In this episode, I’m talking foraging with expert forager Michael Wachter. Michael has masses of experience when it comes to living outdoors sustainably and being self-sufficient, having lived on a remote island off the North Coast of Germany. He also regularly treks across the landscape both in the UK and abroad, with nothing but a sleeping bag and his survival kit, foraging for food along the way.
Michael currently lives and works in East Sussex, where he indulges his passion for plants at every opportunity. We only scratched the surface of his experiences and if you ever have the opportunity to hear him speak, I urge you to do so, you will be spellbound as he recounts his adventures!
Scroll down for the episode transcription
We cover:
– The best places to find wild food
– How to forage in your own garden, however limited you are on space
– Michael’s trek along the South Coast of England
– The philosophy of foraging
About Michael Wachter
Born in the rolling hills of North Bavaria along a river in Bamberg, Michael studied landscape architecture near Frankfurt. After a short stint working in an office, he went to work for the protection of mainly seabirds on the North Coast of Germany, before coming to England in 2014.
He currently works as a gardener in East Sussex and indulges his passion for wild plants on a daily basis.
Links:
Robin Harford’s site provides great information, plus he produces a podcast on the topic.
The Woodland Trust’s guide to foraging sustainably.
Wild Food & Foraging UK Facebook group.
The website of Samuel Thayer, a foraging resource for listeners in the US.
Transcription
Transcription – Episode 18 of the Roots and All Podcast
Foraging with Michael Wachter
Release Date 12/03/19
Episode available to listen to at www.rootsandall.co.uk/thepodcast
{SFX: Intro music plays}
[00:01] INTRO: This is the Roots and All podcast, here to help you get growing. Join us as we explore everything plant-related both indoors and out, and provide the information you need to create your perfect green environment. Presented by Sarah Wilson. [00:21] {SFX: Intro music starts to fade out} [00:21] SARAH: Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. This week, I’m speaking to Michael Wachter. Michael works as a gardener at Great Dixter but in his spare time, he’s passionate about foraging for food and as you’ll hear in the interview, has a lifelong connection with nature and has spent many years outside immersed in it. He incorporates plants into every aspect of his life, using them for food, drinks, for tools and to produce herbal remedies. Before I interviewed Michael, he prepared me a salad and a tasting platter of all the individual leaves that he’d included in the salad, which I washed down with a cup of his nettle tea.I’m ashamed to say I’d never eaten so much as a dandelion leaf before so the tasting session was a baptism of fire and Michael found my trepidation and ignorance quite hilarious. I’ll be posting a bonus episode of a recording of the tasting session in the next few days and I’ll also be posting a couple of videos of Michael making fire using fungi and of his Stone Age glue stick, which you’ll find on the Roots and All youtube channel, I’ll post a link to these videos on my social media.
I have to post this episode with a disclaimer – please don’t go out foraging unless you’re 100% sure what you’re doing or unless you’re with someone who knows what they’re doing. And please don’t use this episode as a guide to foraging, if you go out and poison yourself, that’s on you. And if you want even more of a reason not to take risks with plants, please stop this episode right now and go and listen to Episode 16 where I talk to Dr Liz Dauncey about poisonous plants, and then come back to it.
