A new season of foraging walks

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).

Patrick Jones foraging walks 2013

Students were each given notes that I have compiled that give details and uses for over eighty edible and medicinal plants, mushrooms and some fauna common to temperate Australia.

Walks run every Saturday from April 20, 1-5pm (all weather except for torrential rain). A minimum of six people each walk, $30 per person. For bookings call Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre on 5348 3569 or email. 

I will also travel to your community to take foraging walks. Email me for more information. Minimum of six people required.

Some of the edibles we came across today included mallow, plantain, sow thistle, honey fungus, lomandra, chickweed, watercress, slippery jacks, rosehips, hawthorn berries, acorns, sticky weed (cleavers), clover, gorse, dandelions, hawksbeard, dock, fathen, kangaroo apple, wild fennel, black nightshade, vetch, sheep sorrel, calendula, yarrow, wild radish and rocket.

Thanks to student foragers Felicity, Michael, Rita, Em, Natalie and Grace for making the first walk such a joyous occasion.

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Walking for Food (a new poem and a found peg)

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The Middle Kingdom of Weeds

I was asked to contribute something to The Middle Kingdom of Weeds Festival, which I was naturally enthusiastic about.

'A place of simple feeding' is a line from Jean-Luc Nancy's book 'The Birth to Presence' (1993), which I gobbled up as the title for this work. I made a simple video as a poem-recipe celebrating autumn's hawthorn (crataegus) berries, using a recipe appropriated from UK forager and BBC presenter, Ray Mears.

In Australia hawthorns are considered pesky weeds, but this passage from Alfred W Crosby's 'Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900' (1986), puts this limited attitude into some perspective:

"The weeds, like skin transplants placed over broad areas of abraded and burned flesh, aided in healing the wounds that the invaders tore in the earth... The colonizing Europeans who cursed their colonising plants were wretched ingrates." p170

Are we all 'in abandonment', as Bossuet spoke of the West, or are we in varying degrees of naturalising our wounds and settling in?

Aboriginal bush foods, cultivated garden produce, some wild meat, and weeds and wild herbs altogether constitute the mainstay of our relocalised diet. Autumn, for us, is a time to ferment and preserve the bounties of the warm months, to use as medicinal foods throughout the winter, as our ancestors once did.

Hawthorn berries have been used continuously in both Eastern and Western medicine traditions for thousands of years. There are around 200 species, although that figure is a little ambiguous. All species, as far as I'm aware, can be used for human consumption, and are especially good for treating heart pathologies such as high blood pressure and hypertension.

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