Last week I went on a blogging event that was very different to any I’d been on before. Forest Holidays invited a group of bloggers for two days of food and foraging in the Forest of Dean. I love the idea of using wild foods in cookery, but I’ve never been too sure about how to go about it. I’ve tried the obvious things cooking with blackberries, apples and so on. One year I branched out and tried making a Haw Ketchup from hawthorn berries. It was a lot of hard work and I only ended up with one bottle of sauce for my efforts, so I felt I was i some need of some expert help.
We went on a foraging walk around the Forest Holidays site. What was really impressive was the range of plants available and the richness of the bio-diversity of the area. We learnt about leaves that we can eat like plantain (bitter to start with, but surprisingly mushroomy after a while) and sorrel. We found sweet chestnuts in some abundance. Further round the walk we discovered mushrooms and rosehips (used during the war years to keep up our vitamin C levels).
Later we found quite a large patch of Himalayan Balsam which is quite an invasive plant. It’s not native to this country and it has spread due to the fact that the seed pods explode when ripe to scatter the seed. We gathered some of the seeds and flowers to use in the cocktails we were planning to make later.
Our last task of the foraging walk was to gather some pine needles and light a fire, so that we could make pine needle tea. This is really easy as you just need to infuse the needles in boiling water. Apparently it has a lot of health benefits, but it’s also quite pleasant to drink (or at least it would have been if I’d had a way of straining out the pine needles).
Haven’t been to the Forest of Dean since I went on a school trip in 1992, would love to go back!
I used to love doing things like this – out in the forest was my favourite place. It sounds like you had a lovely time. x
I agree that it wouldn’t be nice to drink pine needles!! But interesting that you found so many things to eat, who’d have thought?!
All these amazing blogging events I have been reading about today make me want to get on a train or plane and travel this week!xx
My friends do foraging here and we had such a great time making bread in the great outdoors with them. Looks like you had a wonderful time
It sounds like a really interesting experience although I think I would be clueless when it came to knowing which wild foods we could eat and which we couldn’t!
Oh I would love to try this! The Forest of Dean is such a beautiful place too…what a fun experience!
What a great trip to go on. We went on a Forest Holiday earlier in the year and it was AMAZING
What a great way to spend a day out – fadcinating to hear the things you can eat!
How interesting! I bet you leant loads!
ooh I do fancy Forest holidays …sigh ready to escape and they are only just back to school
Sounds fab my perfect xx
last autumn my husband & I booked to go on a mushroom foraging trip. We were really looking forward to it, then we got an email saying it had been cancelled because the funghi expert had taken ill suddenly (hopefully not through eating the wrong mushrooms!). We were really disappointed, then we got another mail saying that we could re-book for this coming Autumn, which we did. I hope this time we actually get to go on the foraging trip as I would love to learn more about what we can and can’t eat. We get various mushrooms in our garden but I’m scared to try them.
This topic seems to be more popular. As some tv programmes show some parts of foraging tours. Seems logical to make use of what is available around us. Though yes, many of us require education, information, advice, etc. Guided practical tours seem the most sensible / appropriate manner in order to do so effectively.