Lifelong addiction to wandering the woods and finding value from collecting foods, teas, medicinal items, twine, utensils, art, or anything else!
A typical childhood these days, I grew up on a remote Indian Reservation and learned how to sustainably gather food from the forest before starting kindergarten. My grandma taught mushroom picking when I was 5 or 6 years old, we could gather huge bags fulls of matsutakes! They were a large crop and a staple food dried to flavor acorn soup and fresh they were cooked with venison. My the age of 6 I made a secret map of all black raspberry bushes, the wild kind, within a mile or more or our house that I kept hidden from my brother. At the age of ten, I joined Boy Scouts, and with that group of close friends we dove further down the foraging path, checking out every plant identification book from the library, and went on survival campouts living off the forest for days. We did not just survive, we thrived (credit to Donny Dust's book, Wild Wisdom).
During college and a few years in the military, occasional woodland knowledge came into play. Maybe more than occasionally.
Then kids, and the thrill one day when I was picking a few blackberries and my son in the baby backpack leaned out to pick his own berry and gobbled so many down that his diapers were purple for days!
He turns 18 in a few months and for his whole childhood we have never had store bought jam or jelly in our house, roughing it? Hell no! On our shelf, we have all the options - blackberry jelly, salmonberry syrup, apple butter, crabapple jelly, huckleberry jam, to name a few! With multiple kids and a taste for jam myself, we need 60-70 pints a year to keep up the supply, and we make it from all the different berries the Pacific Northwest provides!
A lot of foragers concentrate on mushrooms, and I can identify and do gather my fair share of a dozen different species, but matsutakes will always be my favorite (miss you Grammy!).
Myself, I am a huge fan of anything nettles, hence the logo, and am always chasing down roots and shoots to gather. Sedge corms, cattail rizomes, thimbleberry shoots that you peel and taste like a crispy candy stick! Seeds and nuts are a fall focus, I cannot step over an acorn!
Non food, I make nettle twine, baskets from cedar roots and sticks, a lot of different teas mainly from berry leaves, tinctures and bitters, cedar bark twine, cattail matts, and carve utensils from alder and cedar branches.
I remove invasive species from local wetlands and use the wood to make charcoal and biochar.
Need to make a pot? I go for a jog down a beach where I know a superior seam of clay to collect and mold to your hearts content.
So, as I find more and sustainably harvest anything extra, I will post it here for sale.
Everyone should enjoy the forest more, and maybe by selling nettles or jelly here, people can connect more to the forests and that is not a bad thing!