberrying at a location deep in a forest on the North York Moors. That was backbreaking and you couldn’t sit down to pick because of the spiders - there were hundreds, all of them massive.

York Press:

Raspberrying, pea picking, strawberry picking, you name it, we did it. Many villagers did the same and made jam in giant pans. Picking not only saves money - have you seen the price of brambles (or blackberries as they are commonly known) in supermarkets? – it also teaches children to identify foods.

A survey by a UK shallot grower found that many people struggled to identify fruit and vegetables from pictures. Mistaking a courgette for a cucumber, a shallot for an onion and a plum for a cherry were among the most common errors.

Many of us only see fruit and veg on supermarket shelves and are familiar with only a small selection. The survey found that one in six 18 to 24 year olds had never tried peas and potatoes, one in seven had not tasted a banana, a carrot and a strawberry and one on 12 young people had not even tried an apple. How sad.

Come autumn, we would spend a day in the garden catching apples which my dad - from his perch up the top of a ladder - threw down. These would be wrapped in newspaper and stored for winter.

I’m not saying we were anywhere near self-sufficient - my dad didn’t hunt down deer and sling it over his shoulder Bear Grylls-style. We still did a weekly shop at the supermarket, but we did make use of a lot of wild fruits and vegetables.

There’s so much in the media about the benefits of additive-free food, yet fewer people seem to be taking advantage of this seasonal harvest. I should be glad - I’ve never seen so many brambles on the cycle track and they are all mine. Yet, at the same time, it makes me sad to see families strolling by and children asking their parents what I’m doing. My own family are no better. They don’t help me pick and my husband and daughters would rather eat an artificial-tasting shop-bought apple pie than my delicious fare.

At least my parents know a good thing when they see it - they loved the crumble I took over . They can expect many more.