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A Personal Wilderness First Aid Kit: What to Include?
The best wilderness first aid kits are ones where the contents, your experience and the likely risks are in sync. This is why assembling your own kit is the best option. The choice of equipment to include in your kit is a personal one. The process of optimising your first aid kit and training, as well as assessing the risks you might face, improves your wilderness survival skills and maximises your….
Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea
Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea, is a very common plant of wayside verges and open woodlands. Until it flowers, however, it is easily missed. Greater Stitchwort is a relative of Common Chickweed, Stellaria media, and like Chickweed, Greater Stitchwort is an easily-collected source of edible wild greens…
Common Dog-violet, Viola riviniana: Spring herbage
Common Dog-violet, Viola riviniana, is the most common violet in the UK and provides some useful herbage for a wild salad. The leaves have a pleasant flavour with only a little bitterness and making it a wild food worth picking up as you forage, particularly in the spring. It flowers March to May and is then easy to spot but a little less so at other times. The leaves and flowers are edible…
Primrose, Primula vulgaris: Wild food?
The primrose is widespread throughout the UK and Europe. The flowers and leaves are often described as edible but there is research that suggests handling the plant might cause allergic contact dermatitis in some people…
Brooklime, Veronica beccabunga
Brooklime, Veronica beccabunga, is an edible leafy green plant of damp freshwater places. You can eat the leaves and stem. The name may be unfamiliar but the plant is relatively common. You’ll find brooklime growing in boggy ground (the sort in which you’d wished you’d worn boots, not shoes), on the damp margins of ponds, streams and rivers and sometimes…
Conopodium majus: Pignuts and How to Forage for them
The pignut, Conopodium majus, is one of the most palatable wild foods. The tuber can be eaten raw and is very tasty. To the uninitiated, pignuts can be hard to spot, particularly in the spring. But once you’ve been shown and know in which places to look, they are surprisingly common. Leaves appear in the spring, then…
Bushcraft Knife Safety for Children
How should you supervise a child using a bushcraft knife? Should they even have one at all? Bushcraft knives and children do mix but it is a relationship that must be managed… Emma Hampton covers kid-specific safety tips that will enable you to guide your child as a novice knife user. She also answers some frequently asked questions regarding children and knife usage.
Foraging For Early Spring Greens: Some To Eat, Some To Avoid…
Late winter and early spring is a lean time. As soon as shoots start to appear, however, there are some tender, young spring greens to gather. They grow quickly too – the early spring plants race to grow before the trees produce leaves and cut out much of the light to the forest floor. You must be careful though – early spring plants often have defence mechanisms by way of toxins…
The Importance of Leaving Word Before Heading Into the Wild
Nobody heads out into the wilds expecting to be the recipient of a search and rescue operation. Most people don’t think it will ever happen to them. But you only need to Google ‘lost hiker’ or ‘missing hiker’ to get a sense of how many people for whom it becomes a reality. A famous case, recently popularised further by the film 127 Hours, is that of Aron Ralston who became trapped by his arm…