The Year of Foraging — Months 1 and 2

For one year, I am foraging 100 percent of my food and medicine. A year without grocery stores or restaurants, not even a garden! Nature is my pantry, my garden and my pharmacy.

In this video, I share about the first two months of the year-long immersion. I summarize the fall starting on October 9th (Day 1) into the beginning of winter on December 1st (Day 54).

Transcript: The following is a transcription of The Year of Foraging — Months 1 and 2.

My year of foraging has begun. No grocery stores or restaurants, no gardens, no exceptions. All of my food and medicine from the land for an entire year.

The year began with a salty sip of water from the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine. The date was October 9th. Originally, I was planning on starting on the first day of fall, September 21st, but I decided I didn’t want to do a couple of weeks without salt. So, the year began right there at the ocean with that first salty sip of water.

I didn’t harvest just a sip though. That was where I went to harvest my salt, one of the crucial ingredients to a year of living on 100 percent foraged food. A five-gallon jug of water makes about one pint of salt. I harvested about five five-gallon jugs, which is about two-and-a-half quarts of salt. That would be plenty for the next few months before my next time returning to the ocean.

I wasn’t at the ocean only for salt though. I was there for a new exploration and foraging, and that was seaweed. A new friend met me there. His name was David, a local forager, and he knew all about foraging seaweed and took me under his wing. Within minutes, I was blown away by the abundance and the variety of seaweeds. He showed me five different edible seaweeds, and it only took about 40 minutes to harvest a year’s supply of rockweed and bladderwrack, two very nutritious seaweeds. I also harvested Irish moss, dulse, and sea lettuce. It was actually so easy to harvest an abundance of seaweed that in a way it almost felt like cheating. I just wasn’t used to this incredible abundant resource.

What was so ironic about the first 48 hours of the year of foraging is that I actually didn’t eat anything. I went on one of the longest fasts that I had ever gone on, about 48 hours. I just had so deeply felt like I was needing a fast. A fast to reset my body and mind. A fast to empty the stomach. A fast to let go of a lot of the past and come into this new year of relating to my food. So 48 hours without any food, just that initial sip of salt water before I moved on from Portland to the next stop in Boston, Massachusetts.

If you thought that just foraging all of my food would be some serious work, I had my work really cut out for me. Over the next three-and-a-half weeks, I had talks and plant walks to lead in 18 cities: Portland, Maine; Boston, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; New Haven, Connecticut; New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Knoxville, Maryland; Tacoma Park, Washington DC, Richmond, Virginia; United Plant Savers, Columbus, Ohio, and Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago; and finally back to my hometown in Ashland, Wisconsin. So, not only did I have to eat all foraged food, cook all of my foraged food, be harvesting lots of food, but I was traveling from city to city, teaching and sharing my knowledge to help others learn about the food and medicine that is growing freely and abundantly in their communities.

While I was on this tour, I had a pretty long list of plants that I wanted to forage, many that I wanted to harvest and bring that abundance back to Wisconsin with me. One of the most difficult parts is the number of times where I saw an abundance of food that I wanted to harvest. But I had a plant walk to get to. I had a class to get to and I had to keep on driving, like that loaded Kousa dogwood fruit tree that I didn’t even get to harvest a single bite from.

It was the fall season. I started on October 9th in the northeast. So although I had left behind the abundance of the north woods of northern Wisconsin, I had entered a new abundance. There was so much abundance all around me. Each day was a balance between what I could potentially harvest, what I had space for, what I would need to process, and my time going into teaching.

Being on the road was a lot. Moving from place to place, staying in different places almost every night and maintaining my diet at the same time. I quickly found that I had overestimated my abilities and that I was struggling right at the very beginning. I had an Instant Pot with me which allowed me to easily cook on the road and be able to take it with me and plug in. But I quickly found that I just often didn’t have access to a place to plug it in. I found that I was quite frequently eating cold meals which just was not nearly as satiating. Just did not nourish me like I was hoping to be.

That said, I was getting in some really complete nourishing meals and I was really enjoying them. My daily meals revolved around wild rice, venison, stinging nettle, the dehydrated mushrooms I was carrying with me, my herbal powders, my spice mix, and the salt that I had recently harvested. So, I had a nice pot of food every single day. I was also eating the applesauce and the pear sauce and many different wonderful snacks to go with it all.

