Last Saturday Fraser Christian & I ran a wildly successful Edible Seashore course. Click here to look at some of the photos.

“We should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It’s obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.” Tom Hodgkinson – The Freedom Manifesto

If you are longing to escape the pressures of city life, join Tom and Victoria Hodgkinson for a weekend of simple pleasures at their idyllic farm in North Devon. Between an idle schedule of skimming stones, star gazing, feasting on food from the farm and singing along to Tom’s ukulele, we’ll be exploring ideas from a range of cultural figures including the Buddha, St Francis of Assisi and Henry David Thoreau who have advocated the joys to be found in austerity.

This is the perfect weekend for anyone who wants to learn to live more lightly in the era of economic gloom and ecological uncertainty, for anyone who finds that society’s obsession with material wealth has not brought them happiness and is searching for alternative sources of inspiration.

Details

The weekend will be led by Tom Hodgkinson with contributions from visiting speakers. We’ll be based in Tom’s house, garden and the local village hall.

Over the weekend you’ll learn essential survival skills, from getting the most out of going for a walk to how to bake your own bread. We’ll be joined by Wild Swimming expert, Dan Start, who’ll be leading a dip in a secret cove and learn to forage wild food from the hedgerows with Wild Food expert, Robin Harford.

Click here to learn more…

I am co-running this course with Fraser Christian. Fraser is a master fisherman and wild food chef, who used to run Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s ‘Introduction to Fish Skills & Cookery’ course over at River Cottage. Yes he’s that good.

Date: Saturday, 26th June 2010
Time: 10am to 4pm
Location: Sidmouth & Budleigh Salterton
More info: Edible Seashore

Last Sunday I taught a wonderful group of people at Combe Farm, Axmouth, Devon. It was a scorcher of a day, and we spent a leisurely three hours walking, talking and gathering. Then back to the kitchen we went to prepare an array of wild dishes. Below is a video slideshow of the day… enjoy!

Just got back from a wonderful day teaching foraging and preparing a community feast. Below are some photos, unfortunately (duh!), I forgot to actually take photos of the meal itself. That being said here’s what we had…

• Hogweed seed biscuits, herbal tisanes, and coffee for the die-hards before the forage.
• Sea plantain risotto.
• Couscous, tomatoes, cucumber, and wild hedgerow herbs.
• Beetroot with quinoa,dressed with chickweed.
• Tartlets with nettles and ramsons.
• Ramson (wild garlic) bread.
• Aioli made with ramsons.
• Oxeye daisy tzatziki with yoghurt, coconut cream, and wood sorrel.
• Large hedgerow salad with barberry flowers, sorrel, navelwort, stitchwort, hairy bittercress and many other plants.
• Hogweed chocolate mousse with spicy elderberry sauce.
• Braised alexanders with dandelion vinegar.
• Buttered hogweed leaf and shoots.
• Pickled acorns.
• Rock samphire pickle.
• Nettle cordial.
• Fermented wild green leaves (included 10 wild edible greens) – In India called sabuj patra
• Spiced cow parsley stems.

All in all we covered about 30 wild edible plants during the day. If you’d like to book on the next Nature’s Larder Wild Food Forage & Feast happening in September 2010, click here.

“Totally brilliant day. Really good fun, and lots of info to take away… I now feel confident to go out and forage! Thank you. I will definitely be recommending you to friends and come back again myself. Also the forage and cooking combo rocks!” – Claire Plowright

“Thanks so much for such a great day. I’m going to see the woods in such a different way now. A really interesting and fun day. I’m going away feeling that I’ve learnt a lot, but that it’s just the tip of the iceberg! I’m also very relaxed and full. Thank you.” – Kate

“From start to finish the day was fantastic. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to learn from someone who has the warm energy Robin delivers. See you again next year!” – Neeta Patel

“Was good to forage, great food, good time. Learnt a lot and it is always good to have new insights. Many thanks.” – Peter & Irma