I started the interview by asking Michael how his love affair with plants began…
[01:10] MICHAEL: I grew up mainly outside, I never had a TV, I still don’t have a TV, my parents would send me outside, I would come home and since I’m a teenager I actually spent one month per year completely outside, without any tent. So I always had a connection to nature and at some point I wanted to be even closer rather than just looking at it and sleeping and I wanted to interact more and the closest you can get I guess is just by eating your landscape, so I started trying to eat simple things like nettles and dandelions and then I just tried a bit more and got lots books, as you can see I have loads of books, I’ve never taken any foraging course I’ve just done it. Yeah, it became part of my second nature in a way, I try and eat something wild every day if I can but I incorporate it in my normal diet rather than saying I’m radical and just eat wild food because I don’t think that’s possible. [03:02] SARAH: No, I was going to ask you if that’s possible, if you had any attempts to be self-sufficient, but it must be almost impossible. [03:11] MICHAEL: So this year I’ve got permission to go on an exhibition that I’ve just told you, so 5 times a year I’ll go to Devon and learn traditional skills from leading experts and then I’ll go to Africa to hunt with the bushmen, so that’ll be great. And after that at some point I always play with the idea of for 6 months of only living on wild food. I think it will be incredibly difficult in a densely populated country like the UK but I like the challenge and I would love to try it and see but I need to know first which environment is the most abundant at which time of the year. The beach is probably the best one. [03:54] SARAH: Is it? [03:54] MICHAEL: Yeah, it’s probably the easiest because the shingle flora and the sand flora on the beach is mainly edible, as well as you have the protein source of the fish. We say in Germany when the tide is low the table is set. So because there’s so much food, and I think one of the wild foods that is most under-appreciated is seaweed. Despite in Wales and Ireland there’s not really a culture of eating seaweed and it’s full of protein and full of nutrients. I think for our future there are two things that we should look at more, seaweed and insects, in terms of protein there’s a massive potential potential that’s not foraged yet. [04:42] SARAH: That’s if we don’t kill off all the insects by then, wipe them out. [04:51] MICHAEL: That’s right, yeah. So, it’s not a tricky time at all, you can eat so much food, so the buds are just breaking. March is the foraging time, oh my god, so my diet, you know I said I used to be vegan but now I eat meat? Actually my diet would be in an ideal situation so in the winter I eat quite a lot of roots, nuts, seeds and meat, in the spring I go completely vegan, eat only salad, in the summer I would use a lot of seeds and fruit and in the autumn I eat berries and nuts again and have a lot of soup. I find that strange you know, to say, that I don’t eat meat I only eat salad, or the other way around, because my diet changes according to the seasons, so in about 2 weeks time the hawthorn leaves together with the birch leaves make the most beautiful salad and they’re so easy to gather because you can just strip them and birch leaves are so full of sugar they actually have 10% sugar in them so they’re really sweet and you can just eat them as a salad, it’s the most beautiful salad. Or you can cook them in water, boil them for a few hours and then you can exclude the leaves, discard them and then you can boil that down to a syrup and that syrup is much more complex in its flavour than maple syrup from Canada for example. You can have that on bread, it’s a really nutritious syrup you can have on bread. And obviously at the moment you can tap the birches, we call them poor man’s cow in Bavaria because you can milk them without paying for the cow and in a really rough winter, when the winter was really long and you run out of fodder you would give them birch water because it’s a really nutritious water. But in Germany it is illegal to tap birch trees, I don’t think it is in the UK. That’s another thing I see all over Instagram, I follow a few foragers, and they put “oh, what’s the most peculiar plant that you tap?” Because you can tap hydrangeas, you can tap all sorts of trees, acer, maple, whatever, but if you drill a hole into a tree and just leave that unattended the tree will so-called bleed and obviously that takes important sugars out of the tree that it needs to store in its buds before the leaves come out, it can really mess the whole tree up so birch tapping is one of things that’s really ephemeral and there are such tight regulations on it, not regulations, but instructions, so south side, 1m metre high, you have to have a slight angle on it, you drill into the cambium, not the inner wood. You have to protect it from the slugs and flies because it’s sugar water, you have to secure the hole afterwards. Obviously the moon is important too, on a rising moon, a full moon there’s a lot of water coming out on a new moon