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Foraging with Leo Utton, The Barefoot Forager
220 Plays1 month ago
The weeds in your local park? Some of them are dinner. This episode, I sit down with Leo Utton — the Barefoot Forager — a UK wild food expert and foraging workshop host working across Brighton and London. We dig into early spring edible plants, safe foraging practices, and the surprisingly rich history behind the wild foods growing all around us. Leo has a brilliant knack for bringing together old herbal texts and cutting-edge plant science, whether he's posting on social media or leading a group through the hedgerows. Whether you're a curious beginner or a seasoned forager, this one's packed with seasonal inspiration.
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Transcript
Introduction to Gardening and Foraging
00:00:07
Speaker
Step into the Gardener's Lodge with me, Michael Haw. Let's explore the fascinating worlds of gardening, nature and ecology through conversations with experts, thought leaders, passionate enthusiasts, and of course, some real good friends.
00:00:23
Speaker
All from the cozy heart of the lodge. Come on in. It is brilliantly early spring and the earth is slowly waking up and some of the first plants to awaken are actually food.
00:00:37
Speaker
Not food that you're probably used to eating or food that you can buy in the greengrocer, but food nonetheless. Today I'm talking with Leo Utton, but you may know him better as the Barefoot Forager.
Meet Leo Utton, the Barefoot Forager
00:00:49
Speaker
He's a foraging expert who runs workshops between Brighton and London on how to safely forage for food in unlikely places. we chat about all things foraging. One of the reasons I wanted to chat with Leo was that he marries historical texts with scientific evidence and showcases this via his social media and his foraging workshops.
00:01:12
Speaker
But before we dig any deeper into that, let's hear Leo's answers to my six rapid fire questions. Are you ready? Yes. Favourite plant? oh Hogweed, Heraclium spondilium. Favourite way to connect with nature?
00:01:28
Speaker
Talking to trees. Nice. What is the most beautiful garden or natural landscape that you have ever visited? oh my God.
00:01:40
Speaker
Can I be so cliche and just say the outside? I don't need a perfect anything. i just I just need to see stinger nettles on the floor somewhere and I'm happy. ah Now you're not a gardener, but what's your favorite, maybe let's say garden tool, but maybe your favorite foraging tool.
00:01:57
Speaker
you know what? I use my hands, man. I like to get my hands dirty. I've got a knife and I've got a basket, but when it really comes to it, it's my hands.
00:02:07
Speaker
I had a horticulture teacher who once said his favorite garden tool was the nail on his thumb because he could just pinch things off with the, like kind of using that as a little. Yeah, that's a good one. If you could be one, plant or an animal?
00:02:21
Speaker
I like being a human being, man. It's an animal. I'm i'm me. i like I like this incarnation. I like existing. Yeah, I'm already here. When you're stuck and looking for solid advice on anything plant or garden related, where do you turn for the most trusted sound advice?
00:02:40
Speaker
Great question. Books. I open up a book. I've got my favorite forage and books. And then I always check a couple of reputable websites, got sort of my
Leo's Foraging Journey
00:02:50
Speaker
favorite forages. And I go to them and I look at their books or their websites.
00:02:53
Speaker
Nice. What are some of your favorite forage books? the The one I recommend to everyone, if they're just starting is a book by the company, wild food UK. And it's just called foraging foraging pocket guide or something like that.
00:03:06
Speaker
That's, that's the one you start with, man. It's just straight to the point. It's got pictures and ID points. um the The correct answer is you need multiple books. There's no one book that has all the things you need.
00:03:16
Speaker
So i I do the foraging guide by Wild Food UK. I do John Wright's, the forager's calendar. um And then, cause that shows you the the year of foraging. And then I'd recommend Robin Harford's very long winded title of edible medicinal plants of great Britain and Ireland.
00:03:36
Speaker
It's a very good book. Rolls off the tongue. Take me back. Where did you discover your love of the natural world, your interest in nature?
00:03:49
Speaker
The thing is, man, is I think every human being is born with an innate love with the natural world. And then it gets sucked out of you. Yeah. It gets sucked out of you by living in the school system we go through and living in a city. And our association with plants is that's a weed and we should get rid of it.
00:04:09
Speaker
And that's what you get brought up. So, I mean, I was born with it, man.
Urban Foraging and Nutrition
00:04:14
Speaker
Everyone is. But then for me, in terms of like doing foraging as a thing, it didn't come till I was an adult.
00:04:22
Speaker
You know, if you ask if you ask my family, like I've got a sister and a brother, my sister will say, we did a little bit of foraging when we were younger. But to me, that wasn't there. I think I just like switched off to it.
00:04:35
Speaker
So for me, it's living in a city. And at at the start, it wasn't even about food, man. It was just, I'd walk through the woods because I like spending time in the woods. And I'd look around the woods and I'd think,
00:04:48
Speaker
I do not know the names of any of these things. Like everyone knows like an oak tree or a beech tree or something, but what's this plant here? What is that mushroom over there?
00:04:59
Speaker
And it started there. It was like, I'm a human being. i should be able to name the plants and the mushrooms that i'm surrounded by, but I can't. So I bought books. um Actually, the first thing I learned was my partner, Amber, showed me what wild garlic was.
00:05:15
Speaker
And I was like, cool, that's fun. That actually tastes good. I can make something out of that. And then it was buying books and then it was getting obsessed with that. And then through that, I dig in a bit further and my brain just wants to know the reason behind everything. Why is that plant growing there? Why doesn't grow over there? you know And then it moves into food.
00:05:37
Speaker
And I love food and I love fermenting things and all that stuff. But I mean,
Challenges in Modern Farming
00:05:40
Speaker
it's quite a long winded answer to the question. I mean, it starts, it starts for me as being a human being that lives in a city that is searching for something that a human being requires, but not knowing what it is.
00:05:52
Speaker
And it turns out- So you grew up in London? I grew up in Portsmouth, okay but I moved to Brighton when I was like 19 and I live in Brighton now. So I've been here for, you know, 15 years or something.
00:06:04
Speaker
I mean, the city's covered in green spaces, man. You leave your house and there are plants on the floor. You just walk past them every day. They absolutely do. And I think one thing that I find interesting is that there is such a strong disconnect between food that you find in the supermarket on the shelves, um the green grocer, and that that same thing growing in, you know, in an urban space or in yeah a natural environment is not the same to people. That is completely different. It's so funny. father and...
