Hi there, if you hadn't already got the news I'm hanging around over at the Artist as Family blog for the next year while we conduct research for a new book called Free Food. In this book we aim to put together all of our experiments in foraging, hunting, gifting and swapping, low-carbon travelling, poaching, free-loading and generally living a very small ecological footprint in this very big country.
Fifteen of us walked out from the Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre today for one of my four hour foraging workshops, bracing winter's cold ground joy.
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| Foraging workshop. Photo: Dave Cauldwell |
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| Mallow (left), wild radish (right). Photo: Dave Cauldwell. |
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| Acanthus. Photo: Dave Cauldwell. |
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| Buckshorn plantain. Photo: Dave Cauldwell. |
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| Washing spear thistle root in Lake Daylesford. Photo: Dave Cauldwell. |
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| Patrick Jones' foraging workshop, Lake Daylesford. Photo: Dave Cauldwell. |
I've extended my foraging classes indefinitely through the Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre. But I will also travel to take them in your neck of the woods.
Today I took the first group out for a new season of foraging walks around Daylesford. We identified about thirty-five edible plants and a few mushrooms over a four hour walk.
Half way along we stopped for autumn fruit-and-acorn cake that Meg had baked for this inaugural and lovely crew – current students from the Castlemaine Permaculture Design Course. The cake was made from forest and/or garden ingredients – honey, olive oil, acorns, eggs, plums, peaches, quince, apple and rain water. These ingredients came from our home garden or nearby small businesses (Kyneton olive oil and Daylesford honey). Baking powder was used, but this is optional. (See earlier Artist as Family acorn cake recipe. A video showing how to turn acorns into flour will appear on this site shortly. Also please see my videos for turning hawthorn berries into fruit leathers and making dandelion coffee).
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| Patrick Jones foraging walks 2013 |
Over the last month, while ima Meg recuperates from long nights of breast feeding, Woody, Zero, (sometimes Zeph) and I, dada, have gone out walking every morning noting all the free public food in our local commons.
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| Patrick Jones – Creative Commons: Foraging Commons |
A recipe-poem in action (with a mini manifesto).
From Radio National's Off Track programme:
So far, the Permeate series has focused on artists who are inspired by the environment.But today, Miyuki Jokiranta introduces Patrick Jones…
And for the astute listener, yes I mispronounce 'deliciosus'.Listen here.
In April 2012, in conjunction with Fungimap, the inaugural Australian Fungi Festival was held in Hobart. Here is the audio of the debate, Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy from my perspective, the second speaker for the affirmative.
I wrote this poem and took the footage roughly a year ago when in Mole Creek (Tasmania) visiting family. I finished editing it yesterday. Enjoy!
Two new friends that I met through the community gardens, Dave and Doug (and Doug's lovely son Malachi), came out foraging with me yesterday in pine forest plantations on the edge of town. I asked Dave if he would film our little excursion so we could make a beginner's guide to foraging edible mushrooms.
Identification is critical before consuming 'shrooms. Books and static images are not often enough to identify accurately. I hope this little video document provides enough tips to get you started. And remember, if you're not 100% sure, trust your instincts and do not eat it.
For much of my fungal knowledge attained thus far I owe to my friend Alison Pouliot, who runs courses in south-eastern Australia in autumn every year. Thanks Alison!
around which we honed our whittling skills. 
My friend Peter Yencken and I are just about to take 10 children out into the bush for 4 days and 3 nights to teach them what we know about foraging, intuitive movement, close observing, stalking prey, living with simple tools, making fire and building shelter. This is the first of what we hope will be many called Black Cockatoo Camps. The camps are designed to foreground bodily and ecological knowledges, while backgrounding digital, technical and abstract knowledges.
This video shares a very similar philosophy to ours. It's an inspiring story:
Find out more about this video here.
There's a lot of fear around mushrooms, fear created mostly out of mycological ignorance. In Australia we have such little knowledge of fungi, their role in ecosystems and their edibility. This previous post goes further into that sort of thing.
My friend and fungi teacher Alison Pouliot, an ecologist, photographer, writer and mycologist, is vehemently encouraging of amateur mycology, so I thought I'd share a recent discovery that I made:
Camp fungi – nibble methodology #1, 24 September 2011 (from my journal). Trametes versicolour (Rainbow fungus).
I found this bracket fungus growing in eucalypt forest alongside Sailors Creek at Bryce's Flat, Central Victoria. I have heard that the Dja Dja Wurrung ate Fistulina hepatica (Beefsteak fungus), another bracket fungus that also grows in the Wombat Forest.
However I don't know for sure if the Rainbow is edible so I aim to taste-test in the name of local ecological knowledge and relocalisation.
I choose a few small brackets, cut off the woody parts that were the point of attachment to the log, and fried them up in the pan on the camp fire using a little olive oil from nearby Guildford.
As I write I'm not in the least bit sure I'm going to be poisoned and as we've walked here from home to this beautiful camping spot I'll just have to tough it out around the camp fire tonight and trust that I'll overcome any adverse toxins. I have only had a small chip, and I say chip because what it tasted like was an overcooked, cold potato chip that's been lying around for a few days. In other words, an oily albeit edible tasteless crispy starch. The smell of this mushroom uncooked is earthy, vaguely fishy (permeated by freshwater eucalypt tannins). A good mushroom smell really, one you can trust, at least for a nibble, anything more at this point would be stupid. I'm with my girlfriend Meg and my son Zephyr, who I've not invited to partake in the experiment in case it all goes terribly wrong, and as it was my idea it is only fair I should carry it out. As I cooked the chips the mushroom gave off no unsavory smell, as mushrooms I have eaten in the past have, causing me to abandon eating them.I write this post several days later and I'm pleased to announce that I suffered no adverse effects. Next time I may soak this fungus in milk for a day as I've heard this makes beefsteak fungus more delectable. I will then eat a few more chips to text the toxicity again before being confident to serve up to others.
With our recent project in Sydney I think we have achieved what we set out to do in showing how art can itself be a biophysical resource. In this new work, Natural Bitterness, I attempt a similar thing – the poem doubles as video field guide for edible weeds and wild foods abundant in our area this spring.
This poem is dedicated to Alexis Pitsopoulos, our local wild foods expert and cook.
We're in Sydney planting out the Food Forest this week, and it's equally beanie weather here as it is at home. A few weeks ago twenty of us rugged up and roamed the hills of Daylesford in search of edible weeds. Here's the story (click on image):
On my Garden Notes for Relocalisation blog I've posted images and descriptions of the edibles we found.
An abundant, free world is an uncapitalised world.
For a few years now I’ve been interested in how permaculture, and its siblings – biodynamic and natural farming – can inform an arts practice. In other words, how an arts practice can follow suit in the way in which it produces things, biomimicking natural systems and therefore having something to return to the land it has taken from. More recently I’ve been thinking about foraging as another such activity that can inform art and help move it on from an industry embedded in capitalist structures. An ethic of foraging attends directly to the reclamation of public food lands and to the reclamation of a ‘collective wealth’. Read on here.
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