Tag: foraging

When Nature’s Cupboard is Bare

Vivid blushing bracket

A little context…  …Skip to main article if you want I don’t learn do I. How many times have I told people to listen to their bodies?Yet, the ‘cold’ that I’ve had for two weeks and been ignoring, pressing on with work, hoping it will go away, hasn’t gone. Half three this morning, I wake feeling rotten, and coughing up copious amounts of dark, yellow-green phlegm – in plugs. Yuck. […]

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Flaming June

Well, midsummer is upon us. I will admit that it’s been a somewhat strange late spring/early summer though. Spring seemed to come late, with many things that would start in April only really blossoming in the second half of May. Of course, this meant an explosion in growth as nature ‘catches up’ with itself by speeding up. Now we’ve had a heatwave, and a week of wall-to-wall sun. And would […]

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Ar Lan y Môr (Down by the Shore)

Lowrian Foraging

As I get more into the ‘Silly Season’ of full-time (and then some) work, I’m becoming ever more aware of the need to make time – even just in small chunks. The half-hour here, or the morning there. So it was today – I’ve been getting interested in the idea of foraging for some time now – beyond just foraging for medicinals – as I realise that there is a […]

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Winter’s Harvest: Part 3

Musings on my mushrooming interest in fungi. What winter blessings! I have just been down the quarry from walking the dogs + seeing if where were any more fly agarics to pick – for friends who can’t get the tincture elsewhere. There weren’t any out, I think they’ve long gone for the rest of the winter now. Anyway, I saw a tree stump + fallen log covered with turkey tails […]

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Winter’s Harvest: Part 2

Last year, I realised that the shortening days and die-back of the world of herbs and plants didn’t have to mean the end of my beloved foraging walks or of learning more about the woods I call home or their inhabitants. I fell in love with mushrooms and fungi (Exception being the dry rot that has plagued our house over the past few years!). This year, as the shelves in […]

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A Part of the Forest…

Something really special happened today – I found Fly Agarics growing down in the woodland by Dorothea quarry. There were signs of more having fruited, but I ‘only’ got 4 – one very large, one, and three smaller ones. But that isn’t the real magic. The real magic is that I’d been picking Acorns, and had them in my shirt pocket. Every time I bent down to pick a mushroom, […]

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Winter’s Harvest

Recently I have realised that my forraging and walking alond hedgerows has not stopped this winter as it normally does. Normally, about the end of October, the medicinal plants have gone in and I lose interest until they re-emerge in the spring. Associated with this slowing of the growing world, I tend to develop a bout of SAD around the beginning of November which is usually dispelled by Christmas but […]

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