there’s less water coming out, it makes massive difference actually. But you can really mess up a tree – the tree needs to be more than 20cm in diameter to be tapped otherwise you can really harm the tree. When you tap about 100 litres out of the tree, the tree will lose about 9-10% of its sugar content for the year and that’s still ok, you know, some trees you can tap for years and years and years. I know my tree that’s best in my environment so I tap always that one, but you can really mess it up. So it’s one of those you have to treat with a lot of respect. [08:38] SARAH: I know you walked from Brighton to Hastings, didn’t you, how did that go? [08:41] MICHAEL: It was interesting, I tried only living on wild food. I had about…so for the 4 days I had about 300g of porridge with me, just as an emergency source so in the morning, I thought you know…you know we had the heat wave last year? Incredibly hot, beautiful weather, perfect weather, when I walked I had 4 nights of thunderstorm and rain and two days I had heavy rain as well [09:10] SARAH: You couldn’t have timed it any worse, we had an entire summer of sunshine! [09:15] MICHAEL: I walked by myself and you really feel how amazing it is to go into a supermarket and just get your stuff and you go home, you know? So even though I was freezing, I was really freezing cold and the only way to keep warm is to keep walking basically and I had to forage. So even though I was freezing cold and completely soaked I had to force myself to stop and to bend down and gather tiny little seeds and fruit and nuts and that was just insane, it was just insane. I think it’s much, much easier if you are in a group for the reason of keeping the spirits up and also foraging in a group you get much more food much, much quicker, you can divide the labour. Somebody is making a fire, somebody is foraging for food, I think in a group it’s much easier than by yourself. [10:16] SARAH: Which is how it would have happened historically, I suppose? [10:17] MICHAEL: I guess. But interestingly at Birling Gap, near Seven Sisters, they found the bones of a lady and they analysed her teeth. She lived about 2000 years ago when Romans invaded Britain and the diet she had was mainly seafood and seeds and starch-rich plants and it was exactly the food that she had eaten so I was following her diet. I think it’s called the Birling Gap lady and that was just so amazing to be able to eat something that feels so good. I always felt wonderful, I never really felt hungry so what I learned from that walk is that you have to take the food when it’s there because it might not be there. I did the mistake on my first day, I thought oh I’d rather just make kilometres and when I arrive I’ll gather my food so I arrived there and there was no food and I thought, oh, bollocks! I made a massive mistake and I was low on calories and of course calories are the wood for my oven for my body so I was just freezing all night. So the next day I gathered food on the way and I had an abundance of food, I had more food than I actually needed, which was brilliant. It was very diverse and going into a landscape and not knowing what you expect and being cold and wet and suddenly finding a mix of nettle seeds and blackberries is just so wonderful, so I was just so thankful all the time because I could eat something without harming that plant, being part of this whole eco-system, part of this landscape without having a negative impact and all that happened in a way that I couldn’t plan it. So when you find something that’s nutritious and nice you get a real kick out of it. You know when you go to the supermarket and you kind of know what you want and you get it and you eat it and you know exactly how it is, so every bramble bush is different, every fruit tastes completely different, some are big, some are small, some are more sweeter, some are very sour and when you find one bush and they’re big and they’re absolutely juicy and sweet it’s amazing and you’re just like woooah! I stood there for hours, just like I have to take that bush with me you know I just have to get every single fruit and I had the fruit with me in my bowl and I looked like a homeless person begging for food basically but I just had this fruit and I just wanted to offer it to people, look at my amazing blackberries, I just found those, they are the best in the whole day but obviously people didn’t share my enthusiasm quite as much. [13:14] SARAH: Well, I suppose it is that thing of terroir isn’t it with the wine, everything is specific to where it grows, it got it’s own taste. [13:15] MICHAEL: Every hawthorn tree tastes different as well. [13:16 SARAH: If you weren’t trained how to forage, where did you learn? [13:19] MICHAEL: You mean for other people? [13:24] SARAH: I mean for identification purposes. So when you go out and forage food, how do you know what you’re eating? [13:25] MICHAEL: Well, the flora of Britain is a fantastic book to take with you. That’s an absolute key, you have to be able to identify the plant, if you’re not sure what it is I wouldn’t touch it because you can go horribly wrong. I’m lucky enough to be a gardener so I have a basic