Learn To Identify, Harvest & Process Nature’s Bounty

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Food From The Land

Food comes from the land. It isn’t only plastic-wrapped from the grocery store. And it includes a wide variety of things such as plants, trees, mollusks, fish, insects. We’ve been foraging since the 1980’s, and a significant part of our long-term programs are devoted to understanding the relationship between modern humans and wild food.

New as a standalone course in 2017, the Wild Food Week is all about the food. We’ll spend part of every day doing wild plant walks where we identify edible and otherwise useful wild plants, pressing specimens in order to really learn them. We’ll harvest a bunch of edible stuff, process it, then eat it.

We’ll also be fishing, scavenging and seeing what else we can come up with.

We’ll be based at the folk school in a beautiful lakeside setting for swimming and paddling, and we’ll also be picking blueberries and huckleberries along the shore. We’ll also explore other habitats via day trips including a cattail swamp, the rocky Maine coastline and the nearby woods.

This will be a plant intensive, hands-on week. We’ll do a lot of field ID and harvesting. We’ll also touch on fishing and gathering. We’ll also do a lot of food preparation. The goal is to become more in touch with the natural resources available all around us, and to become more resilient.

Intended Learning Outcomes:

• Field ID of flowering plants, trees, seaweeds & fungi.
• Field ID of several deadly poisonous plants
• Discernment in harvesting wild foods, and experience doing so
• Understanding the difference between angling and fishing. Catching, cleaning and eating fish.
• Experience at preparing foods in an outdoor (campfire) setting using a wide variety of techniques including pot suspension systems, cooking in a bean hole, using dutch ovens and reflector ovens, grilling in a raquette, etc.
• Experience with fermenting foods, specifically kombucha, sauerkraut, wine and sourdough baked goods

Tuition includes lodging, transportation, instruction, and food foraged. It does not include other food.