00:06:37
Speaker
my father-in-law here and say that like, you know, we were pulling down a shed at, at um, uh, my sister-in-law's house and, uh, there was a plum tree hanging over the neighbor's back garden. And I was like, they they were so ripe and we had a little ladder. So I snuck a few that were hanging over the fence, yeah but they wouldn't eat them.
00:06:54
Speaker
And, and I, and I was like, well, they're so good though. Why not? And they were kind of like, oh no, it's, no, it's, you know, they, they couldn't even kind of, ah yeah intellectualize really what the problem was with it um and so i think that that's a super interesting thing that yeah you can walk down the street you can pass so many like ah sources of food and nourishment and just not be into it not be interested not even notice you've hit the nail on the head of the start there it's the disassociation it's the disconnect we have people don't associate plants growing out the ground with their dinner
00:07:31
Speaker
People associate their dinner with plastic packaging, which is in a supermarket. or Or, you know, okay, maybe you shop in a
Foraging as a Lifestyle
00:07:38
Speaker
farmer's market. Okay. Then you can afford a better quality of food, organic food, which is normal food. Organic food is like yeah this special corner of the supermarket, but actually that's just like baseline ordinary food.
00:07:51
Speaker
But even then, yeah right, you know, that's just the normal food. Even then, people would associate the small weeds that grow around that food as being weeds, something you have to get rid of.
00:08:03
Speaker
But dude, that's nutrition. Like I walk from my house to Tesco, right? I still go to supermarkets, man. I walk from my house to Tesco and there is more nutrition on that walk from my house to Tesco than there is in the bloody supermarket.
00:08:17
Speaker
And it's all just the little weeds that are growing out of the cracks in the pavement that I'm slightly skeptical to eat those particular ones out of the cracks in the pavement. yeah um But that's the nutrition there, man.
00:08:29
Speaker
this this This is why I like teaching people, right? It's because... you let people see that those plants that they see every day are food and are medicine. And it's not a joke. They actually are.
00:08:40
Speaker
Why is there more nutrition in your pavement yeah versus the supermarket? Oh, that's a fun question. Well, I mean, right. so let's check around a percent number. No, it's good one. I like it. Um,
00:08:57
Speaker
something like 80%, don't know, this is a random percentage, but something like 80% of food in a supermarket is not food at the get-go, right? Like we have a small section for produce.
00:09:08
Speaker
Most of it is packaged stuff, ultra-processed foods. So there isn't nutrients in any of that. I mean, then if you want to look at how wild food grows, if wild food food is growing in amongst other foods, that soil health is going to be better.
00:09:26
Speaker
than a lot of the supermarket soil health is because they're growing monocultures. <unk> They're growing for one plant to thrive. When you have environments where multiple plants are thriving and there's mycelium underground connecting everything and they're sharing nutrients and they're sharing information.
00:09:44
Speaker
there's going to be a higher influx of nutrients going into that food. Soil that's used to grow produce at the supermarket, it's really just a substrate just to sit the food in at this point. Most of the time, there's no nutrients in that. It's been completely destroyed by cultivation and then by the constant use of chemical fertilisers. And so you're actually...
00:10:09
Speaker
in a kind of indirect way, instead of eating beautiful produce, that's nutrient dense, you're eating NPK fertilizers that was able to absorb, um, to grow effectively, but not kind of filled with micronutrients and all that kind of stuff.
00:10:26
Speaker
Well, it's, well, it's, it's also, it's hard, right? Like I've done, i used to use a site that was a farm where I was a working farm and I do foraging walks on this farm. And there's a few interesting insights to have to be had about the wild food that grows there. But I'd speak to the farmers, you know, and they're like, they're like, I don't want to use fertilizers. Or like, I don't want to use the chemical sprays I'm having to use.
00:10:50
Speaker
But I have to. Because if I don't, I'm not going to make enough crop. They're not going to be big enough. I'm not going to make any money. The farmers have got it well hard right now. So i I like to be very sure that when I
Foraging's Societal Impact
00:11:03
Speaker
so talk about this stuff, I'm saying like, you can't blame farmers for this. It's just the process. No, oh no.
00:11:10
Speaker
you know It's the corporations that have like such strict, strict requirements on, you know, that tomato needs to be this size and it needs to be blemish free and it needs to be the perfect little specimen when food and nature is not perfect.
00:11:26
Speaker
It's not. i think that's probably the problem. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's something where wild food comes into play actually is that. I like to talk about that on walks. Like if you're showing someone a plant on a walk,
00:11:38
Speaker
You're finding it at the exact stage of growth it happens to be in on that day because of the weather and because of the environment it's in. People are used to seeing food, supermarket food, that is grown to the perfect moment and then picked at that time.
00:11:54
Speaker
So that's what we associate good food with. Yeah. But then wild food doesn't like that, man. I mean, sure, I'm out there right now picking the things I like picking in spring because it's the time of year. But if if that patch of nettles on the left is slightly older and not as good, I don't really care. I'm still going eat them. I'm still picking that.
00:12:13
Speaker
You know, you were mentioning before in a roundabout way that, you know, foraging is an innate human skill that we have just lost yeah um in in the modern world. That must have happened relatively quickly, really. Obviously, farming been around for a very long time, but not everyone had that as ah an available source. I think probably up until 150 years ago, foraging was what we did consistently to get food. So there's something in me that thinks that, hey, we could actually get this back.
00:12:48
Speaker
And I think it's people like you who are like pushing this movement that can show people that this is actually a viable way of collecting food, getting in nature, connecting with nature and connecting with others that could actually fix a quite a lot of issues that we have in our society at the moment.
00:13:03
Speaker
It would fix so many things all in one. I mean, you've you've put it quite well there. it It rounds into lots of different avenues. It's not just about diet either. about your mental health, the whole thing. But yeah, i mean, it is an innate skill.
00:13:15
Speaker
And it is, yeah, very recent that we've only stopped doing it. I mean, you can look at like Victorian cookbooks, and they've got dandelions in there. Nettles are in there. yeah You know, you talk to, I spoke to my grandma, who's like Irish.
