The Art of Wildcrafting
It seems that we have our very own food scavenger in our midst. Perhaps he might even be an imitator of the famous food forager Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from the UK TV series River Cottage. He’s in the community and he’s in our garden and he’s on a hunt for whatever wild food he can eat. It’s called ‘wild-crafting’ and it entails reaping a harvest from local, wild grown plants or weeds! It appears that we have no shortage of plant material to choose from, with a selection of noxious weeds growing in the community garden to forage.
I met recently with two prominent members (leaders even) of the community garden to discuss the possibility of running some workshops over summer, when I was distracted from the conversation by a question from one of them.
“Hey, do you know what this is?” He asked me this thinking that, as a horticulturist, I could identify every plant in the universe. Of course, I had no clue what it was but it looked pretty weedy to me and I’m certainly no expert in bush regeneration and feral weeds. But not letting the powers of deduction allude me, I was determined to work it out.
“Taste it.” He instructed me. What was he thinking? I wasn’t going to eat some wild plant that I had no idea about. But being a convincing type of guy, he led the way and gulped down a fistful himself.
