Wherever you live try to get to know the free food you can forage locally. In the modern world we tend to forget that food occurs naturally pretty much everywhere. Nature supplies lots of edible goodies if you only get out their and look for them.
- Perhaps the best place to start is to track down a book on plants native to wherever you live. Or even better a book on local wild foods.
- Then get talking to people. Vegetable Gardeners are often great scavengers too, and the older they are the more they may know what your locality has to offer. Anyone living an even semi-rural life before the war is likely to have made some use of free wild foods.
- Sign up for an organised Wild Food Walk. These seem to be popping up all over the place. It is a good thing, people are keen to rediscover lost skills.
Here the most highly prized free food are of the fungal variety. But an experienced mushroom hunter, from our village, died during the mushroom harvest of 2007. She mistook a deadly mushroom for a tasty one, so I am not going to go into the realms of mushroom hunting here. Other than to say it is great tasty fun IF you have someone to take you who REALLY knows their stuff.
Our second most desired free food crop is Wild Asparagus. Throughout spring many roadsides are full of bottoms sticking in the air while their owners unearth the sweet spears of wild asparagus.
After spending the first year in Spain trying to cut back and dig up all the weedy asparagus plants on our land I speak from experience. Find out what is edible in your part of the world before you start clearing it all away!
Finding our there are free food goodies to be had locally really gets you in tune with the seasons and also the local culture.
Each year the wild food larder is different, which also makes for a more interesting life. Some years rains come and keep the asparagus cropping for months. Other years things are dry and the season is soon cut short. This variety makes us appreciate the crop even more.
Other rather more obvious local free foods for foraging are the many herbs which grow well in the wild places. All year we pick fresh thyme, bay, fennel and rosemary. Then we have the seasonal appearance of juniper berries and wild garlic.
Flowers are something we do not normally hunt, but I hear good things about dandelion leaves, nasturtium flowers and nettle soups. We do, on occasion remember to make our own saffron when the wild crocus come up in late autumn.
On a fruitier note Quince and Medlars spread themselves about the land freely. Wild rose hips are great jelly making material. Of course, as in most of the world, bramble jam is do-able every year due to the proliferation of blackberry brambles.
Foraging for free wild food is rewarding no matter how large or small your haul is. You might think it a waste of time to pick a few bay leaves rather than buy a box. But looking for food, even herbs, gets you out there with nature witnessing the seasons. And anyway every free bay-leaf is a few pennies saved! Besides it really is eating locally.
What free wild food is available for foraging where you live? Do you bother foraging or is it a forgotten practice? Let us know what things are like where you are.
For a more self sufficient future
Morning from deepest Brittany. We have wild garlic in abundance at the moment. Do you have any interesting recipe suggestions? Thank you!
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Hi Max. Well we like wild garlic on cheese on toast and in salads. But best of all I think is sauteed with herbs (rocket/parsely/basil all good), capers, spring onions and olives then mixed with pasta. Lots of olive oil and some parmesan (or even feta which oddly seems to work well with herby spagetti). Oh dear, that’s got me hungry!
Coming to the end of summer in NZ, we went camping one last time last weekend. I was on a big high due swimming out to an old boat and picking off 21 massive mussels that were growing there (it’s our new secret mussel stash) – took them back to the camp site and opened them up on the barbie – delicious!
The following day we went Pipi picking before heading for home, picked ourselves our legal quota of pipis, barbied some of them but made fritters out of the rest. We’re very lucky over here to be able to go foraging for such yummy goodies, and it always makes me appreciate the joys of not just free food, but fresher than fresh and totally delicious!!
Another freebie yummy that we have at the moment is grapes. Our neighbours grape vine has gone balistic and we have loads of bunches of grapes just hanging over into our garden (well,not so many now as there were before). I was really harsh with the prooning earlier in the summer, but think I will be a lot kinder next year! 🙂
Hi Mrs DB,
Yep, I’m also kinda hungry too after reading that…sounds lovely! Did a bit of reading after my last post, and there’s a suggestion that wild garlic goes a bit bitter after cooking for minute or two…? Anyway, I’ll take the chance…
Also found a suggestion for garlic bread using the underground cloves bit of the plant… might dig up a bit of next door’s field and investigate!
