How to Cultivate a Foraging Spirit

As you spend time outside as part of a simple, seasonal life noticing the natural world, you may begin to wonder about the wild treasures at your feet.

Foraging from the wild is probably the oldest, most accessible, and perhaps most delightful ways to connect with the seasons. 

While it might seem intimidating in our modern, fast-paced world, developing a foraging spirit is actually a beautiful and simple journey that can help calm our lives, provide nourishment, supply healing remedies, and most importantly give us joy. 

Let’s take some gentle steps to make foraging a natural, fun, and easy part of your seasonal life.

Get Outside

In order to forage, we first have to get outside. Make it a part of the weekly routine to simply get outside. This doesn’t have to be grand hikes into the great wilderness. Walks around a local park (where foraging is permitted) is great. Just simply get outside and look around.

Don’t forget that the organic backyard has plenty of foraging opportunities as well. The gardens and lawn are often full of underappreciated plants that we can use to begin our foraging adventures. 

Stay Present

Foraging is less about finding and more about noticing. While outside, be looking around at the earth. This is not the time to be scrolling through Instagram. Stay present in the moment and pay attention to what is growing. 

Our modern society makes it so easy to get distracted. Practice staying present in the moment. Let the worries of the day go for a little while and just watch the ground at your feet. 

The more you do this, the more you’ll notice and be able to identify. 

Be Curious

In order to have a foraging spirit, one needs to be curious about plants. Sometimes it’s easier to be curious about new or unfamiliar plants but never forget to be curious about old familiar faces. 

You may be able to easily identify daisies or lupine for example but do you know if they’re edible or useful? You know that blackberries are edible but are there uses for the leaves, too?

Stay curious about the new and old friends in order to grow your knowledge and enjoyment of the natural world. 

Ask Questions

Foraging is often a skill passed through community. Find a new plant that you can’t easily identify? Ask someone. If there’s a ranger at the park, ask them. Take a photo and get help either online or from local experts. Pour over field guides. The US Department of Agriculture has a handy online plant database to help with identification (and it lets you narrow it down by state). Take a wildflower hike or herb walk offered in your local area.

This is an important part of sharing tradition and building local community. It allows us to learn from each other and the land while sharing knowledge and skills. Don’t skip it. 

The Herbal Academy has an incredible online Botany & Wildcrafting e-course complete with photos, videos, identification tips and more if you want to go even deeper into expanding your skills.

Keep Notes

A foraging journal is a handy thing. Keep track of what was found, where and when. It’s nice to know that generally the arrowleaf balsam root blooms in a particular park in May, for example. It’s also a great personal reference for edible and medicinal use. 

This doesn’t have to be anything fancy or encyclopedic. Simply some form of record keeping that works for your lifestyle. It needs to be something you will actually use and enjoy – there is no right or wrong way. 

Keep a few foraging supplies in the car, a foraging kit. You never know when you might spot something you want to harvest. 

This is nothing fancy, just a container of some sort (like a small bucket or basket), maybe a pair of scissors or a pocket knife, and some gloves. That will likely get you pretty far. 

Trust me, you’ll be grateful the first time you go to the park on a work lunch break and find morels or wild roses ready to be taken home.

Once you start taking the time to notice nature, you’ll be amazed at how often surprises pop up.

Bring those foraged items home (assuming you’ve properly identified them). Let those bits of nature become a part of your daily life and home. 

Take them into the kitchen and cook with them. Decide the best way to eat them (or not again if you didn’t like it). Make herbal remedies that your household can use with them. Use the flowers and other items as table centerpieces. 

Remember to keep track in your journals of what you liked and didn’t. 

Simply bringing the wild bits into your home deepens your connection to the rhythms of the earth giving it more meaning. 

Have Fun!

While cultivating a foraging spirit might be about connecting to nature, creating herbal remedies, or eating from the wild, let it always be fun first and foremost.

Find joy in this activity and allow it to give you peace that often doesn’t come from our many devices with screens. 

It can be exhilarating to find a bumper crop of berries and disheartening when we only find 1 morel – still remember that getting out in nature should be fun and relaxing. 

The outing itself, not the yield is the gift. The spoils of our foraging adventures should be viewed as a most excellent bonus while the true reward is the connection to the earth and our communities.