00:13:27
Speaker
And um I remember when I was telling i was getting into this stuff, she was, she thought it was a bit of a joke. She was like, Everyone knows you eat stinger nettles. Everyone knows that's the thing. And I'm like, they don't, that isn't a thing. People don't know that anymore. like and it And it became a poor people's thing actually. It's actually like a status game thing, right? So you can look at like medieval England, the rich people were eating the white bread. They were eating the highly processed stuff because it was harder to do. It took more time.
00:13:55
Speaker
And the poor people would be eating organic wholemeal bread, organic
Understanding Nature through Foraging
00:14:02
Speaker
salmon from a river. you know, clean bloody river organic foods. Yeah. And it was the richer people that eat in the process stuff.
00:14:09
Speaker
And we've just role reversed that. And wild food became poor people's food. So stinging nettles were for poor people, because why would you pick that out of the field when you should be buying it with money? You know, it's a status game.
00:14:22
Speaker
And I mean, and now, now you're seeing an role reversal completely the other way around again, because richer people are now looking to do this. Because it's like, i don't know why. It's a bit of fun, I guess. Yeah, i I guess so. And I suppose it may be now in such a busy society, like a richer person will do these sort of things is as sort of, for lack of a better term, like a vanity is like, oh, look what I'm doing. You know what I mean? I go foraging on the weekends or whatever. Because they have the time to spend and do that. Whereas...
00:14:55
Speaker
you know, poorer communities are kind of like locked into this sort of world where they have to work and they don't have the resources to be able to spend the time anymore. yeah So they are kind of locked into being just having to go to the supermarket once and buy, unfortunately, poor foods.
00:15:11
Speaker
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00:15:22
Speaker
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00:15:42
Speaker
You can download your free perennial garden design, as well as my free Australian native garden design at the link in the description. You know, i've done I've done walks with groups of people that that I've got a little pet peeve and it's for it's one that I actually use on walks, which is funny, but it's when you call it an experience.
00:16:04
Speaker
like I'm going on foraging experience and I'm like cool that's great like if it sells a ticket and you're going to come and I can teach you stuff great and sometimes I start I've started walks by saying this I'm like look if you're here just for the crack to see what this is about for a bit of a laugh great I'll give you a good day but if you want to actually like learn to forage then I'm here for that too and there's nothing wrong with either I think both are healthy But yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, they end up in the same result, right?
00:16:31
Speaker
ah Ultimately, but it isn't an experience to me. It's like it literally is a way of living. You know, I leave the house and I purposely walk certain ways down to town so that I could walk past a particular plant and see see how far it's grown in the past week, you know?
00:16:48
Speaker
It isn't even just about food. It is a connective thing. It's connection. We're supposed to interact with our plants in a healthy way, in a good way. Talk to them. Say hello hello to your stinging nettles, man.
00:17:00
Speaker
That's it. So you've raised an interesting point. So a few years ago, I actually spoke to a man named Diego Benetto. He's an Australian foraging kind of, he's quite similar, does so quite similar things to you. Cool. When he was talking about that foraging is a lot less actually about getting
Safe and Responsible Foraging
00:17:16
Speaker
out there and not knowing what you're doing and a lot more about experiencing the environment around you knowing where that um peach tree is or knowing where that patch of nettle is and and kind of yeah as you were just mentioning walking by every day seeing how far it is okay we've got a few days away before we kind of can pick that and I think what you're kind of saying there is it's a way of living in the sense that you're you're not just here for an afternoon to have a bit of fun. It's a lifestyle in which you go out every day on your way to work.
00:17:48
Speaker
You see the tree. You go, okay, the the blossoms are out. So we've got probably, you know whatever. How many months until we've got fruit there? i'll I'll, you know, come back and I'll have a look in a month or so. Well, you know what i mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It ties you into what the world is doing, right? So we're so disassociated with...
00:18:05
Speaker
Okay, let me use a little analogy. So recently I decided I wanted to learn about the moon cycles, right? Okay. And I just thought, instead of Googling it, I'm just going to flip and look at the moon every day.
00:18:18
Speaker
I'm just going to stand outside my front door and look at the moon every day and watch it for like a month and see how it moves. And it's like that with foraging. you can you You have to learn it by getting books out and stuff. But then if you want to see what's going on and you want to see what the best thing to forage in March is, you've got to go outside and you've got to look at what's growing in March. It literally is that.
00:18:42
Speaker
And it it it does make you more connected with the seasons. It's so cliche, but it really does. Because, like okay, for instance, right now, magnolia petals, right? The magnolia flowers are out and they they don't stay out for that long. You've got a pretty short window to get those.
00:18:57
Speaker
But they are one of my favourite things to pick every year. um And last year I only did one little pot of pickled magnolia buds just because I kind of just forgot to go out that week, you know?
00:19:09
Speaker
And so this week, this week I'm going out, I'm going to fill that basket this afternoon, I think. So what do you do with it? ah So those guys, two things. One for me, I mean, this is just what I do. My experience is sushi.
00:19:23
Speaker
I bloody love doing the sushi with them. So I pick on the magnolia petals. ah So the petals of magnolia, and you're only eating the flowers, you're not going to eat the leaves. um They taste like ginger, gingery, cardamomy sort of flavor.
00:19:36
Speaker
So if ah if I'm doing walks, I might serve a dessert with them. I might do like a whipped cream inside a petal and then whatever flowers we've got, or maybe like a digestive crumb or something.
00:19:46
Speaker
um But for me, it's sushi. So I pickle them. I do one-to-one water vinegar, little sugar, little salt. um heat that up and then pour them over the top of the petals full of a jar.
00:19:58
Speaker
And within a day, you know, they're they're ready to go. And it it tastes like Gary Gary, which is like ginger sushi. pearl wow that is actually very cool i didn't know that man go and do it now's the time yeah i mean it it really is the time and i think i suppose before we get too far into like this season's bounty that we can go out and pick let's give everyone just an overarching little warning a piece of advice about how to do this safely oh yeah okay fun i mean look
00:20:29
Speaker
When you learn to forage, you need gateways. You need like a gateway drug. You need to go outside. You need to find stinging nettles. That's the place everyone should start. If you've never foraged anything, learn something you don't need to learn. right So you know what stinging nettles look like without looking at them.