“Absolutely great to “top up” the knowledge following on from last year. Robin is a great teacher and a fantastic source of information. The day was amazing value for money. The delicious three course meal being worth the cost of the course alone. I have taken so much from the day particularly some ideas for my future cooking.” – Chris

“Robin is very enthusiastic and knowledgeable. Foraging for 3 hours at a relaxed pace and preparing, cooking, and eating the foraged food was a great way to finish the day. From knowing nothing about foraging, I now know a little bit, and am keen to get out and forage myself. A great course, a great meal and a great way to spend a Saturday.” – Ron Evans

“Fascinating, educational and good fun. Thanks for a great day. Your enthusiasm is infectious!” – Grahame Terry

“Absolutely brilliant! Really informative. Interesting and eye opening. Really friendly atmosphere. Can’t wait for another day to be organised in a different season, so as to learn even more. Definitely will be using some of the recipes again. Many, many thanks.” – Andrew & Mandi Hill

I am giving a 45 minute talk to the Sid Vale Association on Wednesday, 24th February 2010. Details of the wild food talk can be found here.

This morning a group of us went on a Wild Edible Mushroom Forage in Sidmouth. Unfortunately due to the dry, hot weather conditions recently (which mushrooms don’t like) we didn’t find that many edible mushrooms, mainly Porcelain Fungus and Winter Chanterrelles. But a good time was had by all and everyone learned lots.

As with anything in Nature, there are no guarantees. But even in a dry period there is so much to learn about the edible landscape, both what you can and cannot eat.

Yesterday I ran a Forage & Wild Food Lunch at the Spiral Centre, Axmouth, Nr. Seaton, Devon.Click here to see the foraging images.

The Spiral Centre is a non-denominational organisation created to encourage and promote healing and well being on all levels of life. Symbolically the spiral represents the inward journey to find our still centre or spirit within, and the outward journey that brings that spirit and energy into the world, encouraging peace, harmony and respect for each other and for the natural world. The Spiral seeks to explore all possible ways to help in a caring way with both journeys.

To receive the Spiral Centre workshop programme, please phone Christina Bows on 01297 23822.

A short interview I did with Carl Munson of New Exeter Radio Show where I discuss my personal philosophy of foraging, and how eating wild food can awaken your body to a deeper appreciation of the Natural World and our place in it. 

You can either listen to the podcast or read the transcript below…

Carl: It says on your card Robin that you offer a wild food guide to the edible plants of Britain. Now how long have you been doing that?

Robin: Basically eatweeds.co.uk was set-up in September last year (2008).

Carl: That’s a great name, sorry to interrupt straight away, but eatweeds.co.uk… what a fantastic name.

Robin: I set it up (its a blog), to basically document my own private foraging activities out on the land. And it has kind of progressed rather rapidly over the last few months because I go around filming foragers and other various plant teachers. From it has come a whole different life.

Carl: And you are still alive?

Robin: And I am still alive. Yeah. Luckily enough I have experience with eating very deadly plants, and how they impact my body. So I am very, very conscious of (1) Teaching sustainable foraging, (2) If you’re going to commercially forage to forage appropriately so you’re not stripping the land to bits and (3) For fun.

Carl: So the website started last year, but how long have you actually been eating weeds yourself? Where you like one of those kids who’d eat earth and worms and stuff like that?

Robin: I was, I used to eat ants and all the little bugs and stuff when I was a nipper. I grew up in the countryside and I used to get the nature awareness books.

Carl: And the Richard Mabey classic?

Robin: Not in those days, no, I didn’t know about Mabey. I had another nature/outdoors book that I followed that had foraging in it. Not a lot, more kind of berries and nuts and stuff from the trees.

So I did that as a child, and then when I was 19 I went to North Devon and I learned from a couple who where big foragers and they would just take me down the lanes, and we’d go fishing and get some edibles and do cook-ups and stuff like that.

