Picking Sloes and making Sloe Gin is a great way to get into foraging.
I’ve made nettle soup a few times, it’s nice and nettles are obviously easy to identify
Definitely scared of situations like the one @Brainfreeze has mentioned when it comes to fungi
Yikes. You definitely have to know what you’re doing. It took me two years from the first guided foraging day I did to actually pick and eat mushrooms I found myself, but in the meantime I learned how to identify mushrooms by picking one from a bunch and looking at its features, taking pictures of the gills and stem etc so I could look them up later then leaving it for the maggots to crack on with. Absolutely not worth it unless you’re 100% sure you know what you’ve found.
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Really think it would be great if public areas were planted up with edible things that are happy growing wild. Like around this estate there a whole bunch of little patches that are just weeds. Some are all blackberries now which is great, but the majority are nothing in particular and it would be great if they were useful and there was some eduction available to those who wanted to use and maybe help look after them.
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I’ve seen the occasional help yourself area, Seven Sisters overground station had apples and chard iirc but I’d love to see this kind of thing more widespread as you describe
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I think we all agree that raw veg is better than cooked veg as many of the nutrients are removed through cooking. I would say many taste better raw too such as Peas, Carrots spinach etc. With that in mind during the summer I donned some gloves and picked some nettles from Dartmoor. I added the raw leaves to smoothies to get the raw uncooked benefits. The smoothies were great. They had the appearance and colour of bile but tasted great.
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Not sure foraging Japanese Knotweed is worth the candle tbh. Apart from the fact that it’s legally grey whether you can harvest it at all it’s definitely not something you want to run the risk of introducing accidentally to any soil near where you live.
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This is oversimplification to the point of being almost untrue. Cooking veg reduces the amount of vitamin C you get, but it isn’t hard to get enough vitamin C, and cooking correctly releases more of other beneficial compounds, such as lycopene. In other words it’s complicated, and the best advice is just to eat plenty of vegetables in whatever form you prefer.
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But if you’ve already got it in your garden…
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Then you’re in a for a feast!
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Don’t tell the surveyors
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mad that something so ‘innocent’ as mushrooms could cause such havoc.
probs for that reason mushrooms are on thing i won’t take a punt on.
love doing ya blackberries, apples, wild garlic, nettles etc. would love to get braver and more into it too! feels like it feeds into the ‘vibe’ i wanna cultivate for 2021 (yes i’m a massive knob).
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I have made lots of acorn flour this year.
I collected about 10000 acorns and shelled them then rubbed off the skin, then grated them, (beleive it or not this is not the tedious bit)
The tedious bit is then the leaching, put the gratings into a big bowl and fill with cold water. Leave for several hours then pour (gently) off the brownish water (with a bit of a petrol like scum on top) (try not to take pur out too much of any whitish (flour/starch) stuff at the end.
Then repeat.
Then repeat. etc
(until the taste of the gratings is not bitter)
I then took the gratings, squeezed them out (keeping the squeezed water)
then put them on tray to dry. with the white starchy water remaining (and squeezed water) wait for this to settle, then try to pour off as much of the clear water without loosing the white (I use this white starch for ultra fine flour)
I dry the gratings and fine flour in the oven (not hot, try to use the remnants of heat of oven after cooking, for ecologicalness) or use the sunlight if it is great enough.
When thoroughly dry grind in pestal with a mortar.
And hey presto …acorn flour rich in fat and protein
(If you use hot water to leach the acorns then its a lot quicker, but removes a lot of nutritional value)
I’m really proud of this as it means I could call myself a producer, rather than just a consumer…Of course I will need to scale up.
It would be easier to find white oaks to get acorns from as they have less tanins
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This is pretty amazing.
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I love raw nettles, they taste so ‘vegetably’
although you can rub the stings off, you can also just wilt them in a flame and this removes the stingyness
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I used to call them that when I was little
think this goes against the spirit of foraging lol
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IMO JKW is much less of an issue than say Bamboo or Buddleia but that’s not what mortgage companies think so 
Pleased to know I can eat it should it ever crop up here
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I think lots of people did but it was the defensiveness and unwillingness to change that were a bit bah
This sounds like an interesting experiment, but what is it like to eat? I have only heard of acorns being used as a famine food