Call it what you like; wild food, free food, food from the hedgerows, but there's a very good reason why most of the time it remains untouched and ungathered: it's not very good to eat. In 'Crocodile Dundee' a hungry Paul Hogan points to lizard and says 'You can eat it, but it tastes like shit.' When I heard that, I laughed the laugh of recognition.

I've lived in the hills of Wicklow now for twenty years and it has endowed me with a little of the pioneer spirit. I look at the fields and hedgerows and assume they ought to be like a supermarket - there to provide me with food. Over the years bucolic sadists have persuaded me to try a variety of free greens, all with names vaguely reminiscent of a bestiary: fat hen, pigweed, goatsbeard, catsear, goosefoot, dogsbreath. Well all right, I made the last one up, but you get my drift.

You wouldn't believe some of things that are listed as edible: beech leaves, birch shoots, ground elder, sow thistle, cow parsley - the list is long and completely unappetising. Even dock leaves are considered edible - although I remember as a boy scout their outdoor use was closer to the finale of the digestive process. I suppose it all depends on what you mean by edible. Looking at this list I can only assume it means that none of them will actually kill you.

Maybe if you were starving it's a good idea to know what wood sorrel looks like, so that instead of eating something uncompromisingly poisonous like hemlock, you'd get a bit of nourishment instead. But believe me, don't let anyone tell you it makes a tasty meal because I know, it doesn't. There seems to be a rule with wild greens: if they're free and edible then they're bitter and vile-tasting. At least, they are to my palate.

In France, Spain and Italy this bitter aftertaste is appreciated and even sought after. Dandelion leaves are a common additive to green salad, although rarely eaten by themselves. I've been high in the Apennine mountains on warm summer days, well over 8,000 feet up, and there are always people with plastic bags, bent over, picking the mountain asparagus or the wild broccoli. Presumably if you're prepared to spend an afternoon climbing a mountain and gathering these bitter greens, than you have to like the taste of them or you wouldn't be up there.

But just like any rule there are exceptions which I'll grudgingly list, now that I've had my little whinge. Best of all the greens is sea-spinach which you can pick growing close to the shoreline in the sand. It even grows in Dublin Bay, although personally I'd think twice about eating anything that has been washed by the waters of Dublin Bay. The other palatable, green and free item of nature's bounty is the stinging nettle. You can eat them as a substitute for spinach, but I've always used them for soup.

It's a good soup, but it has to be said that the addition of cream and stock has a lot to do with the final flavour. And it's a fun soup to make just because it has a little country cachet plus overtones of eye of newt and wing of bat. Here's how to make it. Pick only the growing tips of young nettles, taking care to avoid those clumps growing underneath rookeries or where the neighbour's cat frequents. Wash them and put them in a pot with twice as much stock as there are nettles. Boil it for two minutes and then blend it. Now add half as much cream as you did stock, some salt and some ground nutmeg and heat it again before serving. This is a soup with no sting, as the formic acid in the nettles is destroyed in the cooking. However if you have a slightly malicious bent you can always add a splash of tabasco which might send a frisson down the spine of the more timid.

Apart from greens, nature's bounty in the autumn is composed largely of berries, and after the occasional good summer, nuts. If you can refrain from eating them as you go along, blackberries make a great jam. The other berries that I will take the trouble to pick are rowans and elderberries. A good idea is to pick them in bunches and then use a fork to comb through them to separate the berries from the stems. Rowan jelly has a beautiful colour and goes well with strong meats, especially game. There is a timeliness to this marriage, since game and rowan berries both come into season in the autumn. I prefer rowan and apple jelly, for which you can use crab-apples ideally, or if not, cookers.

To make the jelly take equal quantities of quartered apples and rowans, put them in a pot and add sufficient water to cover them. Boil until the apples are soft. Strain the lot overnight through muslin or cheesecloth. For every pint of liquid you have, add 3/4 pound (350gr) of sugar. Dissolve the sugar in the liquid over a low heat and then boil rapidly to setting point (220 Fahrenheit or 110 Celsius). Pot it when it cools.

Elderberries are abundant and very much under-used. John Evelyn described them as 'a catholicon against all infirmities whatever'. When ripe they have a taste not unlike blackcurrants and are rich in vitamins and minerals. A good recipe is Rosamund Richardson's for elderberry sorbet. You'll need a pound of elderberries, the juice of half a lemon, 4 ounces of sugar, 1/2 pint of water and two egg whites. Liquidise the berries with a little sugar and the lemon juice, then sieve them to remove the pips and pulp. Now make a sugar syrup by dissolving the 4 ounces of sugar in the 1/2 pint of water over a low heat. When it has dissolved, boil it rapidly for 6 minutes. Let it cool and stir in the elderberry puree. Freeze it until it starts to go mushy, then take it out and beat it with a whisk. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and freeze again.

If you like the idea of raiding hedgerows then there's nothing simpler than making sloe gin. The sloes are the purpley fruit of the blackthorn and are abundant in every hedgerow. You need enough to quarter fill a bottle of gin and each one needs to be pricked with a needle a few times. Add 2 ounces (50 grammes) of sugar and fill the bottle with gin. Shake it every couple of days until the sugar dissolves. It'll be ready to drink in three months, but if, unlike me, you have the self-discipline to leave it for a year, it'll taste even better. A common variant is to add half a dozen blanched almonds as well.

In the days before you bought vitamin C in tubes in the supermarket, people fended off winter colds and flues by making and drinking rose-hip syrup. I'm old enough to remember being given it as a child and it was one of the few strengthening medicines that I actually liked. It's not hard to make and if you do it you'll feel a little like an apothecary. Take three pounds of rose hips (from the wild dog rose, not the garden variety), six pints of water and two pounds of sugar. Boil 4 pints of the water with the sliced hips and skim the top while boiling. Cook for 1/2 an hour and then strain the hips through muslin or cheesecloth. Now boil the pulp in the rest of the water, cool it for 1/2 an hour, strain it as before and then add it to the rest of the liquid. Boil this until it reduces to 3 pints. Add the sugar and bring it to the boil. Cook it to a syrup, pot it and store it away from light.

