In this blog I share a brief description, photos plus a full-length video, featuring a multi-day, wild camping canoe trip down Scotland’s longest river, the River Tay. We travelled light and put bushcraft and campcraft to good use on each overnight camp. It turned out to be an epic, highly memorable trip for a good number of reasons…
As spring moves towards summer, there are plenty of wild edibles to choose from. Some of the easiest to collect are the green aerial parts of readily recognised plants as well as some of their flowers. Many of these provide great additional flavours to seasonal salads and some can be used as stuffing herbs or as the basis of a soup. All of these uses provide additional micronutrients to your diet. Flavoursome teas can be made with several of the featured plants and some also have medicinal uses. In this article I present a dozen easy-to-recognise and easy-to-collect seasonal plants for this time of year…
Miles Irving, is one of the foremost professional foragers in the UK, author of The Forager Handbook, founder and director of Forager Ltd and host of the WorldWild podcast. Miles’s interest in foraging goes back to his childhood but a chance conversation led to him turning this growing passion into a career. Miles was able to start supplying restaurants with foraged plants and this quickly expanded, ultimately leading to him to supplying well-known chefs and restaurants such as Jamie Oliver, Mark Hix, Heston Blumenthal and The Ivy. His company Forager Ltd has expanded to source nearly 500 wild ingredients and Miles has grown to be one of the most respected professional foragers. Miles continues to push the boundaries of wild food and advocates the reintroduction of foraged foods into regular diets. Miles joins me for a wide-ranging and in-depth conversation on wild foods, foraging, health and connecting with nature…
In this Paul Kirtley Podcast I return to Q&A, answering listener questions on a range of topics – Is there an issue with collecting water from streams or ponds containing poisonous plant species such as hemlock water dropwort, Oenanthe crocata? What are the benefits or disadvantages to a woodland if it is being used for bushcraft? How many knives is too many knives? Is a belt knife and a pocket knife enough for a wilderness trip? How to sharpen spoon knives? How to tell the difference between birch species? What are the alternatives to birch bark for lighting fires with sparks from a ferro rod?