00:20:46
Speaker
So you go outside, you find stinging nettles. You can pick them and you learn how to pick them and do it in an environment that's clean and we can go down that route. But in terms of identification, don't overcomplicate things.
00:20:57
Speaker
If you're learning a new plant, and you've successfully identified it once, that is not the one you eat. You don't eat that one. You learn it once, you take it home, you take photos, you take photos in situ and at home.
00:21:11
Speaker
um And my advice typically is, ah this was given to me by someone else, but if you're learning a new plant, find it three times in three different locations before you consider eating it.
00:21:23
Speaker
There's no rush. You have the rest of your life to forage. It can be a long time or a short time, depending how quickly you try and eat things that you don't know what they are. That's the way to think about That's actually very good advice.
00:21:37
Speaker
it's it The thing is, right, life is it's like foraging is very safe. It really is. You don't need to try and forage a hundred plants this year, forage three or four, like, and you can do stinging that was dandelions, c cleavers and cherries, you know, like start easy.
00:21:54
Speaker
And then if you want to get into it and get a bit more knowledge, then you start looking at something like the carrot family, which has a few of our deadly members and they can all look quite similar to the untrained eye, but you just, you just take your time. It's not a fast process, you know?
00:22:13
Speaker
Okay, let look what's a short, concise bit of advice? um If you are going to learn... Don't eat what you don't know. don't what you don't know. Be 100% certain of your identification and write down why it is what it says it
Spring Foraging Tips
00:22:28
Speaker
is. Oh, God, really quickly, let's cover using apps, using foraging apps or using books or websites. Okay.
00:22:38
Speaker
An app is an acceptable it's an acceptable tool to use to point you in the direction of what that thing might be. But it is not an answer to what you want it to be. So if an app says it's something, cool, go and buy a book and look at a website and find out why it is that thing.
00:22:57
Speaker
Because an app says, yes, that is cow parsley. Okay, why? Why is it cow parsley and why is it not hemlock? Those are the things you need to find out, you know. I think too, a lot of those apps, and I so have seen it with my clients in the past, they'll go, I put it through this app and um this is what it came in and it is just so inaccurate.
00:23:22
Speaker
yeah And the way that that, I'll explain it very quickly, the way that a lot of those plant ID apps work is that they're working on data that is user uploaded. So if enough users upload a photo of a plant and then the system looks at it and then they say, oh, it's this click. Yep.
00:23:44
Speaker
That's it. Then every time it sees that it's going to shoot that out, but it's not accurate to what the actual plant is. so you can run into some big problems. oh I would say for a piece of advice on a good app to use, and this is actually what I use, is actually just the Google app, like reverse image search things, because then sure it's raiding through Google as opposed to just raiding through a very limited um kind data set.
00:24:12
Speaker
i'm I'm glad you put that like that. I think that's an important thing to to think about, actually. i I like to test the apps. Because I mean, right, so when i was doing when I first started doing foraging courses, like teaching courses, the apps were kind of being used, but it wasn't like everyone wasn't scanning everything every day, which seems to be the case now.
00:24:30
Speaker
um So, you know, I'd bring up a couple of studies. There was there was a good study they did um on some of the most commonly used mushroom apps. I think this was 2021 to like that. So they're a bit better now. But They tested four of the most common apps.
00:24:45
Speaker
um'm I'm not going to name them just so I don't piss anyone off, but they tested four very popular apps that you would recognize the names of. And the most successful one identifying edible mushrooms compared to toxic mushrooms was 49% successful.
00:25:02
Speaker
o And the rest of them were worse. And for identifying the death cat death cat mushroom, it was something like 35% successful. I haven't got the figures on the right in my brain, but it was bad. Um, so I tell people that, but then what we did, i was doing a walk in Hackney, um, on the marshes and there's a hemlock water drop work there, which is one of the most deadly plants in the country.
00:25:27
Speaker
Very small amount of that plant can kill you. And there's no antidote. Um, it's a carrot family member. So it looks kind of like coriander and parsley. And I was talking about it and someone asked about the app and I was like, well, get your app out and let's do it. So they got their app out and they used, I think they used a chat GPT thing on it. can't really remember, but they scanned it and all it said was, this is coriander.
00:25:50
Speaker
Didn't say anything else. It just said coriander. And that's that. And it's like, dude, you'll die. You will literally die if you eat that. So, but it was, it's good to do it in person. 15 people are looking at it going, okay, right.
00:26:04
Speaker
let's consider not using apps to eat things. But literally I don't know, man. the so I've got one. I've got ah the iNaturalist one. I've got the iNaturalist one. I actually used it on a plant at some point at the end of last year. I was looking at a plant and I was like, I can't even work out what family that thing's in, man. I have no idea.
00:26:25
Speaker
And so I scanned it and it pointed me in the right direction. And then I went home and checked and it was right in that instance. But it's it's a tool you can use, but it's not the be all end all. Should i eat this or not?
00:26:38
Speaker
that's to think of it. let's Let's jump into
Edible Weeds in Your Garden
00:26:41
Speaker
spring. So we're in the early stages of spring right now. What are some amazing wild foods that anyone who wants to get out there and get going can easily identify and use at home?
00:26:55
Speaker
It is one of my favourite times of year to forage, I think, springtime. Is it? Yeah, I love it. it will You're out of winter and it was cold and there's not that much going on and now it starts getting bright, the colours come out and you get really good edibles.
00:27:08
Speaker
my favourite hogweed shoots, common hogweed, not giant hogweed. um You get the unfurled leaf shoots of hogweed, which are going to be like, you know, 20 20%.
00:27:22
Speaker
twenty to 30 centimetres and a really big one, but 10 to 20 centimetres, something like that. And they resemble asparagus. um I like these because it's actually more like a vegetable. A lot of foraging in England can be quite like herby, you know, lots of thin leaves that are great in salad. um But hogweed shoots are actually like a vegetable. So for instance, this week I did, the I just do scrambled eggs, sourdough,
00:27:46
Speaker
Nice butter, scrambled eggs and fried hogweed juice on top. They're kind of like celery-ish like, but more like asparagus. They're bloody great. um Yum.
00:27:58
Speaker
There's a couple of mushrooms too, man, actually right now. ah St. George's mushrooms pop out now and you get these. They come, it's typically supposed to be around St. George's Day, which is why they're named St. George's mushrooms.