Max Akroyd’s last blog post..
Free food! I went wild looking for this last year: elderflowers (great cordial – which has only just been finished!), blackberries and bilberries.
Although, just a word of warning…
Last summer, I spent a wonderful afternoon and evening on the fell picking bilberries and admiring all the wildlife. I came home and duly made some jam and then collapsed into bed. It was only the following afternoon I noticed I had tons of tiny burrowing insects on me, like tics but smaller. The pharmacist and the doctor were both rather miffed. So, turning to wikipedia, I found out they were ‘chiggers’. I won’t go into the detail, but a few days later I was still finding them on me (they are not visible to start with). It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience!
It hasn’t put me off foraging, in fact I’m planning my wild-garlic spree at the moment, but I will definitely embark on all foraging-outings with caution this year!
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Max – I’m not sure as I’ve only really cooked it quickly so it wilts with the herbs. I did see on another site they made pesto with wild garlic which sounds good.
Springtime – Definitely don’t want any chiggers they sound nasty! I’m guessing foraging might be best done in a boiler suit and wellies!
Sootie – Foraging for mussels sounds like my kind of weekend – am very jealous!
Last summer I saw that blackberries were growing over the fence in one public area of our neighborhood. I got very excited because I remember picking wild blackberries that grew in a nearby vacant lot with the nieghbor kids and eating them in a bowl with suger sprinkled on top (if the picked berries actually made it to the house!) Sadly, I missed the prime berry picking season last summer, so this summer the dog’s getting a lot more walks in that part of our neighborhood so I don’t miss out on the berries this year!
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Thank you for this posting and btw, I love your topics. Great comments, too! As a long-time hiker, I’ve always loved finding wild raspberries in the northeast (US), and even plan my holiday to coincide w/ finding good stuff in the woods. As for mushrooms, yes, it is SO easy to be fooled by what may be an edible. Recently in S. California, a long-time mushroomer mistook several poisonous amanitas (A. ocreata) for one that is a delicacy esp. among Italians (Coccoli – A. calyptoderma). So as a noob to mushrooming, I stick with fruiting bodies that I KNOW do not have deadly look-alikes. Here in Calif., that would be the chanterelles, black trumpets, hedgehog mushrooms, morels. “Greediness” apparently often plays tricks w/ the brain in perceiving good edible from bad (I suspect that led to the demise of the aforementioned). It is vital that one learns as much as possible by being out in the field with experienced, cautious foragers. It’s also important not to eat too many unknown wild mushrooms as every individual can react differently and adversely … even to supermarket button mushrooms!
With that said, I’ve felt a profound transformation when walking in the woods in search of sustenance. Yes, the poison oak/ivy, the chiggers, etc. can certainly cure us forever of our curiosity and send us running back for the “safe” concrete jungle (debatable). But I’ve discovered a renewed respect and a child’s awe for what is going on around me as I hike through the woods, the meadows. So much is happening beneath the soil, within the stems, leaves, bark of plants. This is the REAL “happening place”! Life giving life to others.
We need to get our children out in the woods, if not to forage, at least to learn about “what’s out there”. There’s a story behind every acorn or anthill – I recall many from my childhood. Having their own little garden container to grow a few lettuces, is certainly an excellent start, and they can even invent stories about their patch!
It’s definitely great to get out there and if you can bring some food home too all the better!
I agree this is something we should all be learning, especially if we happen to be addicted to eating every now and then.
I for a see a time when the grocery shelves will be bare and not in the too far distant future.
I have seen it in the past and believe me, it will not take much for it to happen.
We are at the mercy of the merciless.
Thanks for the very nice information.