For me, the best of the free foods come in the autumn. I enjoy nothing more than late afternoon walks with a low sun and crisp air, hunting mushrooms. For some reason that is still entirely unclear to me, very few people in Ireland gather mushrooms. Perhaps it's some kind of atavistic fear of toadstools and witchcraft, or perhaps it's simply that there is no tradition of doing so. There is a part of me that doesn't want to encourage people to go mushroom gathering, since it could result in somebody getting to one of my favourite mushroom patches before I do and picking them first. But there's another less selfish part that can't help wanting to share something very special with others.

Gastronomically speaking you can divide mushrooms into three groups, those that are good to eat, those that are poisonous, and those that are neither of the above. This last group is by far the largest; there are many hundreds of mushrooms that will neither poison you nor give you any pleasure. The poisonous mushrooms are not many in number, and neither, sadly, are the ones that are really good to eat. My advice, if you're interested, would be this: buy a good book on mushrooms (Roger Philips' is good) and learn to recognise the poisonous ones and the good ones. Never pick a mushroom that you don't recognise.

Most years chanterelles can be found in the Wicklow hills. They're apricot-coloured, smell wonderful and when you do find a patch, tend to be there in large numbers. If you're lucky enough to find them, mark the place well since they also tend to grow year after year in the same place. And there's another bonus: more often than not after the chanterelles have finished growing, the white hedgehog mushroom nearly always follows them in the same place. It's very easy to recognise, because under the cap it has little spines rather than gills, hence its name.

The best of the best is the cep. Its proper name is boletus edulis, but it's often known in English as the 'penny bun'. It gets this name because the cap is hemispherical and is the colour and size of a brown bun. Ceps are not easy to find since they grow only in forests and fallen brown leaves often hide the already well-camouflaged cap. But when you do find them, you have a real treasure. They can grow very big: the biggest we ever found weighed 863 grammes, or about two pounds. They're firm-fleshed, they don't shrink in the cooking, and they can be easily dried and kept throughout the winter for flavouring. Those expensive little packets of dried porcini are ceps under their Italian name. If you're lucky enough to find them, cook them simply. Sliced quite thinly, saute them in good olive oil with salt and black pepper. It's worth noting that mushrooms in general have a peculiarity: they absorb salt quite remarkably. You really do have to use more salt on them than anything else, or you just won't taste it.

There are two other common and easily recognised mushrooms that are also very good to eat; they are the parasol and the giant puff-ball. As its name suggests the parasol is a large capped, thin stemmed mushroom that grows in pastures. Pick only the cap, as the stems are fibrous and indigestible. The caps will separate from the stems fairly easily; they're joined by a ball and socket joint. Try not to disturb the stem and its roots if you're picking them, since if you do the mushroom will take time to recover and will fruit less. I turn the parasols gill side up, put a knob of butter in the hollow where the stem was, add a pinch of salt and black pepper and pop it under the grill. Couldn't be simpler or tastier.

Giant puff-balls are unmistakable. Round, pearly white, and frequently bigger than a football, it means that a single specimen can provide a meal for a family. When they're old they turn into a mass of brown powder which is the mushroom's spores, but before that happens the flesh is white and firm and extremely good to eat. My favourite way of eating it is to cut it into 1/4 inch thick steaks and dip them in beaten egg. Five minutes in a frying pan and it's done.

Not all of nature's bounty is inanimate. As a confirmed carnivore I make no apologies for eating rabbit. The rabbit was introduced into these islands by the Romans as a source of food and by the middle ages, rabbit, like venison, was a meat for the aristocracy. Warreners were employed for the sole purpose of ensuring that this delicacy remained only in the mouths of nobles. The rabbit, of course, has a legendary capacity for reproduction and eventually it established itself in the wild. Like wild mushrooms, the rabbit is a source of food that is largely ignored in Ireland while appreciated elsewhere. This is odd, because although not as easy to cook as steak, it can be exceptional and given the worries over beef and other meats, it makes a wholesome and organic alternative.

Last year I was in an Italian restaurant in Berlin called 'Don Camillo' where I had, amongst other amazing dishes, boned saddle of rabbit. It was probably farmed rabbit which is more tender and less gamy than the wild variety, but it was an exceptional dish and it's given me the urge to use this meat more frequently. Farmed rabbit you can treat as chicken, but the wild variety needs a little more care. If the taste of game is not to your liking, piece the rabbit and leave it overnight in milk. Throw away the milk and if you have a pressure cooker put the rabbit pieces in with a little water, some roughly chopped carrots and onion, and simmer for twenty minutes, otherwise do the same with a lidded saucepan. Throw this water away and start again with water, carrots and onion. The purpose of all of this is to take away the gamy flavours from the wild meat. After an hour of simmering remove the pieces and brown them slowly on a low heat in a frying pan with olive oil, rosemary and garlic for an hour. A lid on the frying pan will stop the meat from drying up. It won't be as good as Don Camillo's boned saddle, but it's pretty good.

There is a common thread running through all of this and it's this: none of these foods come without a bit of effort, whether it's in the gathering or in the preparation. And that may well be why so few people make any use of what's there; they simply don't have the time. To some extent that's true for me too, but I get around it by combining a Sunday afternoon stroll through the woods with a basket and my mushroom knife. I may come back empty-handed in which case I've simply had a pleasant walk, but if I've found a few ceps then I'm not just well-rewarded, I get the warm glow that comes from being a little closer to nature.