And then I had to go back into work, and I had children and kinda forgot it. And then five years ago I had to walk away from my business interests and I wanted to get to know more of the plants that I was walking by everyday. And so I started identifying the wild flowers, and then 80% of those often medicinal, in the past, historically. And then because I like my food, I started to focus on the edible plants, and that’s what I do.

Carl: You mentioned 80%, so 80% of the things we see?

Robin: No, 80% of the stuff I was IDing, had been medicinally. So what that percentage would be, generally through all the wild flowers, I’m not sure, but it’s pretty high. It’s not down in the 1 or 2%. I mean we’re talking a lot.

Carl: So we are literally as a culture walking around with our eyes closed? And often our belly’s empty? When we could be eating god-given things in the hedgerow?

Robin: Very much. In Britain we have a problem. I am not trying to encourage people to go back to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Nor am I trying to encourage people to eat solely from wild food.

Carl: Awww, but I must say that the loin cloth does look very good.

Robin: Laughter… You haven’t seen the G-string underneath.

Carl: Laughter… Did you make it?

Robin: Well someone did?

Carl: More laughter… It caught my imagination, the hunter-gatherer idea, because I have a sort of romantic notion about that. You know, even if we are tracking down the last bargain in the supermarket, that’s the hunter-gatherer instinct kicking in.

Robin: No it’s not.

Carl: Right, okay go on…

Robin: The kind of consensual understanding of hunter-gatherer societies, is that they were very scarcity-driven, they were very fear-based, there was a lot of dominance, and a lot of war and violence.

There’s a whole knew school of Palaeontology and Paleoarchaeology that’s coming out (I think that’s the word) where actually we moved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, growing the grains, because we actually had an abundance, a huge abundance of wild food. Protein based, fish and game and stuff. But also wild edibles.

And actually what happened was that as hunter-gatherers moved around the land, it was hard work. It is hard work you know, you’re on the go all the time, but you’re eating maybe 300 plants in the course of a year. Which is hugely different to our 20-25 plants that we get in a supermarket or a veg shop.

Carl: Is that what it is?

Robin: Yeah, that’s it, yeah. So what happened was the hunter-gatherer societies slowed down. They got savvy, because they’re very observant hunter-gatherers. And they realised that at X times of the year the salmon or the fish would come down the rivers or there would be gluts by the sea. And so what happened was the hunter-gatherers became a lot more sedentary. And with the sedentary lifestyle, they were still foraging obviously because they weren’t growing anything, but they didn’t have to forage very far and not over great distances, which they had to do before.

So with the sedentary lifestyle came cave paintings. And that’s when the cave paintings started developing because they had more time and they could develop artistic skills etc., and then from that they started thinking about growing. And as soon as people started growing (modern day agriculture came in 10,000 years ago), what happened was is you ended up with hierarchies, you ended up with far more violent communities and you ended up with propertarianism.

Carl: They call it civilisation don’t they?

Robin: They do call it civilisation and some people think we are coming to the end of that, and we maybe moving into a new form of culture.

Carl: I hear the band practice in the background, almost like a fanfare for a… well what are we going to call it? If this is the end of the western civilisation, what is this new thing that we are moving into? Where we might be foraging again and harking back a little bit to that hunter-gatherer…

Robin: I have no idea what the people are going to call it. The importance for me for foraging and why I go out teaching it to people is that, not only is it the most local and seasonal food around, it also awakens very primal instincts in our bodies. Our bodies become far more sensitive and attuned to the landscape and the countryside. And that can only be a good thing. Because with that comes appreciation of the Natural World, and our place in it.

Carl: And we are talking about food millimetres rather than food miles?

Robin: We are talking food steps… literally.

Carl: Superb. Well I think people are ready to make a move, because we are going to go on a forage around Exeter University grounds now. If people want to find out more about what you do, what’s the website address?

Robin: www.EatWeeds.co.uk

Carl: Fantastic… thank you for that.

Robin: Thanks Carl.