An Almost Rant and Excitement

Foraging is about so much more than simply finding food for free. Granted this is a large part of it; the tastes and textures you can experience from food which isn't available in any shops is hard to describe. The incredible selection of mushrooms, wild greens, berries, fruit, flowers and nuts, from the simple blackberry picked and popped into your mouth as you walk past a bush, through a simple dish of mushrooms on toast, to the painstakingly prepared feasts incorporating special ingredients and cooking techniques, there is a feast waiting in the wild larder on everyone's doorstep.
I am still a beginner, and it will be years before I could consider foraging as a way of replacing a fair number of my meals, but it's not about that for me. I have the small allotment plot to put less shop bought produce on my family's plates, and I aim to increase the size of the plot as a means towards self sufficiency. From a pure food point of view, foraging supplements this with variety and tastes from select meals, alcohol, preserves etc.

For me, foraging is not just about feeding the body. It is about connecting with the world around us again, to learn to respect our surroundings and appreciate what we can take, in moderation, from nature as our ancestors did. While I am still a beginner when it comes to foraging, I am learning more each season. Little by little my knowledge will grow, but I don't see the process as aiming to know everything. It is about the journey of learning new things. If you continue to read this blog you'll see me find things for the first time and hopefully share in some of my joy. (as below). You'll also see me fail to find things which I have before (I have no idea where my Wood Blewitts are this year!).

So the above may sound a bit ranty, maybe even slightly hippy-ish. Hopefully neither. But what brought it about was the realisation that when I go out foraging, I probably don't even gather a tenth of what is around me. The reason for this: I go with my family!
My intention is to keep this blog, as far as I can manage it to the 3 main hobbies I have and not about my family, hence it's name, "Brew Forage Grow".
But in this one post I will make the exception, and if you can see that it is possible to have a full time job in an office and 2 young kids at home yet still make time to get out into the world around you, to cultivate a plot (even just a quarter plot like I have) and even brew some alcohol to enjoy in the downtime then I'll feel like I've added to this world.

I have a long suffering wife and 2 beautiful little girls, currently 1 and 2.5 years old. A trip out to the forest means we generally take a pushchair, restricting our movements to the main paths for the most parts. It can often involve a backpack carrier as well, restricting my movements even further with the eldest on my back.


I can almost sense the mushooms sat off the path, mocking me as I pass blindly by. Occasionally I venture off the path, often with my eldest daughter, normally returning to the "look" from the wife who was left on the path with the pushchair.
This happened at the weekend. I knew "the look" was waiting for me back at the path when I darted into a LMLP. That's a Likely Mushroomy Looking Patch. Then I started grinning. And I did a little dance. With a 2.5 year old strapped to my back like this:

The reason for my joy? The reason for the jig? I found my first ever Winter Chanterelles or Trumpet Chanterelles depending who you talk to (Cantharellus tubaeformis). I know they taste good, I tried them once on a mushroom walk I went on with John Rensten, but I'd never found them on my own. Maybe I'd passed them by many times, it's hard to say as they are almost exactly the same colour as the leaf litter they inhabit.

After that excitement I stuck to the path with the family, and just before we turned back, happened upon a couple of birch boletes

So when we got back to the car we had a couple of boletes and a couple of handfuls of winter chanterelles in the basket. By no means close in size to the hauls you often see on foraging blogs from people who have been doing this for years.

What you can't however see in the basket, is the fun we had as a family and the memories we are hopefully building for the girls as they grow up. You can't see the excitement I felt finding a new species of mushroom for the first time, or the connection with the outdoors we all get from just being outside. That is why foraging is about so much more than food. That is why foraging is about more than just what is in my basket when I get home. The memories and family time are the most valuable things I can take from my surroundings, and I wouldn't swap them for even the biggest basket of foraged goods.