Wild Food Walks 26th. and 30th. September 2015
The muddy recce to Wilmington Wood, Abbot’s Wood and Nate Wood went well (we managed to pick huge amounts of fat sloe berries) and we felt that we would have plenty of wild food to talk about.
Autumn is great for a forager; the fungi has emerged and the nuts, fruits and berries have ripened.
It came as a shock on the Saturday when people started to turn up – 21 had booked and Craggers brought another 10. So we had to adopt a different teaching style, rather than walk and talk, which wouldn’t work with so many people. We stopped from time to time and talked about the different plants in the immediate area.
It was the first time I have used Latin alongside English or local names for trees, plants and fungi. I am new to this but very quickly the precision of the Genus and species names makes the connections between different plants more logical.
It would be boring to list the more than 30 edible species we discovered but there were some standouts in fungi and as important as identifying edible mushrooms we were able to point out some of the most deadly poisonous of British fungi.
As well as edible plants, we also talked about medicinal uses and craft/practical uses. It was a fun three hours and we had some great feedback.
Wednesday the 30th., being midweek, had fewer people, which was great in many ways as we were able to cover more things.
It was interesting how, in just one week, fungi particularly, had emerged, fruited and disappeared.
Please get out there while the trees are in their vibrant autumn glory, the blackberries are bursting with flavour and the woods are at their most mysterious and magical.