Yup, slightly alarming title. I admit it was a bit scary for me, too. We went to a talk on foraging wild food on Thursday evening, and the speaker laid out a load of plants on his table and began to talk to us all about foraging. He was a little nervous, as he usually took people on a wander around the Wethersfield Eco Project and the surrounding grounds to see the plants themselves in their natural habitat – this was a new format for him and he was worried that it wouldn’t engage his audience.
He started by talking about water. Foraging water. The topic of foraged water continued for about twenty minutes, and he could have continued all night as far as we were concerned. He had only drunk water from the spring on the farm for the last two or three decades and loved it – and he’d brought along a two-litre jug of it for us to share. ‘Anyone want some?’ he asked. At first we all shrugged – the glasses we had were full of ginger ale, gin and tonic or mead. The second call, I’d drunk my ginger ale and was the first one up. Tim filled my glass. ‘Please, don’t die,’ he said, as he began to pour. He was joking. I hoped. The water was fabulous, cool and slightly chalky in a very pleasant way. It was a small compensation for having missed out on the chance to slug back some glacier meltwater in Milford Haven in 2014 (we were later told that the glacier itself was due to melt completely, with the last of that ancient ice flowing into the Sound by 2020. I haven’t wanted to check. In my mind, it’s still there).
He walked down the aisle distributing sprigs of plants he’d foraged over the previous 48 hours, inviting us to crush, smell, take a nibble of a leaf and pass it along. Nobody around me appreciated the yellow samphire he’d gathered from the Heybridge Basin, so I ended up with an evening’s supply – likewise the wild garlic leaves (‘The stems are the best’), though the Herb Robert was thoroughly crushed and the chickweed had been eaten to the stems. Never mind, we have plenty home here.
The variety of weeds that can be eaten and enjoyed is stunning. Our local council is about to charge for the garden waste collection service, and we’re deciding that paying £3 a time to have the weeds removed is not worth it – especially as there is only us to stop for within a hundred metres, as our neighbour doesn’t put out his green waste bin more than four times a year. I think Tim Wells has suggested the solution. Eat those weeds.
We even tried the sequioa sprig. Lovely, piney (of course) and definitely in the category of spice notes rather than bulk filler. In the end, the organiser was tidying up the glasses as discreetly as she could and Tim realised he’d gone an hour over his allotted time and wrapped up quickly.
We went home with a new determination to dig out our kitchen well this summer (weather permitting) and test the water. The sky was dark and the grass was frosted as we walked back to the car. Well worth the time to visit.
Julia Chalkley 