knowledge of botany and the local flora, wildflowers are my passion since childhood anyway, so I know roughly what I get. I know Lily of the Valley would never grow together with wild garlic, even thought they similar, I just know they grow in completely different environments but if you don’t know that, after about 15 minutes of gather wild garlic your hands smell of garlic no matter which plant you touch so even though you touch an arum which is completely poisonous… [14:15] SARAH: And they do grow amongst them, don’t they? [14:18] MICHAEL: That’s right, so completely amongst them and if you smell it it would smell of garlic because of your hands. For me, it looks very, very different and I know the aura of the wild garlic, I know the plant inside out anyway, so I would never confuse it, but that comes with experience and that comes from having a connection with that plant. Foraging on a Sunday, occasionally because it’s a sunny day and it’s a fun thing to do is very different to doing it on a daily or weekly basis…I know exactly where the wild garlic grows within 2 miles of my house, I know exactly where the best willow tree grows to get my branches and I know where my wild plants grow so I don’t actually take a book and I go specifically for plants because I know where they grow. But I’ve eaten arum before actually, it’s quite interesting. It’s completely poisonous and what happens is your mouth goes completely numb, it’s like tiny needles that would go into your lips, it’s quite interesting. [15:24] SARAH: So maybe an age old dentistry tool? [15:30] MICHAEL: Probably! What would have been done to trial new plants is they would have chosen the youngsters out of the tribe because you can spare one or two of them, the mothers are much more important than a few of the youngsters. They would then have to boil the plant first, put it under their lips see if it has any weird taste and slowly try and eat it and then you boil it a little bit less and you eat it raw and at some point that’s how they would have discovered it, yeah. [15:55] SARAH: I would have thought they’d give it to the oldies? Bump them off, no? [15:58] MICHAEL: Well, they’re full of wisdom…but I think with foraging, if you can go with someone who does it, brilliant. There are so many wild food walks that you can do in the local area and that is just a wonderful way of passing on knowledge and passing on locations and passing on this connection because when I’m out there foraging I’m completely by myself and there is no-one to judge me. If I would just take my hand and rip out the plant there would be no-one to judge me, so I have to have a high awareness of conservation first, before I go foraging because otherwise you think, oh I don’t have my scissors with me, let’s just rip out out and then you lose it. [16:45] SARAH: So that’s a thing to be careful of isn’t it, to not over-forage? [16:49] MICHAEL: Yeah, it’s becoming more and more popular, foraging, in London, everywhere. Where there is pressure on wild plants, like in urban areas, anyway. Over-foraging is a massive issue. I just read recently that 70%, so they did a study in the UK with 5000 parents and 70% of those kids from those parents spend less time outside than prisoners do, so prisoners spend about an hour a day outside, that’s recommended, so they spend less. The interesting thing about it is that our experience of nature and the picture of how we should interact and maybe preserve nature as well doesn’t come from direct experience, it comes from pictures or films so it’s very different actually, because nature is very different than in the movies, nature can be brutal as well. I’ve spent so many days outside where nature was just absolutely brutal to me and you just learn from it and have to move on. [17:54] SARAH: Yeah, we are losing that connection, for sure. So when you ate the arum or any of the other things that you’ve eaten that are not good food, how did you get around that? [18:04] MICHAEL: Well the arum I ate intentionally, because I wanted to see, so I didn’t actual;actually swallow it, I just held it in my mouth to see what it does. But I’ve eaten a pea once that was not as edible as I thought, I just basically ate my fire after I had it, because ash is a beautiful thing you can eat, as well as charcoal is. I just tidied up my fire by eating it and then I was completely fine. So charcoal is a good thing to carry around with you. [18:34] SARAH: Charcoal is your friend. [18:35] MICHAEL: Charcoal is my friend, I make charcoal, I eat charcoal. [18:44] SARAH: So if you could go anywhere in the world, where would be the easiest place to live foraging? [18:50] MICHAEL: I guess on a remote island would be easy. If you live in Canada, or if you live in the North of Sweden maybe where it’s very wild, there of course the season is different. It really depends I think what you go for. I think a very, very easy and abundant place to forage is an ordinary allotment in the UK because it’s just full of weeds and it’s so…I was part of an allotment for 2 years until they kicked me out because they didn’t quite agree with my idea of what is a vegetable. What’s really interesting is like