All things Selfsufficientish

City foraging – Collecting wild food in a City

Posted by Andy Hamilton - 02/05/09 at 09:05:35 pm

Over the last two days Dave (My twin and co-selfsufficientish fella) and I have been foraging for wild food with groups of people in Bath and Bristol. Yesterday we were in Bath to help out Topping and Co bookshop and also to help promote our book. There we took a group of around 20 folk aging from 6 to bus pass age out for about an hour. We found a good selection of wild edibles just a stones throw away from the bookshop, we even gave an old lady a bit of a start as we gathered outside her front door and inspected the weeds growing in a tub on her doorstep.

Today we were in Bristol conducting our monthly wild food forage. Which is is basically a walk starting at the city farm looking at the ecology, wild foods, bio-diversity, medicinal uses of plants and a bit of folklore. I have just got back and despite being rather tired I am very happy. There is always a bit of a bulletproof feeling that you get when you arrive back after a day out engaging with plants. Foraging (collecting wild food) can leave you with a feeling unlike any other outdoors pass time even gardening. It is hard to explain without sounding like a bit of a hippy so I apologise from the outset.

Foraging gives you a connection with your surroundings in many ways, firstly is a nutritional link. We have evolved around plants over thousands of year and different plants will have different properties at differing times of the year. We have different needs throughout the year. Take spring time for example, plants that are considered to be cleansing such as goosegrass (aka cleavers or sticky willy) are in abundance. During the harsh winter months we stock up on sugary and fatty foods. This winter belly is perfectly natural as it would have kept us warm. We don’t need it in the Spring and cleavers has been used not only to help cleanse the system but as an aid to dieting.

If you have been foraging for some years you will also find that you are much more likely to notice the subtle changes in the climate. Plants that are blossoming a week or two earlier or plants that simply have stopped growing in certain areas. These are a couple of the tangible things that foraging can do, the far less tangible is the overall feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself that you get after connecting with the planet (see told you I would get a bit hippy).

Anyway, back to the actual forage – we left our crew of people at the end of a hot days foraging looking very happy if a little tired. They all want to book again later in the year and as a group there would not be a single one I would not apprechiate coming back. It does seem that mostly good folk are drawn towards wild food forages which certain does help when you are the facilatator.

To see us in action we are on this clip (after the Gurellia gardeners) it is a French/German show called Global Mag on the Arte channel. To read more look in the months edition of Ethical Living magazine. If you want to learn more about our wild food forage or book a place on the next course please do follow this link,we’d love to see you.