Today’s Foraging Workshop and a Lightning Strike!

So we ran our first foraging workshop today with one attendee, taking her to a trail often frequented by other foragers, but that we hadn’t scouted out yet for what is growing there this year. The workshop portion took roughly 30-35 minutes. But by the time we were done with the initial trail and our guest wanting to join us on going to another nearby foraging zone afterward, we were out there for a total of 5 hours!

She was very happy to receive her foraging notebook and did make some notes, take pictures of plants we pointed out to her, etc. She was game for some of the more challenging aspects of the zone we went to after the first trail. I kept warning her to be careful, as my liability insurance can only cover so much! That made her laugh.

We found a fair bit of stonecrop growing on the first trail, along with a lot of false solomon’s seal and twisted stalk, with those two sometimes growing beside each other. If you aren’t familiar with the leaf veining pattern, you can easily confuse the two plants. Fortunately, such confusion doesn’t mean anything toxic as both are salad material as well as have medicinal uses. Kinnickinick is growing well and starting to get berries.

Wild Strawberry is growing everywhere on the first trail and in our usual zone, so hopefully we catch the tiny flavour bombs when they are ready!

Indian Paintbrush was growing more proliferantly, so I grabbed a few flowers. They are an edible flower.

3-flowered avens are now in flower with their cute whispy flower heads. My daughter took a meadow photo where you can see arnica flowers, 3 flowered avens, indian paintbrush, sweet clover, desert parsley, stonecrop, and if you look really, really close up to the photo, you can see the seed pod of a chocolate lilly not far from the sweet clover near the very bottom of the photo. You can also see some arrowleaf balsamroot flowers in this meadow shot.

We picked more parsley, rescuing from aphid infestations again like we did a few years ago. That took up probably a good half hour by itself and we didn’t make it to every single plant either in the area. This is part of wild husbandry. The breed of aphid on these plants is tiny, and their sugary effluent gives the parsley flower heads a shiny appearance that they don’t normally have. When you check closer, you see tons of tiny black bodies coating the stems of the flower heads and sometimes the leaves too. We pick those off and crush them, which the parsley plants really seem to appreciate! Sometimes they insist on giving us the entire infected stalk even if the lower regions of the stalk have no bugs. Other times, they’ve already begun killing off the infected stalk.

We grabbed more lichen, which, contrary to what is currently taught about how long it takes for lichen to grow, only requires a decent set of rain fall, dead or dying branches, and it will grow! Current literature simultaneously states that deer eat lichen as winter forage while trying to say in the same piece that it takes 100’s of years to grow! To prove my point, we took a picture of a young fir tree’s needles back in December 2019 when this fir was healthy from top to bottom! It, like many trees and plants over the past few years, had suffered from long periods of drought in the region. Last year we revisited the young thing, and it was almost completely taken over by lichen except for the top 2 ft of the tree! Today we went back and took another shot of branches not far from the original tips we’d photographed 5 years ago, and you can see the devastating effects that the intervening years had had on this poor fir. This year, she’s trying to flesh out some of her lower branches, but there is SO much lichen on her that wasn’t there in 2019! It doesn’t take 100’s of years to grow! That is evolutionary thinking gone awry to continue believing that!

As we were taking our guest around one part of our usual foraging zone, we came upon a quartet of very large Douglas Fir trees that appear to have been recently hit by lightning! One tree in particular had bled quite profusely, with dried, drying or fresh beads of sap that appear to have poured down the sides of the tree! Rounding the tree revealed what happened! Roughly 10 feet up from the ground, it had been hit by a lightning strike that not only shocked the outer layer of bark off the tree from the strike to the tree top, but burned a 10 to 12″ wide swath of the trunk from the strike to ground level! We gathered around 500ml’s of beaded fir tree sap, then looked around when we spotted four other trees where their outer bark had received the same shock treatment. The shocks were in a roughly 200 ft somewhat linear range coming down the hill to the tree that had it’s trunk hit and partially burnt. We are grateful this didn’t cause a forest fire in the area! The fire seemed to be fully contained on the side of the tree and not even the shocked off bark remnants around it’s base were burnt. I have to say though, this is the first time I’ve seen such aftermath up close. The amount of bleeding by this tree was almost heartbreaking, but we are grateful the tree wasn’t girded, wasn’t split down the middle, will continue to grow, and that the bleeding did mostly stop. Due to some of the beads still soft, it will take awhile for the tree to recover.

We came home with more lichen including a bit of Old Man’s Beard, some indian paintbrush, stonecrop, twisted stalk and false solomon’s seal, a branch of pine needles from a downed larger tree branch, desert parsley, a few tiny biscuit root plants with their tiny bulbs that our field guide says natives would turn into flour for baking among other uses, a bit of sweet clover, witch hazel leaves. . . overall, it was a good day!

If I learned one thing today, its that telling people to plan for at least 2 hours for the foraging workshop is important!

Starting at 9am is important!

Depending on where we go to do the tour portion of the workshop, it could take several hours, especially if there is more than one guest present, which ideally, hopefully, we’ll have in the future.

Related Posts

A Tea Order and A Marathon Foraging Run – Reminder of Upcoming Foraging Workshops

Of Foraging, Micro-Plastics, Finances and Health

Macerated Aromatic Oil and Scented Lies

The “Decade of Pandemics”, and what we can do about it!