Wise woman foraging

Since I adopted Stinging Nettles as my wild herb to study this year, I decided to take another foraging lesson to get additional perspective (a wise woman’s point of view) on this herb and foraging in general.

Tara Bowers, of Howling Wolf Biodynamic Farm in Hope, NJ offered an affordable foraging lesson ($20) on the fields of their farm. Their biodynamic farm is a dreamy place humming with a vibrant and lush diversity of living things both wild and domestic, living in harmony. It is an ideal place to forage, pure food, free of chemicals. You don’t have to go all the way to Costa Rica to get Pura Vida.

As I listened to this gentle wise woman convey her plant wisdom, I considered her a vision of beauty sitting among her plant friends. I have the utmost awe and respect for people of her ilk. We focused on burdock, dandelions, stinging nettles, violets and chickweed. She asked us to consider using our intuition when learning about plants. Intuition can teach us a lot about nature. They say that children have an exponentially higher survival rate in the wild than adults do because they instinctively know to hide and crawl into spaces that serve as makeshift shelters and to experiment with wild foods by sampling little bits of things and trusting their intuition on edibility, while adults tend to just give up. We can take a lesson from this and try wild foods tentatively, then if we like the taste and feel good, eat more.

Another suggestion that I find useful is to consider how these wild plants exist in a suburban setting vs. their wild setting. At their farm, they have bold, enormous violets the size of very large cabbages. Looking at the shy violets in my yard, I can’t imagine they can ever grow that big. I also noticed their stinging nettles were thrice the size of the ones I harvested from the last forage. The owner of the property of the last forage had smaller, timid and shy nettles. She had expressed that she didn’t want them, saw them as weeds, and wanted them dug up. While the large thriving nettles from the biodynamic farm are welcome as wanted wild friends. They were bold and entitled. Poor suburban weeds are often just eeking out a meager living as mowed down, dug up, sprayed and unwanted pests. Weeds can be so much more, food and medicine.

Strange, but true, one other suggestion to learn about plants intuitively is to sleep with it under your pillow. Ask it to reveal itself to you. I will do that and report what I have learned.

The lesson ended with a trip to a thriving stinging nettle patch. I purposely picked a large bag with my bare hands and allowed myself to get stung repeatedly. Why did this plant sting? Was it so bad to let it sting me? Did the sting have medicine like a doctor’s needle or was it just an anti-social plant that didn’t want to be touched? I have reason to believe it wants us to touch it. It penetrated my flesh, getting under my skin and causing an effect, talking to me in this way. I have to say it really didn’t hurt enough to stop me in my tracks. On the way home, I enjoyed the stimulating electrical impulses the sting sites pulsed through my fingertips. It felt like the gentle subsiding tingling of limbs settling into normalcy after waking up from falling asleep. It lasted all night. I could see why it helps alleviate arthritis. It reminded me of acupuncture that I received to induce labor when I was pregnant with my son. The practitioner had hooked up my acupressure points to an electrical device that sent pulses through my nervous system and got me flowing. I was having mild contractions on my due date and didn’t even know it.

Once home, I washed the nettles for use in my Nettlekopita, nettle and wild garlic pie. Washed nettles smell like freshly cut grass. The nettlekopita was amazingly good and filling.