Springtime means its Stinging Nettle Time and time for foraging and making delicious Nettle Soup!

Springtime means its Stinging Nettle time! The young Nettle leaves are ripe for foraging and cooking. They are delicious and highly nutritious, packed with vitamins C, D and K and minerals, Iron, Zinc and Magnesium. Nettles can be added to many of your weekly family dishes adding that extra nutritional kick! Pop a few wild nettle leaves into your omelettes, Spaghetti Bolognaise, soups or curries. Cook them like Spinach for a side dish or make a Detox Tea!

My Granddaughter and I had a lot of fun last summer making this video of how to make Stinging Nettle Soup and Tea. Its such a fun thing to do with children and because they pick and cook the nettles they are more likely to try it.

Stinging Nettles will often be used on our Foraging Courses, Family Camps and Adults Bushcraft courses. We not only cook them to add to the evening meals but we make tasty snacks like Stinging Nettle Crisps to have after a busy afternoon of building shelters or lighting fires. And that’s not the only thing we use them for, we also make string, natural cordage from them.

I’d love to know if make your own Stinging Nettle soup or tea!

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Wild Foods – Wild Strawberries (Fragaria vesca)

A forager’s summertime delicacy.

Have you had your fill of Wild Strawberries this Summer? What a treat both to the eye and to taste. When ever I see Wild Strawberries I think of Faeries and expect them to be hiding under a leaf spying on me just like in my childhood story books.

This beautiful, dainty fruit is so delicious, packed with flavour and is a wonderful treat to find on an afternoon stroll through the countryside.

It can be found throughout Britain in woodlands, upon shady banks, hillsides and gardens, it enjoys rich soil. A perennial herb with a slanting branched rhizome, the leaves are toothed and veined, trefoil in shape with a paler, silky underside.

It flowers from April to June with flowers of five white petals and a cluster of yellow stamens. It fruits in June and July.

Don’t mistake Wild Strawberry for Barren Strawberry (Potentilla sterilis) which has similar leaves and flowers but the fruits are hard and dry, quite different from the juicy fruit of Wild Strawberry.

The leaves of Wild Strawberry can be used as a tea as a mild laxative and a diuretic and be used to treat kidney complaints. The leaves, crushed can also be used on abscesses and carbuncles or on freckles as an overnight treatment and other skin problems.

It is important to check with a professional herbalist before trying any herbal remedy. Wild Strawberries have also been used cosmetically for removing stains from teeth.

Wild Strawberry leaves and fruit can be added to salads and the fruit can be used in many summer deserts, shortbread, cakes or dried, bottled or frozen.

In folklore Wild Strawberries were used in love rituals and it was said that if you shared a double strawberry with someone that the two of you would fall in love. Because of their colour and heart shape, Strawberries were the symbol for Venus, Goddess of Love.

 

Wild Foods – Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica)

Our first experience of stinging nettles is usually in childhood and the familiar itching, burning rash that occurs after the briefest of brushes with bare skin. The use of stinging nettles goes far beyond nettle tea.

 

Wild Foods – Ramsons (Allium ursinum)

Have you ever walked into woodland and caught the powerful, pungent smell of wild garlic? There is nothing quite like the smell of Ramsons on a cold, spring morning to bring all your senses alive. You often smell them before you see them and then it’s an exciting search to find your delicious treasure.

 

How to Tap a Birch Tree

Late March to early April would have been a delight to our ancestors. After a long, cold winter with food reserves running low, the first signs of spring would have been welcome, none more so than sweet, nutritious Birch Sap.

 

Autumn Harvest – Pine Sap

Autumn brings with it an abundance of foods. The woods are alive with the dash to get ready for winter. The forest floor is covered in a carpet of sweet chestnuts and hazelnuts. The perfect feast for small mammels. Scurryings and scuttlings, a nibble here, a cache there.

And deep in the woods, wounds on the pine trees bleed sap down their bark.

 

Autumn Harvest – Fly Agaric

Autumn brings with it an abundance of foods. The woods are alive with the dash to get ready for winter. The forest floor is covered in a carpet of sweet chestnuts and hazelnuts. The perfect feast for small mammels. Scurrying and scuttlings, a nibble here, a cache there.

Surrounded by this maelstrom, the Fly Agaric slowly spreads its spores.

 

Foraging for Wild Food – Basics 1

Foraging is a fun and productive way of re-connecting with nature

So the economic downturn has hit pockets hard. Does that mean we stop shopping at supermarkets as food prices rise? Probably not. But if you were going to turn to foraging for your food, how would know what’s good to eat?

 

Wild Foods – Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Ah, the ubiquitous weed – bane of gardeners and ‘wet-the-bed’ to old wives. The flowers of the humble dandelion herald the start of the honey bee season and provide a rich source of nectar. Food for bees and food for us – what’s in your salad?