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BLUE LAGOON Summer Foraging With Tapas – info & links
I have a new location for 2025 – the lovely Blue Lagoon Nature Reserve, MK. Plus I’m still running courses at the Globe, Linslade, and at Tiddenfoot Waterside Park. The Blue Lagoon is host to many wildflowers that thrive on poor soils, plus some really surprising escaped ‘naturalised’ plants such as psychotropic Datura (Thornapple or…
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June Home Education with Hedgewitch Kat
Foraging is a great activity for Home Educated children. It combines many disciplines: ▪︎biology of wildlife and plants, food webs, biodiversity ▪︎chemistry of plant compounds – what makes a plant medicinal or toxic? ▪︎Food tech – processing and cooking wild food ▪︎Exercise – racing about in beautiful natural places Your teacher will be me, Kathryn…
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Mayan & Aztec Xocolatl
Though not strictly foraged, I need to share with you the joy of making our own hot chocolate (chocolatl) the way the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs prepared it for thousands of years. We got these cacao beans from a plantation in Madagascar last summer. The Aztecs regarded chocolatl as a sacred drink, fit only for…
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Beetle Paradise on Jack By The Hedge
My favourite pesto plant is home sweet home or food plant to at least 6 UK insect species. These pics were taken in my garden allotment patch, where I sowed Allaria petiolata seeds several years ago. The middle one is a Shieldbug. Yes, you can actually buy these seeds from Chiltern Seeds…or you can collect…
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Wild Kimchi & Spring Tapas pics May 10th & 11th
Another lovely weekend in the sun teaching how to make wild kimchi on Sat. On Sun, foraging course with 3 wild tapas. I forgot to take pictures of the tapas!!! Terrible marketing… We had: Jack by the Hedge pesto on crackers Nori sushi rolls with lacto fermented wild kimchi Elderflower jelly with cream Here’s a…
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Dandelion Delights
Here’s one of the tasty greens (actually yellows!) I collected this week… I took the tallest dandelion flowers near the riverbank – the ones least likely to have been weed on! Although this time I cooked them, so there’s not much to worry about. Had a lovely relaxing time pulling the petals out of half…
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DIY Wild Kimchi
Here’s some pics from my last DIY Wild Kimchi course last week. Good fun and useful learning about the ancient yet very relevant art and science of Lacto-fermentation. There’s a link underneath for the next DIY Wild Kimchi course in May. Places are filling up fast and are limited to maximum 8 people. If you…
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StrANge fRuiT(ing bodies): Fungi-like Horsetails
This week in April, myself and the child collected tender fertile stems of Common/Field Horsetail (Equisetum arvense). These are part of the diet in Japan, Korea and China. They are SO WEIRD…like ALIEN THINGS. They’re a fairly common invasive species in the UK, too, grabbing a chokehold on the damp banks of watercourses. Weird fact:…