00:28:11
Speaker
um But for me, like I get them from about now. and then up for about five, six weeks. They are... Oh, that's quite a nice long season. Yeah, they get a little run, man. um They're grassland species. They're growing rings.
00:28:26
Speaker
or little little clusters of mushrooms on the ground. They're quite short, stout, thick mushrooms, but it is a white stem, white cap, white gill situation, which for beginners is generally a bad sign, actually.
00:28:40
Speaker
um yeah So if you're going to forage St George's mushrooms, make sure you know what you're doing, please. ah But they are the most delicious little things. And because you get them in spring, there's not loads of mushrooms out right now. So that that's, it's a fun thing to able to forage mushrooms for.
00:28:57
Speaker
um To be able to forage mushrooms in spring is a nice thing. Yeah. What else am I picking now, man? I mean, we covered magnolia, but magnolia petals, you need those. They're bloody delicious.
00:29:07
Speaker
um And then there's a couple of more common ones, man. Like, dude, you get the flush of nettles now. Nettles go in my freezer. I get huge flushes in spring because you want them when they're young, really. The best texture is going to be when they're quite low on the ground. Nice and tender.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly that. um Cleavers are out to do cleavers water. The lymphatic drainage drink, which is literally just cleavers, um gallium apirine, cleavers straight into cold water, little bit of lemon, leave it overnight, come back and you get this delicious cucumber-esque water that's that is supposed to be good for lymphatic drainage.
00:29:47
Speaker
And then cow parsley. I love picking yeah cow parsley. um It has the deadly lookalike of hemlock. So you do want to make sure you know what you're doing. and Be careful. Yep. Be very, very careful if you're going to pick cow parsley. But again, it's it's abundant.
00:30:03
Speaker
And it's similar to parsley, similar to coriander, somewhere in between those. That's a garnishing thing for me, but I do a lot of curries and a lot of stir fries, man. So that goes very well with a lot of the food I do.
00:30:15
Speaker
Tree leaves. You get tree leaves now, man. um Hawthorns out first, and then I'm waiting around for the beech leaves to come out. So you can eat a few tree leaves, man. Hawthorns good.
00:30:27
Speaker
Beech leaves are good. Silver birch
Legal and Ethical Foraging
00:30:29
Speaker
are good. and What do you do with them? So honestly, right, this is where I think there's there's there's a nice line in foraging where like, I really love cooking. I'm really big into food. um Okay. And making recipes is very fun. But with tree leaves, dude, there is just something incredibly exciting to me about walking around the woods and just eating leaves straight off a tree.
00:30:50
Speaker
And that's it. That's what I do with them. I go to the woods, I go for a walk, and I just ah say a hello to this tree and I eat some of his leaves. And then I walk to another tree and I say a hello to him and eat some of his leaves. You do want them when they're young, don't you? Yeah, you have get them young. You do want them when they're nice and young. Yes. There is a fine line between something that's edible and disgusting and edible and nice. With tree leaves, you get pretty short window. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A few weeks, really.
00:31:20
Speaker
But you you can do it. There's noyu. People make a gin. I think it's infused gin. I've actually never done this one, but people infuse gin with beech leaves. um When they're really young I've not done that one though.
00:31:33
Speaker
That's on the list. The never ending list of things to do. 2026 is upon us and I have limited spaces open for my garden coaching and consultation sessions. Whether you're looking for help with plant identification, advice on care and maintenance or tips for improving your soil and plant nutrition.
00:31:51
Speaker
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00:32:03
Speaker
My coaching and consultation sessions can happen right in your garden if you live in the UK or online if you're anywhere else in the world. My goal is to meet you where you are and support your unique garden journey.
00:32:18
Speaker
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00:32:29
Speaker
Head to the link in this episode description or shoot me an email at hello at thegardenerslodge.co.uk.
00:32:39
Speaker
What about garden weeds that are starting to emerge? So obviously my listeners are gardeners. Oh, yeah, yeah. They started, like a lot of little plants are starting to shoot up here and there. ah Are there any that should belong in the kitchen and they should try and, you know, save them off to the side and maybe pick a little patch to leave?
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, always, man, always. Okay, so common garden weeds. um There's one called chickweed. Chickweed pops up quite a lot. Yep. Stellaria medea. That guy is the most delicious salad green. I think it's one of the best salad greens we get in England.
00:33:13
Speaker
And right now is a great time to ID them because they're just coming into flowers. So they're quite low growing, low growing leaves. They're very small. um Alongside their stem, you get one singular line of hairs. It's like a Mohican line of hairs and the rest of it's bald. And then they have these flowers that come out.
00:33:33
Speaker
very small white flowers. um It looks like 10 petals, but there are actually five that are deeply notched. So you get those ID points. And and from there, you you are looking at chickweed.
00:33:44
Speaker
That's a fantastic salad green. People would dig that out their garden, i'm not knowing they can eat it. And there's a few more. so Woodavens, G.M.A. Bainham. If you're familiar with that one, that is a very common garden weed.
00:33:58
Speaker
The leaves are edible, but just because you can eat something doesn't mean you should necessarily. They don't yeah but a taste of a lot. Like if you are really hungry, sure, go for it now. But it's the root system, um which is a fun one because people will uproot it to get rid of it.
00:34:15
Speaker
But the roots of Woodhavens contains eugenol. which is very well known amongst dentists. um It's used as ah as a topical painkiller for for toothache. And they still administer this today. It's the same stuff in cloves.
00:34:29
Speaker
It's the exact same chemical. Eugenol found in cloves is the same as eugenol found in Woodavons. um But it's an English one. So cloves cloves were like quite a highly priced commodity in the spice wars.
00:34:44
Speaker
For like a good few hundred years, people were dying over cloves. People were killing each other over the collection of cloves. um And the whole time it's growing in your garden. I appreciate people don't like eat cloves every day, um but you have this root system growing in your garden. You're digging up, throwing it away, and you can use it to make like masala chai, like I do hedgerow chai.
00:35:07
Speaker
So just do okay English tea and you can use cardamom, but I would use like hogweed seeds or maybe wild carrot seeds or something. And then you can just use the roots of woodavens. And you can do the same thing for like mulled cider, mulled wine um at Christmas. Wow. i just I just use the roots of woodavens.
