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Foraging for Edible Plants in the Urban Environment
June 12, 2011
Explore the free food at our feet. This workshop will be an entry into the wonderful world of foraging – seeking out and using the delicious and nourishing plants that you have walked past your whole life.
Dress for the weather as we will spend the day walking, looking and gathering the plants around the Bastyr campus, allowing our curiosity to lead us humbly into the wild world of plants. We will focus on the most common, easiest to identify and easiest to use of the wild plants. A large portion of the day will be spent in the field, and a goodly portion of this will be time practicing the art of plant observation, note taking and putting what we see, feel, taste and smell into words. There will also be time spent indoors discussing plant evolution and how knowledge of the process of domestication can inform our foraging. During the lunch break we will make a foraged salad from our morning’s harvest.
Topics covered will be plant identification and classification, safety concerns of foraging, seasonality of wild foods, harvesting methods and ethics, cooking with wild foods, storing wild foods, nutritional qualities of wild foods, poisonous wild plants, wild plants relation to domesticated plants.
Upon completion of the seminar you will be able to:
- Identify some of the most common edible wild plants of the Seattle area.
- Harvest these plants appropriately and ethically.
- Confidently begin to incorporate these plants into the diet – at minimum, make a ten-species foraged salad.
- Assess the safety of a harvest site.
- Confidently seek out the information necessary to further explore wild food plants.
- Identify the small group of deadly poisonous wild plants to avoid in this area.