the hairy bittercress that we just ate, people clear plants away that are far more nutritious and then grow plants that are less nutritious and less tasty. I spoke to a man who was breeding vegetables in the Netherlands 2 weeks ago and he told me that we breed vegetables or select vegetables for 2 reasons and that is high yield, because you get paid by yield and the second is pet and disease resistance, those are the two main factors, that’s why we breed vegetables and then naturally, over thousands of years we selected vegetables that are less bitter. A lot of he vegetables we used to have, like cucumber, we used to have it for eating the seeds not the flesh and then we selected out and it became tenderer and tenderer and sweeter and sweeter. The carrots we eat now are incredibly sweet compared to the wild carrot that you have so sweetness is something that we select. But then you have vegetables that are less nutritious, you know, I’m not generalising there are few like rocket and spring onions that are still very close to our wild vegetables. It’s just interesting…I think allotments get disturbed a lot so you have a lot of weeds like chickweed, dandelion, hairy bittercress and those are really nutritious fantastic salads to eat. Let’s make it really tough, say you live in the centre of London, small apartment and you have a tiny balcony, you know one of those balconies where you can just turn around, you can’t actually sit, ok? North-facing, let’s make it really tough. I think you can still forage. You can go to places like Peckham Rye park, I’ve been last weekend, there’s a patch of hidden wild garlic there and also what you could do, you can grow your weeds in pots so for example you take a north-facing balcony, you have a big pot, you grow nettles in it together with chickweed, so the chickweed is the under layer, the nettle goes upright so it’s a perfect companion plant. I don’t think there’s any other vegetables that give you more biomass throughout the year than those two, cos nettles is like basil, when you cut it it actually increases in biomass. So there you go, you have all the options. I don’t think you actually need to be remote. I think foraging can start in your garden because it’s a place where you know there is no dog, because dogs love to wee on foliage, obviously so you know that’s kind of safe and you know your garden and you have to maybe be a bit softer with your weeding and just allow more plants to settle in and over the years they will self-sow and as long as you actually use them they never become overwhelming. So I introduce loads of weeds, as I just told you I grow dandelion from seed, I introduced chickweed which has up to 60,000 seeds that are viable for up to 50 years, so hopefully they will come. [22:31] SARAH: Do you just go around chucking them in people’s gardens like some sort of weed terrorist? [22:32] MICHAEL: No, not in people’s gardens! Well I try…ground elder is one weed I would to have, I was so sad it wasn’t there. [22:43] SARAH: Would you like some? I can get you some! [22:44] MICHAEL: Oh, please. [22:45] SARAH: I will happily bring you some of those white, horrible roots, no problem. [22:48] MICHAEL: Oh, please. I couldn’t find one so I had to buy a variegated one from Beth Chatto so I spent actually money on it and I just hope it will re-birth one day. [22:57] SARAH: I’ve got that in my garden, the variegated one, in a container because I’m too scared to let it loose. Can you eat the leaves of that one? [23:04] MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, you can. And it will also spread, they say it’s less vigorous but I’ve seen areas where it just goes out of hand [23:10] SARAH: I tell you what I find with it, the slugs love it, so that might keep it in check a bit but if you want the straight green one I can quite happily drop you round some. [23:22] MICHAEL: Oh, please. Well at the moment my house mate Dean is still quite reluctant to introduce it. [23:30] SARAH: Yes, he won’t thank me for that. No! [23:32] MICHAEL: Well, the thing about it is, so ground elder was introduced by the Romans. They come to England, it’s wet, it’s soggy, it’s not quite as Italy and they missed certain things, so they missed Alexander, which they took with them and they missed ground elder. So there is a plant that has so much value that you would take it from the Continent and it’s so abundant and gives you so much biomass. Also, the Romans used to walk a lot and it helps with arthritis, so it was actually a vital plant for them conquering Britain and same as I said before, as long as you use it and cut it, it doesn’t become overwhelming and you can keep it in check easily with a lawnmower actually. I think it’s quite pretty. [24:18] SARAH: I’m not sure about that actually, it does get quite carried away. [24:25] MICHAEL: I envy you a lot. [24:26] SARAH: Oh no, don’t, please, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. BREAK HEREYou mentioned something imp your talk actually about the amount of humans the globe could sustain if everybody was to forage and I found that quite surprising. How many people could the globe support if everybody foraged for food?