For those first couple weeks, I oscillated with feeling solid and then struggling. On Day 5, I woke up at night with my heart just really racing, having nightmares. I was wondering, what is going on here? Over the next week, that happened again. Throughout the day, I would notice my heart was pumping a little fast, a little wiry. I found myself keeping track of everything that I was eating every day and what I was doing differently and asking, “Am I getting too much salt?” “Am I dehydrated?” “Is it that juniper berry that I harvested that I’m not so sure about the toxicity of the juniper berries?” “Or is it this venison that I canned before I left for the trip?”

I canned a whole bunch of venison, one of the keys to the success of traveling. My canner. I had an issue with my canner and I didn’t can it for the full 90 minutes. So, there was this concern about botulism. When I was first opening up those cans each day, I was concerned. I remember a couple weeks in, I said to my friend, Eric Joseph Lewis, “This might be my last day on Earth.” I felt this real tenderness that I had never felt before. The good news is you can see obviously I’m here and there was no botulism. It was a totally unnecessary concern after all. But the beginning was very challenging.

I struggled on Day 7. I did my blood work. A doctor had reached out and said, “Hey, we would love to be a part of what you’re doing and we’d be so interested in seeing what would change.” They came at just the right time, where at the beginning, I was able to do my blood work. I had to fast for 20 hours. It ended up being 20 hours when I really didn’t need to fast. I actually passed out while giving blood in New York City to test for the vitamins, the minerals, the fat, all of that; which all of that information is published on my website, so you can look right through that unedited. But that was a struggle. Passing out in New York City. I had never passed out before. Then having to go from that to a plant walk not too much later.

I’m sure some of you are wondering how would I have gotten around on this long tour. I don’t own a car myself or even a driver’s license. I was very grateful to have the support of two people who volunteered. That was Angelica for the first portion and Brad for the second portion. They were so deeply helpful with the driving, with the helping to harvest foods, with the processing of foods. As I’ve said many times, I am not doing this alone. This is a very community-oriented project and I’m so grateful for all the people supporting in that way.

I was so excited to be traveling the East Coast, where fall was extended longer than where I had just left and there were so many different plants to explore. Some I had on my list, others I was open to learning about. Each day, to the best of my ability, I was harvesting fresh greens to add in with my wild rice and venison and mushrooms. One of my great harvests from the trip was nettle, stinging nettle. I harvested a large quantity of that and dehydrated it so that I could take that with me for the rest of the tour and the months to come.

Probably the most joyful fruit from the trip was autumnberry or autumn olive. This is a plant that is considered invasive and so harvesting it is absolutely an ecosystem service. It’s tart. It’s delicious. I canned a whole bunch of that while I was in New Haven, Connecticut. Then, of course, there were the American persimmon, one of the wonderful sweet treats that we have growing across parts of the Northeast and the Midwest. I got into a couple of persimmon trees throughout the tour.

I also harvested a handful of herbs to add to my apothecary. There were the ginkgo leaves. You wait until they turn yellow to harvest them. There was the Japanese barberry, a really potent medicine that was a new one to me. I was very grateful to be able to harvest spicebush from the Appalachian region in Virginia; both the twigs and the leaves, as well as some sassafras.

One of the highlights of the tour was meeting up with my close colleague and friend, Eric Joseph Lewis. He’s been one of my key foraging partners for over five years now and I first went on a plant walk with him over seven years ago. Eric Joseph Lewis is a wild nut human. I was really hoping to get into the wild nuts with him and that we did. He took me around to some of his top nut places and we got into some incredible abundance.

There was the shellbark hickory nut where I managed to harvest over 50 pounds of that to be able to make hickory nut milk with. There were black walnuts. We didn’t spend too much time on the black walnuts because there’s plenty of that back in Wisconsin. The pecans were incredible. I harvested over 20 pounds of pecans with Eric. That is such an easy nut to crack open and eat right out of the shell.