00:35:26
Speaker
I should caveat this with one little note, which is um if you're not in your garden, it is illegal to uproot plants without landowner's permission. I disagree with that in some situations, I agree with it in other situations, but it's worth saying that out loud while we're on the internet.
00:35:42
Speaker
Just to clarify, you're talking about in public spaces as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Public spaces, um you are legally allowed to forage in public spaces, but you are not legally allowed to uproot plants
Urban Foraging Considerations
00:35:55
Speaker
in public spaces. Good advice.
00:35:57
Speaker
Interesting. I actually didn't know that about here. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you can forage. I mean, it's often cited as the four Fs when I was them in the wrong order, but it's fruits, flowers, foliage, fungi.
00:36:09
Speaker
You can forage those things on public land, um, for personal consumption. If you want to sell it, that gets a bit different. Um, but yeah, uproot implants is not allowed where, where it gets a bit funny is though. So the council,
00:36:26
Speaker
is legally allowed to spray weed killer all over the lawns and all over the the flower beds, but I'm not allowed to take a root of Woodhaven's home to make a nice bread sauce or a mulled wine.
00:36:40
Speaker
Um, and I've got a problem with that. is of that that That doesn't add up to me. So, yeah i mean, yeah the official advice is don't uproot plants without permission. That actually brings us right through perfectly to foraging in urban spaces. You were just mentioning, you know local councils spraying pesticides and yeah all sorts of myriads of chemicals across um our landscapes, which is gross. To be quite honest with you,
00:37:07
Speaker
You've got better protections here than you we than we we do in Australia, which is amazing, but it still happens. And then I suppose you've got people that are scared of dog wee. um There's all sorts of little like caveats that happen in urban spaces that maybe you don't have to think so intently about in the countryside. Yes. What are some of those safety concerns and how to mitigate for that?
00:37:30
Speaker
gets a bit tricky. um You don't know if someone's sprayed something. Quite often, you don't know if there's chemicals being sprayed there. um That's a concern for me.
00:37:41
Speaker
Let's do the dog thing first. Let's jump into that. So it's so like, okay okay, anywhere you want to forage food, people walk their dogs. That's in the countryside in the woods too. You just cannot avoid it um I don't want to eat dog piss, but I'm not going to let the fact that people walk their dogs in the woods stop me from eating wild food.
00:38:05
Speaker
um You just have to use your common sense. If it's a dry day and there's a patch of wet leaves, don't eat the wet leaves, man. You eat the dry leaves on a dry day. If it's been raining, that's that's half of a wash done anyway.
00:38:20
Speaker
I mean, when it really comes to that side of things, I'm more concerned with pesticides and herbicides than I am with a bit dog wee. um And then it's it really is using common sense. Like I forage in parks, right?
00:38:32
Speaker
Preston Park and Brighton. I go there and I pick food from there. um I don't pick all my food there, but I do pick some amounts. I just wash it really well, man. I just wash it the same as I wash my supermarket food.
00:38:44
Speaker
um We are too squeamish about it. We are. You kind of, you just got to do it a few times and you're like, oh, actually this is fine. and It's
Biodiversity and Garden Culture
00:38:54
Speaker
fine. Yeah. It is. is kind of fine.
00:38:57
Speaker
Foraging like right on a pathway. You probably, your likelihood of there being dogweed right on a path, probably higher than if you were a little bit further into vegetation. Agreed. Yeah. Step in a meter.
00:39:08
Speaker
that's that's That's good advice. go Just go in a metre from the side of the path. But then, for instance, ah when I was learning to forage, you i didn't I didn't have my driving licence right. So I was literally just going to the parks. That's how I learnt.
00:39:22
Speaker
I went to parks. learn I learnt in urban areas. And there was a point at which, and it was chickweed actually, funnily, was the plant. I'd never tried it because the only place I could find it was either like right next to the corner of a bin in the park or like right up against the tree stump in the park. And I'm like, that is just the worst place to pick.
00:39:43
Speaker
um And it was, it put me off. Eventually I did it and I was glad I did because then I got to try a chickweed for the first time. um And I've got spots in the woods now that I do prefer to pick from.
00:39:56
Speaker
But man, it's not the end of the world. you're you're You've got an immune system. Hopefully your body's reasonably healthy and it can fight off some bacteria. If anything, it's that old age argument of it's it's good to get some bacteria in your body, you know, give yourself the means to fight it off. Yeah, exactly.
00:40:16
Speaker
in terms of pesticides and herbicides and the council are doing it, You don't know. You just, you can ask them where they're doing it and when they're doing it. um They're quite hard to get hold of sometimes in my experience.
00:40:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yep. I've still have a listener base of Australians. And one thing that you is foraged here a lot is bramble or blackberry. um and that is something in Australia that you should not do unless you're on private property in your garden or in your friend's garden where you know it hasn't been sprayed because it's a big environmental weed in Australia.
00:40:55
Speaker
yeah, it's it's probably most likely going to be sprayed with um some sort of herbicide that was just a little caveat i thought i'd yeah never that's interesting that's interesting to know you know i didn't actually consider that yeah a lot of your audience isn't in it in england it's about 50 50 now which is nice fifty okay that's interesting i mean what what this can you can't segue this into a thing about lawns and why we do this anyway right so people consider plants to be nuisances, consider plants to be weeds, which I don't like that word at all anyway. It doesn't make sense to me.
00:41:34
Speaker
um Because one man's weed is another man's dinner, me. It's my dinner. The thing people are calling weed is what I'm going to eat for dinner. you know But it's lawn culture. And it brings back into the status thing, the status game. it's It was rich Europeans around 17th century that wanted to prove they didn't have to use their land to grow food because they had so much money.
00:41:58
Speaker
They were like, this land around my estate, I don't need to grow food on it. So they would start mowing their lawns really short, getting rid of all the life, getting rid of all the flowers.
00:42:09
Speaker
And then I think it's not fresh in my mind, but I think it's around the 19th century lawnmowers became commercially available. So poorer people would start looking like they were richer people by getting rid of all the plants in their lawns.
00:42:21
Speaker
Because before this, the concept of a short lawn wouldn't have been a good thing. The concept of a healthy lawn with grass and with things like yarrow and self-heal would be grown there, which are medicinal herbs.
