Wealden Times | WT233 | October 2021 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Garden
Wild
Harvests
Jo Arnell is scouring the English
countryside for all its treasures
General foraging rules
- Make sure you can identify the plant –
poisonous plants can look edible and some
may look almost identical to edible varieties
- Don’t pick from roadsides
polluted by car exhausts
- Stay on footpaths and do not trespass
- It is illegal to uproot plants
unless on your own land
- Don’t take the flowers or seeds
of ANNUAL plants, as these need
to disperse and grow again
- Make sure you don’t trample
on surrounding plants
- Never take more than you
need – think about wildlife. Their
need is far greater than ours
The natural world is getting ready for the
winter. The plants have been thinking about
it for months – since the summer solstice –
the moment when the earth starts to turn away from
the sun and the days start their inevitable shortening.
We might feel that the summer has just started
by the 21st of June, but ironically this is the signal
that tells the plants in the northern hemisphere to
start making fruit and seed, to ripen their wood
and prepare for the long cold months ahead.
By autumn the nights are noticeably longer –
and colder. Fruits and berries are reddening with
anthocyanin and advertising their readiness to be
eaten. Those of us who liked picking up sticks and
shells as children have never really stopped – ok some
might have transferred to shopping or collecting
jewellery, but the rest of us are still unable to go on
a walk without collecting something to bring home.
It is great fun heading out to harvest free food, or
natural decorations (sticks) and foraging
brings added purpose to autumn
walks. It also helps to satisfy those
hunter-gatherer instincts.
- Consult www.bsbi.uk/code.htm
for a detailed code of conduct
113 priceless-magazines.com