Then there is the yellow bud hickory or bitternut hickory. This is a hickory nut that is 75 percent oil. The meat is 75 percent oil. So, we’re talking about an incredible source of cooking oil. It’s similar to olive oil in its nutritional value. I managed to harvest about seven or eight gallons in the husk, which is enough to make about one gallon of oil. I was really hoping to be able to make four gallons of cooking oil and just did not manage to pull that off. It was actually a challenging year for the yellow bud hickory nut in many areas and I had my opportunities. I missed a few of them, but I am at least grateful that I got enough to make about a gallon of oil.

Then, of course, acorns. A very different nut in that this is not a fatty nut, it’s a starchy nut. This is my close friend to wild rice. An incredible resource for calories that if I didn’t have wild rice, I’d be eating a lot more acorns. I made a goal of eating at least five pounds of acorns this year. So, that meant I had not that much harvesting to do. I ended up harvesting 25 pounds of acorns. Right there at Eric’s place, we removed them from the husk, which was the bur oak, a unique one, and then removed them from the shell, dehydrated them, and then I was able to bring a lot of that back with me just in that state, still needing to be leeched. So that means that I will have a good amount of acorns to eat this year.

It was a really beautiful exploration of the acorn for me, because acorns are one of the most important foods to humanity. We wouldn’t be here without the acorns. For me to be able to tap into that and get that experience was very meaningful. I’m exploring, can I make a substantial amount of my diet come from acorns? It’s a deep level of breaking free from the global industrial food system, a deep level of breaking free from domestication, and a really deep connection with Earth for me to be eating a substantial amount of acorns.

When it came to the wild nuts, I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a more ecstatic excitement than with the pecans and the hickories and the acorns and the black walnuts all combined. It was an incredibly abundant experience to get into the wild nuts. After seven years of foraging, I now will say that I have become a wild nut human.

When I arrived back in southern Wisconsin after my last talk in Chicago, I realized that I may have had more food than when I left for the tour. The abundance was real. When I arrived in Madison in early fall, it was early November, I realized that there was still so much abundance to harvest. That’s where I got into wild parsnips. For the first time, I harvested a substantial amount of wild parsnips. About a five-gallon bucket full. It might have been about 20 pounds of wild parsnips. This was my most successful hardy wild vegetable.

In Madison, I found a black walnut tree that I just could not resist. Really ideal black walnuts and I managed to take a good number of those home. I also harvested some herbs that I was hoping to harvest like ground ivy and carrot seeds, to name a couple of them. Also, I still managed to harvest some brambleberry leaves, like blackberry and raspberry leaves, which was key, an important bitter herb that I had not managed to get the time to harvest in the summer. I visited the important onion patch again in Madison that I’ve been to many times. I harvested ginkgo nuts in Chicago in Lincoln Park, a very abundant ginkgo nut harvest. Then there were the aronia berries outside of a gas station in Madison. This is a common landscaping plant and the delicious and nutritious berries are generally never harvested.

A few days later, I arrived back in Ashland, in my hometown really needing a break. The tour was a lot. I was tired and I had had a lot of being around people and not much alone time. But it turned out that a break was not in store. Before I was even able to fully unpack, I was heading out fishing. This was important because I had no fish this entire time and I was almost a month in now. So, it was time to catch some fish and the fish were biting. We had the ideal conditions for salmon and those ideal conditions were not going to last.

I met up with my friend, Tom, who is someone who I’ve been out fishing with a lot for seven years now and has been a very helpful human and friend and resource for my exploration of living off the land in Wisconsin. Over two days of fishing, I managed to take home about 40 pounds of salmon. This was an incredible abundance of fish. This was the exact source of fat that I was looking for. I was able to not just eat the meat, but also with pressure cooking it, be able to eat the bones, the skin, the head. Then some of these salmon had eggs as well as milt, or semen, in them. And I ate the organs as well. So I found myself very nourished by this salmon and was so deeply grateful. This is one of the food sources that makes me who I am. Salmon is a food. It’s an animal that I have had a long-term relationship with that has really genuinely made me who I am.