00:42:33
Speaker
And people would look at it, think that's a good thing to have. But now we're at the point where we're just, it's just a roll through from the status games being played of, well, I need a clean lawn to look good in my community.
00:42:47
Speaker
If my lawn's messy, then people will think I'm messy.
Herbal Texts: Tradition vs. Science
00:42:52
Speaker
But you're actually just like killing all the life. It's like the concept of what a good lawn or what a clean house should look like or a clean garden should look like.
00:43:03
Speaker
It's not how I see it anymore. I want flowers and not just wild flowers, you know, the weeds, they're good, man. You just need to educate people on it.
00:43:15
Speaker
and And that's what I'm doing on courses, man. I have people there that would normally mow their lawn right down that I think a couple of them might not do that now. Well, that's good. And I mean, diversity breeds biodiversity. And I think that the whole idea of a lawn, it is a monoculture, generally one species of grass that you never let seed. So it doesn't actually benefit any ah living thing. And it doesn't even really benefit the soil beneath it because the roots are so like small and insignificant that It's kind of pointless in a way and it's pointless other than our own visual appeal. It's a completely pointless thing to have. And I understand that yeah visual appeal for a lot of gardeners is the whole point, but I'm what I actually love is that there is a much bigger rewilding culture in the UK that is really coming in strong that I'm hoping that a lot more people are turning their brains to... we Where I'm from, used to live in the mountains in Australia and I'd call it a mountains mongrel lawn.
00:44:22
Speaker
So it basically means that it was just full of weeds, full of um all different plant types. and But when you mowed it looked green and that you should just be happy with that. and I used to promote that with my clients. Some would love that and some would be like, absolutely not. yeah I love the idea of a mongrel lawn.
00:44:38
Speaker
Yeah, i there's a middle ground, right? Like, I don't want, I want to sit on my lawn and like eat food and have a nice time and have friends over and do that. But it doesn't have to be completely overgrown.
00:44:50
Speaker
I just, I want a nice combination. like I don't know a lot about ornamental plants. Hardly anything, actually. I'm not a grower. I'm a looker. I go out and forage, you know. But there's a nice happy medium somewhere.
00:45:03
Speaker
Slightly living lawn with some nice ornamental plants too. I don't know. There's there's a middle ground somewhere. Yeah. There is. It doesn't have to be all or nothing either. you know You can certainly have a nice bit of lawn or a nice mongrel lawn, plus some pretty plants you know that are left to go a little bit more wild. like it It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
00:45:23
Speaker
It doesn't. I just think people need to know that they can eat some of that. you know then They're not just random weeds that don't have a point. This is this is my problem with the word weeds. People use the words use the term weeds to describe plants that don't have a use of or like that are out of place. Yeah.
00:45:42
Speaker
Um, you know, it's just that you just don't know what they are. That's all it is. You just don't know their uses. And once you look at thousands of years of use and you can look at the ancient Greek herbal texts that are like 2000 years old, and they're describing loads of weeds that are on your lawn that you're spraying and their medicinal values, um, which can segue into the science stuff for me. So like if I read something is good for something,
00:46:08
Speaker
in an ancient text that has then been carried forward 2000 years, and someone says it's good for a particular ailment. Okay, I'll buy it on face value. But the first place I do is I'll test it on myself.
00:46:21
Speaker
And if if I can't find an experience, then I want to see peer reviewed papers if I can. It's kind of like, I've got two sides of my brain with this. One side is that I'm a hippie at heart, man. And I talk to trees and I hug trees. Uh, and that's a real thing. But at the same time, someone says, well, pine tea is really, really good good for clearing congestion and in the lungs.
00:46:43
Speaker
I'm like, all right, what chemical is it that's in there? That's doing that. Can you tell me that? And if they can't, well, I want to see a paper. I mean, that's a good example to use. You can do it. You can look at the chemicals. It's pinene and limonene.
00:46:57
Speaker
And there's a couple of different pinings and limonines, but pinene and limonene are in conifers. um And the pinene in there is an expectorin. It's going to help clear congestion in the lungs. actually does the job it's supposed to do.
00:47:12
Speaker
It doesn't take long to look at these papers. You can just Google it. So what what have I been doing recently? if I'm going straight back into the lungs again. But um violet flowers, viola odorata, which is like the sweet violet.
00:47:25
Speaker
Beautiful, low-growing plant. The leaves are edible. The flowers are edible. They've got a short flowering season. We're just going to see the end of it right now. They've only been out a few weeks. They don't stay out for very long.
00:47:36
Speaker
um But there's there's there's the Canon of Medicine, which is a very well-known medicinal text that was written by a Persian guy, Avicenna. um It was used to teach herbal medicine, to teach medicine, not just herbal medicine, to teach medicine across Europe.
00:47:54
Speaker
ah from like the 12th to the 17th century, was one of the most important texts. And in there, he says violet flowers are good for clearing congestion in the lungs or a sore throat or respiratory conditions.
00:48:08
Speaker
And again, I see that written down. So I'm like, right, let's see if it works. Like he thought it did thousand years ago or so. um And there is, there's this great study.
00:48:20
Speaker
um They were testing children with asthma. I think was about 180 children. They split them into two groups. They all had asthma. One group got an asthma pump and the other group group got an asthma pump with violet syrup.
00:48:36
Speaker
And the other group got a placebo syrup. So they didn't know who was who. It was double blind. ah And after five days, it was about 70% of the group that just had an asthma pump still had a cough.
00:48:51
Speaker
And then the flip reversal is for the group that had the violet syrup, it was about 70% them that got rid of their cough. So it's it's like significantly better.
00:49:02
Speaker
I mean, look, this was one study that was 180 children, which is not enormous. it's It's reasonably sized. You have to repeat things, but that's pretty promising results.
00:49:13
Speaker
So it's like... That shows that this text that's a thousand years old, well, they were right. They knew what they were talking about, actually. So what I love about your kind of content, for people who don't know, you kind of create content online about foraging. And you really do blend kind of folklore and historical text with more modern science texts, as we've just been talking about.
Leo's Foraging Workshops
00:49:37
Speaker
How do you find the two shape up? Do you find that they are often quite well linked or do you find that ah some of the like folklore stuff's a bit, you know, BS? It's, I love this question. And i actually so have, I don't think I've spoken about this that much with people. The majority of things I've researched so far to see if ancient medicinal claims are true or not. Most of them have been right.
