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Unleash Your Life Episode 20, Foraging 101

Who wouldn't want nutritious, delicious food . . . for free? Foraging is available to people living anywhere from the forest to the country to the city. Come with us as we explore how to get started, hone your skills, and make foraging a life-long adventure!

This episode’s Action Points:

Forage Your First — Use one of the links or books below to choose an easy first wild plant. Wood sorrel or dandelion are great places to start. Then, go out and find it, and give it a try!

New Plant Challenge — Whether you’re new to foraging or a seasoned forager, you can challenge yourself by adding one new plant a month this summer.

Eat Wild Food Outside — Wild food is awesome, but eating it outside is even better! You’ll get the added benefit of more relaxation and nature, which means more absorption of those awesome nutrients in your wild foods.

Share Wild Foods — As you develop a passion for foraging, make sure to share your harvests with others to get them interested. Or, if you’re new to all of this, start the adventure off with a friend and you can learn together!

Links:

The ReWildU Wild Edible Video Playlist — Fun videos on harvesting and using wild plants.

Eat The Weeds — A great ID website with TONS of plants.

Sunny Savage — Mostly based in Hawaii, Sunny has a book and videos that share fun foraging.

Sam Thayer — If you’re in the Midwest, this is the wild food guru for you! Awesome books and website.

The Forager Chef — Check this out for INCREDIBLE wild food recipes!

Tom Elpel — Lots of offerings, including “Botany in a Day”, a book that teaches you how to ID plant families.

Wildflowers of Wisconsin — This one isn’t “easy to use”, but if you take the time to ID with it, you’ll learn your plant families. Wisconsin and surrounding states only.

Seek— A naturalist app that helps you ID plants, animals, fungi, birds, and more!

Wild Homesteading— Our friend Daron has an awesome website for anyone looking to bring more wild things into their yards, and increase their wild harvests at the same time!

These podcasts are 100% supported by people like you! Keep them coming by becoming a patron through Paypal or Patreon at rewildu.com. Love to you!!

7 thoughts on “Unleash Your Life Episode 20, Foraging 101

  1. Foraging is so much fun! Thank you so much for your part in turning me on to foraging with some of your videos. The knowledge I’ve been able to access the last few years is one thing I really like on you-tube. You . Green Deane. Learn Your Land. And many, many others!
    I had grown up eating wild berries and occasionally nibbling on wood sorrel and watching my grandmother nibble on assorted weeds my parents were sure would kill me and told me to leave alone even if they didn’t seem to be doing grandma any harm. But now I’m nibbling pineapple weed and nettles and dandelions and so many other weeds that are just delightful! Time to go dig a few of the ramps that almost carpet my woods if the garlic mustard doesn’t claim my attention first! Or maybe a mushroom.

    1. Wood sorrel! Pineapple weed! Nettles! YUM!!! It’s so heartening to see foraging grow as a movement, as more and more people discover its wonders. What mushrooms do you usually find?

      Love,
      Kenton =)

      1. We have a soggy jungle of a woods where we have found morels, chantrelles, several varieties of boletes, shaggy manes, turkey tails, bears head and others. We have found slippery jacks, parasols, inky caps, and puff balls growing in the yard. Around the edges of the yard we have honeys right next to deadly galerinas. That’s just in the last two or three years that we’ve been learning these amazing and plentiful mushrooms and there are plenty we haven’t identified yet to our satisfaction. My daughter claims to have found dryads saddles in my woods. Her hubby is the one that got the mushroom thing started. I wish I had taken some pictures of him when we found the first few morels. He was so excited and so intense in his hunt for more!
        My car now stops if mushrooms are spotted!
        Now I look out my front door and the spruce tips are calling to me! Thanks, Lonnie.
        Love,
        Maude

        1. Maude, I had no idea you had so many mushrooms in your life! Wow! The health benefits, the flavors, and of course the treasure-hunt fun of finding them that your daughter’s husband was experiencing — does it get any better than a mushroom hunt?

          With love,
          Kenton =)

  2. “My people perish for lack of knowledge…”

    We are so blessed with such an abundance of better than the store bought stuff we were taught to eat! And then we wonder why we seem to be over stuffed and undernourished!

  3. Mulberries are out now in the Cincinnati area (early June) as I was listening to this podcast! Love to harvest a handful or so and nibble on them on my walks through our local preserve. In more “civilized” areas it’s always funny the looks you get when eating wild edibles. I was once in a horticulture class at the Ohio State University and the people sitting outside the hospital there on campus looked in horror as my class gleefully picked serviceberries (Amelanchier) to eat while on one of our plant walks. I think they were convinced we’d keel over on the spot and have to be carried into the ER! But it was a moment of education, as we shared with them that these were edible along with many other plants around us.

    1. Thanks for sharing that knowledge, Becky! There is so much fear about wild edibles! And mulberries! The girls LOVE mulberries, but they are pretty difficult to find up here . . .

      Love,
      Kenton =)

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