On November 9th, just about a month after the year had begun, I wrote into my journal that I was done with food processing. All of the food I had harvested was processed, including the fish, which took a fair bit of time. I said to myself, I’m not going to harvest for at least a little while. I’m going to take a break. I’m going to catch up on other areas in life. I’m going to finish making my natural fiber clothes. I am going to start planning for the upcoming homeland speaking tour. I’m just going to get really caught up and really well rested. And I did some of that, but within a handful of days, I was out harvesting my roasted root blend; the dandelion, chicory, and burdock; which for me is a very important medicine, but just as much, it’s a wonderful sustenance that just brings me so much meaning. I found myself right back out there harvesting before winter would come.

Around Day 44, in mid-November, I started to notice that my muscles were getting a fair bit smaller. First, it was I noticed my legs were the smallest that I had ever really seen them. Then I noticed it was my arms, my biceps, my triceps, my shoulders, my neck muscles, the traps, even it seemed like my jaw. I felt like my muscles were shrinking throughout my entire body. I realized that although I was drinking a lot of bone broth, I wasn’t actually eating a lot of venison. I also wasn’t eating enough of the fish. That’s partly because a lot of the times I was so busy that I did neglect eating as much as I would have liked to.

I went through my freezer, which was still pretty full, and I realized I have so much fish to be eating. I realized I had a lot more actual venison left in my freezer from that first deer that I harvested. From that point on, I started to eat a lot more venison, a lot more fish. Over the next couple weeks, I saw a change. I wasn’t losing any more muscle, and I started to feel more solid and strong. But that month there definitely was some struggle just with managing everything. It takes a lot of work just to prepare all the meals, to be constantly making food from scratch, and to manage all of it just takes a substantial amount of time.

As I was eating my salmon and venison abundantly, I went out fishing another time. This time netting for white fish on Trout Lake. I managed to have a successful night and harvested about 10 or 12 pounds of white fish to continue replenishing that stock and make sure I’d have enough fish moving forward.

On Day 50, I wrote into my journal that I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I had just lived for 50 days solely off food that I had foraged. I had broken free from the global industrial food system. Nothing from grocery stores or restaurants, not taking any gifts from others that they had foraged and not eating from gardens. 50 days. What I realized at that time is that most days I wasn’t even thinking about it. Most days it didn’t occur to me that I was eating 100 percent foraged food from the land. That’s the time when I started to feel like I was really settling into it.

I thought to myself that with relative ease, yes, there’s some ups and downs as I mentioned, there’s some definite struggles, but on that day, I felt that, with relative ease, I managed to get into this place where I was eating 100 percent food that I foraged. As I looked in my freezer, I reflected on the fact that I had plenty of food still in there and that my stock was not dwindling in a way that I was concerned. My pantry was still full and there were a lot of foods that I realized I had harvested quite a bit more than I actually needed to and that I used some of my valuable time maybe in not the most effective way with some of the foods that I harvested much more than was needed. But I found myself just very grateful and very relieved that I would have enough food to get me through the next month ahead before I would be heading to Florida.

In the next month ahead, I would have another speaking tour. This time, my homeland speaking tour throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota. So, there would be the potential challenges of traveling. Towards the end of this time, this is when the media started to share my story. It was about Day 50 that the local newspaper, The Daily Press, put me on the front page. From there, very positive things started to happen. There was a very substantial conversation among many people. It spread across other media outlets and this story about my year of foraging really started to get out there.

I had been struggling over the last five months just with having the time to share my message. So much time had been going into just harvesting and processing and storing and getting my life in store with my natural fiber clothes, with settling into my home, with teaching. I was now able to really start reaching the masses again and spreading the message. I became very invigorated and excited because I’m here, yes, for this deep exploration to see if I can live off the land in this way, in a way that my actions … with every single action, I show my love for the Earth where I can live in harmony, live in reciprocity, live sustainably. But that’s just a small portion of my objective.

My objective is to take you along on this journey with me. I want for all of you who are seeking that as well to be a resource, to be a tool, to be a guide, to help you to break free, to break free from what no longer serves you, and to replace these broken systems with systems of love, of connection, of harmony, of relationships. That’s exactly what I’m here for.

If you’re getting a lot out of this, I encourage you to stick with me. I will be sharing much, much more. I’ll introduce you to many more plants that you can harvest in your areas. I’ll introduce you to more tips to learn to harvest safely and sustainably and to really tap into the abundance of food and medicine that’s growing right in your own communities. I love you all very much and I’m looking forward to seeing you again real soon.