00:50:06
Speaker
Some of them haven't. Interesting. There's one let's let's think of an example that hasn't pine trees. I was reading that the bark of pine trees was used as a heart medicine in some South American traditions.
00:50:21
Speaker
and okay And I hadn't read that anywhere else. And so I thought, okay, let's dig into that. sounds interesting. And I found, I think it was two studies I found where they were looking at specific heart ailments and they found absolutely nothing in a pine tree, chemically speaking, that aided it.
00:50:38
Speaker
um So maybe in that instance, they were wrong. Hemlock. So hemlock, deadly poisonous carrot family member. um I can't remember the exact period of time. I think it's 16th century. They're trying to use hemlock as a topical application to treat inflammation and a few other things, tumors I read. um But it turns out they're actually just killing everyone they were testing on.
00:51:03
Speaker
It was like, that that was actually a bad idea. And as far as I can tell, people have stopped trying to use hemlock to treat things. um So it's a long-winded answer.
00:51:16
Speaker
Most of the things I've researched, yes, seem to have got it right. But I'm always sceptical and I think you should be. think should always test things. A lot of the time when we're foraging, as you were saying, there's only things are only available for a very short, limited period. How can we extend that?
00:51:33
Speaker
Yeah, look, that it's it's it's a key part of the process. And ancient humans did this too. So if you go back in time, it's it's fermentation. It's fermentation, drying, salting.
00:51:45
Speaker
Those are the things we would do. um And so fermentation for me, that that's that that's a core part of the forager journey for me is to ferment things. So like right now I've got wild garlic in the cupboard, lacto fermenting, and that preserves it essentially bloody forever.
00:51:59
Speaker
As long as it's below that brine, it's going to sit there forever and it's still edible. um Where we're at today is you want a fridge and you want a freezer and you want a dehydrator. The dehydrator thing, i lived without one for years and I was just drying things naturally or sticking it in the oven um on a really low temp.
00:52:20
Speaker
And it was actually Amber, my partner bought a dehydrator last year and it just last year I got one and man, game changer. Everyone should have one. If you want to forage food, you should buy a dehydrator. Definitely.
00:52:32
Speaker
Even as ah even as like a productive gardener, you should have a dehydrator. I actually actually upgraded last year as well. And oh my God, I used to use like this 30-year-old thing that my mom had and it would take so long. And now I got a new one. it's Oh my God, so good.
00:52:47
Speaker
Once I've got a slightly bigger house, I know the one I want. It's too big for this house, but I'm getting it the moment I move. Oh my God. Big, massive unit. It just never ends, you know? There's always things to try out. I know, I know.
00:53:01
Speaker
But on the note of seasonality, it's like the traditional human diet, it is obviously seasonal because that's all we've got. We've got what we've got in the season, but that would also mean entire food groups, right? It wouldn't just be not eating in strawberries in winter. It's like in the winter, we'd be eating carbs and nuts.
00:53:20
Speaker
You're eating carbs and fat over winter because that's what's available. And then in springtime, you're going to be eating loads and loads of greens. It's... I might be going a slight tangent about the preservation, but that's all about eating variety of foods.
00:53:34
Speaker
um Sorry, but preservation. Yeah, those are the things, man. Freezer, dry it. salt it, smoke it. I've not smoked that much stuff yet, but that's in the cards. Oh, interesting.
00:53:44
Speaker
No, I kind of like the tangent you were going on then because I have often thought about the way that our bodies have been built to live, eating seasonally, eating um certain things at certain times of year because that was what is available and, you know, obviously a bit of storage and yada, yada yada will... help with that, help with you know longevity through the winter or through months when things are lean. yeah And I've often thought it would be super interesting, and maybe you know this, but to see a study of what doing, going back to a lifestyle like that would actually do to our bodies versus like a modern food kind of diet, I guess. There's a book by Monica Wilde called The Wilderness Cure.
00:54:26
Speaker
um Fantastic, beautiful book. I absolutely love it. um it essentially It's essentially ah years diary of her link living 100% on wild food in the UK for a year. for fa She does a year. um There was a few of them that did that. It's a beautifully honest account. There's some good days and bad days, you know. um But there's a project called the wild biome project. And they've done a couple now. And groups of foragers are doing I can't remember the exact period of time. i think they're doing two or three months at a time they did last year.
00:54:57
Speaker
And everyone's doing stool samples, blood tests, before and afters, looking at the gut microbiome. They're doing another series in September this year, which I was going to apply for. in a carroom You just reminded me that I might have missed the application date now. But ah yeah, if you want to learn about that, Google google the wild biome project and they'll have the stats on there. um The short of it was everyone was extremely healthy at the end of the time. Yeah.
00:55:23
Speaker
What's going on for the rest of the year for you? What projects have you got coming up? It's the Barefoot Forager stuff, man. it's it's it's Look, that the online stuff is something I use as a tool to advertise myself.
00:55:36
Speaker
Look, I exist. But really what I'm about is is people coming on workshops, doing group workshops, doing up to about 15 people at time at the moment. Got a couple of new things. So I'm doing forage and cook events, which is just three hours forage and walk. And then we cook lunch in the woods. um Half of the stuff foraged on the day.
00:55:56
Speaker
But then I'm also doing forage and meditation days. I'm doing student-only foraging to give young people are an affordable experience to come on. and then And then it's collaborations, man.
00:56:08
Speaker
I want to do forage and fermenting stuff. I'm just, I'm all about getting people outside and actually learning the things hands on. Lovely. And if people wanted to find that, it's just the barefootforager.com.
00:56:21
Speaker
That's the one barefootforager.com. Perfect. And message me on Instagram. I love a chat with people, man. So if anyone listening ever wants to talk, message me, I will reply. How good. Thank you very much.
00:56:36
Speaker
It's a pleasure, man. Thank you for having me, dude. It's been's been very fun to talk. You've been ah you've been a great host.
00:56:43
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining me today. If you like the show, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, tell a friend or two, or maybe even give the show five-star rating and a review.
00:56:54
Speaker
If you want more gardeners lodge content, you can find our website, our Instagram and our tip talk in the show notes below this episode. The gardeners lodge podcast is a growing media production.