[24:43] MICHAEL: So, the sustainable level is, apparently, 10 million people which we had a long time ago and know we have, what is it, 7 point something billion people? So way over that after the Industrial Revolution and the interesting thing is the Neolithic Revolution when we actually started farming and eating grains was a time when our brains got smaller , we were actually healthier hunter-gathering than when we made grains so there’s a question now, isn’t it? Are we living unsustainably and what can we do about it. It’s the way how we see conservation projects as well, it’s linked in to that. So at the moment we have a hands off approach with National Parks, don’t we? In National Parks you always see massive signs, you’re not allowed to pick wild plants, do this, do this, do this so they actually stop you having a relationship with wild plants that could be edible and they prefer that you eat vegetables that have been grown in the agricultural fields, which if we remember used to be nature reserves and used to be wetlands that we drained for ploughing them and having a field. Soil erosion is our biggest problem in the UK at the moment, we have about 100 harvests left according to the Sheffield University and that’s not much. You can ac tally see it when you look on Google maps how the soil got strained out by the rivers into the sea, it’s a massive issue and I really do believe by having a connection with your wild food you care about your wild food and by having a relationship then you would make sure that this wild garlic patch would not go away it would stay there for kids because wild garlic gives you so much it is one of the most powerful medicinal plants I know. If you are philosophical about it, it sacrifices part of its living tissue to not only sustain you but to help you medicinally. It lowers your blood pressure for example, you know. So why in hell if I care about this plant and it cares for me and I care for the plant, why in hell should I just rip out the entire colony? I would make sure that this would be here for my kids to be healthy as well and I think we can have that sort of approach with nature and have hands on experience rather than hands off experience of nature conservation, change the way we actually preserve our will areas then I think we have a massive advantage for our future. [27:22] SARAH: That is an argument at the moment, isn’t it, that we ourselves as separate from nature, we don’t think of ourselves as part of it, which we are so it’s about interacting with it rather than trying to preserve it in aspic, in some little park or a reserve. [24:43] MICHAEL: If you ask someone describe a picture of nature, they will maybe describe it with a forest, a stream running through, some wildflowerrs. And what would you see in it? Maybe a rabbit, a fox, a badger, would you see a human in it? Probably not, but we are just grazing animals that roam around, we just forgot about sustainable foraging and now we have this problem where we think, oh, we need to eat all those vegetables in the supermarket or all these processed foods, but actually we don’t. [27:22] SARAH: There’s something supremely ironic about working so hard to keep the pests off of a lettuce and therefore pelting it with chemicals and pulling out the hairy bittercress next to it that’s probably just as nutritious, if not more, that you know it’s madness but part of my cynical head thinks that there’s no money to be made in growing and harvesting hairy bittercress, you doing that in your own garden whereas there is money to be made in selling you lettuce seeds and selling you the chemicals that help you prop up their life cycle so for me, there’s definitely a money-making issue involved in removing that connection between humans and the landscape. [28:59] MICHAEL: I think that’s a really important point, that’s exactly what it is about, there’s no money in wild food, so people don’t do it. [29:13] SARAH: There’s no money in wild food. And that’s what it usually boils down to when you dig into a subject. And that’s what I like about Michael and the idea of foraging in general, you can’t really stop people doing it. Yes, you can scare them silly with stories of poisonous plants, as I did in the intro, and you can sever the generational connection with the land and make it harder for people to forage – generations ago we would have learnt about plants from our ancestors, nowadays with every generation that goes by there’s less and less received wisdom and what we know, we have to discover for ourselves or learn second hand from books and videos, unless we’re lucky enough to know an experienced forager. I love nature but I can only listen in admiration and with some envy when I hear about Michael’s connection with the land. I’d argue that for women, it’s even harder to have that direct experience – I couldn’t contemplate walking from Brighton to Hastings and camping outdoors en route with nothing but a sleeping bag, I wouldn’t feel safe enough.The day after this interview, I went walking in my local woods and without even trying I found some wild garlic and some King Alfred’s Cakes, which Michael uses as a firelighter in one of the videos I’ve put on YouTube. I’m determined to do more of it and to make more of a connection with the landscape around me, because as you can tell from listening to Michael, foraging is about more than eating wild plants, it’s about forging a very deep connection to the land, wherever abouts on earth you happen to find yourself. So happy foraging to you, if you too decide to take the plunge and thanks for listening, I’ll catch you next Tuesday.
OUTRO: You can download or listen to the podcast direct from the website www.rootsandall.co.uk where you’ll also find my blog and a sign-up form for the newsletter which gives you a weekly round-up of content, plus the inside scoop on things like upcoming guests. Or you can subscribe wherever you normally get your podcasts. Email me with comments and feedback at podcast@rootsandall.co.uk follow me on twitter: rootsandall, facebook: rootsandalluk and instagram: rootsandallpod. But please also check out my Patreon where you can make a one-off donation or take out a monthly subscription to help support my work because if you like what I do, please help me to continue doing it, even if you make a one-off donation of a pound, trust me, it all helps and I will be immensely grateful. So please go to Patreon and search for Roots and All.
