Welcome to wild-food.net

Welcome to my web site which supports the fungus forays and seashore forays I run in Dorset, Devon, Hampshire and elsewhere. It also supports my three foraging books - these are Hedgerow, Mushrooms, and Seashore sections linked at the top right of this page. These provide (or will provide shortly) extra content for my three foraging books. Here are some for the Hedgerow book.

Seashore Foray in Scotland! Monica Wilde of the famous Napiers Herbal in Edinburgh has asked me to take a seashore foray near North Berwick on Saturday 29th June this year. I am terribly excited about this as I love venturing away from my native habitat to explore new seashores. Monica has chosen a lovely beach which she knows well for its abundance of interesting and edible organisms. As always I hope we will find plenty to eat but we will bring lots, and lots of food anyway. And since it is such a special occasion I will bring a couple of barrels of my own brew to make the day pass pleasantly.

To make things easy I am hosting the booking system (though you can go direct to Monica if you prefer). The cost will be £95 for adults and £20 for children from 7 to 15 inclusive. My booking link is to the right, though you may have to click "see all courses".

Stocks Hotel Sark. After last year's successful foray on Sark I have been asked back to take another one this year - 24th to 26th May. We were all incredibly well looked after by the charming staff and talented chefs last year so I for one am looking forward to it immensely. This year I am joined by two River Cottage stalwarts - Steve Lamb who runs many courses at River Cottage and Gill Meller the head chef at RC. I have worked with these guys for years and they are great company and hugely knowledgeable. For more details follow the link...

New Forest Mushroom Forays
My New Forest forays will take place on every Saturday and Sunday throughout October 2013. Friday 18th, Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th will be bring-your-own lunch days (£55 adult), the other weekend day-forays will include all food and drink (£85 adult) Note: the latter are all booked up now but I might be able to squeeze in one more... We meet at 10:30 for a brief talk and a forager's nip, then look for some mushrooms, toadstools and anything else fungal. Lunch then another foray, followed by a "show and tell" table of all that we have found, complete with name labels! I have been taking these for some years now and they have been much enjoyed by those taking part. The New Forest is a lovely place and home to more species of fungi than almost anywhere else in the UK.

Booking system updated. You can now email a request for a "Gift Certificate".

The Seashore forays are all booked up for this year though I might do one more. The Seashore forays takes place on the Dorset coast in April and costs £95 for an adult and £20 for a child. This includes a large amount of food and drink!

News: Please see my blog entry on the recent death in Somerset due to Death Cap poisoning.

My annual visit to Moon Down last year went very well indeed with a marvellous collection of fungi over the two days - eighty-five in total. Perhaps most striking was this group of Common Puffballs (Lycoperdon perlatum). The photograph shows only of few of the hundred or more puffballs that were growing in this one spot. It is an edible species, best in an omelette, but has to be peeled (not easy) due to its thin but tough skin.

After hardly seeing these at all for a couple of years, Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureum) has made a come back with a vengence this year with four sitings out of six forays. There have been some magnificent specimens and below is one of them. They grow mostly on oak (never eat one that grows on yew). It can upset a few people so try a little first. The edges are the best bit with the centre a little corky. Just cut off what you need - not the whole thing!

Well you can't eat these, but they are still stunning fungi and I have seen neither since a trip to Gibraltor point in the 80's. The first is Psathyrella ammophila, an occasional species on sand dunes and the second is Peziza ammophila, a rarer species found in the same habitat (ammophila means "sand loving"). The Peziza is the first Dorset record and the first time it has been recorded on the South Coast. My good friend Bryan found them the other day so I joined him on a photgraphing expedition to Studland last Sunday.

Books:
I have written three books on foraging for the River Cottage Handbook series:

The Mushroom Handbook is written to provide the easiest possible introduction to the rather worrying world of wild mushrooms. I cover most of the common edible species with descriptions of dangerous look-alikes. There is a simple key and extensive guidance on what to look for when trying to identify a species.

There are also some recipes!

Writing the Edible Seashore was a big adventure for me and I share in its pages what I already knew and what I learned in the writing of it. Seaside plants, seaweeds, crustaceans and molluscs are all covered. Again there is a chapter with some pretty good recipes.

My most recent foraging book is Hedgerow. This fills in all the gaps left by the other two, exploring the vast amount of wild food available from hedgerow, field, heath, wood and bog. This time I wrote all the recipes myself (with the invaluable help on some of them from Pam Corbin - the lady who wrote the excellent Preserves Handbook). I can highly recommend Juniper Toffee and Elderflower Delight!