Adventures in Food

This: http://www.wildfoodmentor.co. uk/x/notify is a course on wild food, I am wanting to sign up but will i have time? can i justify the cost? will i actually follow it? maybe i could do it and report on the results here. your recommendation? xx

On Saturday I was very happy to be invited to join Pudding Mill River at the Greenway in Stratford , running through the Olympics site, to collect some plants with the help of some lovely people who joined the Botanical Collecting Expedition. Marie Briggs at Kew Herbarium was good enough to make the loan of a Vasculum and a press which made it a much more efficient expedition. We collected specimens from herbs and shrubs. The list is as follows: Viper's Bugloss - Echium vulgare Hedge Mustard - Sisybrium officinale Burnet Rose Rosa pimpinellifolia Bird's-Foot Trefoil - Lotus corniculatus Teasel - Dipsacus fullonum Black Horehound - Ballota nigra Treacle Mustard - Erysimum cheiranthoides Common Mallow - Malva sylvestris Oxeye Daisy - Leucanthemum vulgare A Grass - unknown We also saw plenty of apple trees, brambles and mugwort, ragwort, yarrow, various roses including dog rose, three types of bindweed (probably Convulvulus arvensis , Calystegia sepium , and the non-native Calyst...

At Pensford Field there is a hut (the studio) and behind the hut is a bank of earth with a lot of nettles on it. I am amazed to find that I am offered the opportunity to grow things on this bank. I am allotted, not an allottment but an aNottment. I went there yesterday with Graham from the Alpines in Kew Gardens, you could say he knows a few things about native plants. We had a look around and got together a list of plants growing on the patch. Of course it is mostly nettles, but also Alexanders, burdock, green alkanet, horsetails, Black HoarHound, a type of wild lettuce and a mustard, some pretty grasses and a wild barley, mugwort (allegedly useful in clairvoyancy), a buddleia and some buttercups. I may well have forgotten a couple of things too. We also have on the site a pile of breeze blocks, some rubble, a few black plastic tubes and a bird box. With this highly promising collection of assorted plants and objects I want to intervene as a concious and conscientious agent of ecologi...