By Jo Barker
Garden forager Jo Barker inspires us to start eating our gardens today. In these articles she encourages you to get into your gardens and supplement your diet with fresh plants everyday of the year. The benefits are incredible and it is not only good for your bodies but for your wellbeing too.
How to eat your garden today!
Top Tips.
- Learn one plant at a time
- Use it.
- Do it today!
The Permaculture principle explored here is “maximum yields for minimum work”. Whatever day of the year it is, there is food everywhere. What if I told you there are at least 20 plants in your garden you could harvest and eat today, even in the middle of winter?
This is true in 100% of the 30+ gardens I have surveyed. Food without any digging or weeding or work. Just having knowledge and understanding of the plants and following a few common sense rules is the key. The main thing is to go in your garden and pick! The strangest thing seems to be that every single plant is either edible or very useful for humans. In fact it’s not strange. It makes total sense that we have evolved to fit into this ecosystem and for it to provide our food, medicine and many other needs. We have so much to gain from this journey in eating our gardens. This is a wonderful way to become indigenous to our land again, to remember we do belong and to connect deeper.
The Rules
- Eat only what you are 100% sure of!
- Pick from clean places or wash well. Avoid areas where dogs and cats do number 2’s.
- Pick the youngest parts of leaves, flowers and berries.
- Share your knowledge.
Picking and eating from the garden has to be the ultimate skill in veganic food growing. It is minimal work as it propagates, waters, nourishes and grows itself. We maximise on the yield by using it and learning multiple ways to use and benefit from each plant while caring for the ecosystem it is in. The work is in building up your knowledge. After all, our ancestors have been doing this from the beginning of human time. It’s natural and we are surely hardwired to do this.
Learning the plants!
I had to start from scratch. I once found the land around me a bit of a mystery. I could hardly name anything other than nettles and blackberries, dandelion and daisy. These four, interestingly, are probably the best to start foraging plants. Making friends with the plants is where the work is and sometimes it is one plant at a time. Knowledge can accumulate slowly and then occasionally happen in big leaps such as when I discover a whole plant family may be totally edible.
There was no one person around me to learn from when I started but there were books. Then I met other people who knew more and shared their knowledge. But the way I learnt the most was from taking other people foraging, and by making edible gardens. One of my favourite things to do is to go on forage walks with other people as I always learn something. It could be a new plant or a new way to eat one that I am already familiar with. Its fascinating! It seems like every plant has a human use and most are edible if you know how!
Observation
This is the fundamental permaculture skill. Foraging is a beautiful way to connect with your land. And when you eat the plant, you become a physical part of the land. It becomes part of you. Foraging involves going into the garden and making friends with it. Over time you learn how it changes in each season, sometimes constantly.
Another piece of advice is to keep it simple. If you are new to foraging, or experienced for that matter, use the knowledge you have however small and build on it. For for example, if nothing else, eat nettles. This is one of our most superior vegetables and hardly eaten (as if we need to work to earn it!).When we pick the young leaves in spring they will keep regenerating for months. We only ever eat the youngest, which are usually the top 4 to 6 pairs of leaves. Pick wearing gloves! There will be a summer gap when they go to flower but in September or early autumn they have another flush. They can be used like spinach and added to soups, stir fried or added to stews or curries. They can be used in smoothies or
juices. They can be dried and made into green powder or fermented. They can be eaten raw but that’s a tasty trick for another time! They are packed full of iron and calcium and other minerals. As a medicinal plant they are said to help bring our bodies back into balance. When I first started foraging I only knew a few plants. Build on your existing knowledge and your confidence will grow.
Here is a list of what I call The Big Five! These are easy to recognise and will be in most gardens. It is best to eat only the young leaves.
Nettle. Urtica dioica. Eat the young leaves and seeds.
Daisy. Bellis perennis Eat the flowers and young leaves.
Dandelion. Taraxacum officinale Eat the flowers, the young leaves and roots.
Blackberry. Rubus fruticosus. Eat the very young leaves, the bramble tips, the flowers and the fruit.
Rose. Rosa species. Eat the very young leaves, flowers and fruits (not the seeds).
Acknowledgements
Ffyona Campbell
Fergus Drenann
Food for Free – Richard Mabey
WiseWisdom ofWeeds – Katrina Blair
Plants for a Future database website and books
Self Reliance – John Yeoman
And most of all Mariette in Ramsgate, in whose incredible edible forest garden we are endlessly learning new ways to eat almost every plant!
Jo Barker has been passionate about Permaculture since the early 1990’s. She holds the unofficial record for number of ingredients in a foraged salad (over 300 leaves, flowers, fruits). She is a Permaculture Educator and Designer, she has been designing and making edible permaculture gardens for a very long
time and taken over a 1000 people foraging. She is passionate about resilience in Home-scale and Community Permaculture.
www.dynamic-equilibrium.co.uk
Facebook – Jo Barker Permaculture,
futurefoodforests@gmail.com
