The Year of Foraging – Three Months’ Preparation Stage

A year without grocery stores or restaurants — not even a garden! Nature is my pantry, my garden and my pharmacy. I am foraging for every bite of my food and medicine, down to the salt, oil and spices. In this video, I share about the three months of preparation before embarking on this endeavor.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of The Year of Foraging — Three Months’ Preparation Stage.

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For one year, I am foraging 100% of my food and medicine. In this video, I’m going to walk you through the three months of preparation for my year of foraging.

Nature is my garden, my pantry, and my pharmacy. Now, I know what some of you are saying: “Robin, haven’t you done this before?” Well, for one year, I grew and foraged all of my food and medicine. This time, no gardens. Everything that I am harvesting is coming freely and abundantly from the Earth without me planting any food.

Once I decided that I was going to embark on this new endeavor, I gave myself three months of preparation. July 1st, so middle of the summer, was the beginning of my three months of foraging foods and medicines to be ready for the actual year to begin in the fall.

Going into this, I had a pretty substantial amount of experience with my year of growing and foraging all my food. I had foraged over 200 different foods and medicines. I also had immersed in a month of foraging all of my food in 2022. So, I had the skills. I had the knowledge. I had experience in foraging, processing, preserving, cooking. So to a large degree, I was expecting that there wasn’t going to be a lot of wild cards. I didn’t have to be learning a lot of the basics.

But still, this would be a whole new level of exploration in deepening my relationship with Earth, in breaking free from the global industrial food system, in truly finding a home on this Earth, wholeness and completeness within, and knowing that the Earth can provide me with everything that I need.

Although I had a lot of experience and knowledge going into the beginning of this preparation, I was starting from scratch. I had just finished my Experiment of Non-Ownership in California. And I decided that for this year of foraging, I was going to be based in my homeland of northern Wisconsin. I arrived there in early June, owning almost nothing and needing to accumulate all of the items that I would need in order to be able to harvest, process, and store this food.

First of all, I had to find a home to live in, and it took me a little while, but I settled into a place that I call The Hermitage, which many of you have seen. And then I had to accumulate the material goods. So all of the jars and building some things like my dehydrator, purchasing a lot of secondhand items as well. There was a substantial amount of work that went into the preparation stage.

At the same time as I was doing this, there was also some new research. There were new plants that I needed to learn and I was doing a lot of work. A lot of people imagine that I’m … with a person who’s foraging all their food is just going out and about and harvesting their food that day. But for me to do this, I had to be doing the math. How many pounds of wild rice am I going to need? How many jars of applesauce and plum sauce or pear sauce? How many different herbs am I going to need?

And so I was spending a substantial amount of time in my notebook writing out what foods I would need, what seasons that I can harvest them, and making sure that I would have all of my needs met. So, at the same time that I was starting from scratch, moving into a new place, getting all the materials I needed, I was also hosting numerous Foraging Schools throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota, teaching and sharing this knowledge of how to harvest the food and medicine that’s growing freely and abundantly all around us, as well as running the Wild Bay Foraging Club. So, teaching right in my homeland of northern Wisconsin.

And then, also launching the One Million Community Fruit Trees campaign. And not to mention, I was also making all of my clothes and re-entering the experience of wearing 100% homemade natural fiber and naturally dyed clothes. I was very busy even without the challenging endeavor of now having to harvest a lot of food and medicine, process it, and store it for the year ahead.

Now, my objective was not to have a year’s supply of food after this three months of preparation like some people would imagine. The reason why is because there is food to harvest most months of the year. Even in the winter, there are foods to be harvesting. So, my objective was for some foods that I could only harvest during these summer months, was to be able to harvest a one-year supply of those foods. Others, like greens for example, I knew that there were only short windows where I wouldn’t be able to harvest them fresh and so I would have to just harvest certain amounts of some foods.

My objective during this three-month preparation stage was to go into the year with a substantial amount of food so that on most days I would never have to go out and forage. I would have the food that I needed, which would be incredibly important because of the amount of traveling, speaking tours, and teaching that I would be doing ahead. A lot of people wonder how much time I spent with the preparation stage. I did spend a substantial amount of time with the foraging and the processing and storing of those foods, but it was only a relatively small proportion of my entire time.

Sometimes days or even a week would go by during this three-month preparation where I wasn’t putting away a substantial amount of food. I put in a good amount of time, but I was doing a lot of other things as well. And by no means was I trying to store a year’s supply of food. So, July 1st is when I began preparing. That’s the peak of summer in northern Wisconsin. And what I was most excited about foraging right away was not my calories, fat, and protein, but my herbs.

Herbal teas are very important to me. They make up a substantial portion of the nutrients, the vitamins, the minerals that I’m bringing into my body. Over these three months, I harvested about 30 different herbs. Some of them for making teas, others for adding directly into my foods. Many of these herbs that I harvested were ones that I was very familiar with and had over a five, or 10-year experience with, but some of them were quite new.

Fireweed was a new herb for me that I harvested in abundance and fermented. It’s similar to a black tea. Sweet fern is one of my great friends of an herb that grows in the Moquah Barrens around me. Mullein is an herb that I love to make tea from. Goldenrod is an incredibly abundant flowering plant across many regions. Red clover is a wonderful tea that is high in minerals. Catnip is an herb that I harvested that helps with sleeping and relaxing at the end of a potentially stressful day. And another one for that is hops, wild hops growing on vines that makes a wonderful sleepy time tea as well. And, of course, there’s mint, which is a wonderful general tea to add in with different blends. A new favorite for me was basswood flowers. They were such a joy to be harvesting in the peak of summer. You can smell their abundance and you can see the bees foraging from them. That’s when you know they’re in their peak stage to harvest.

Throughout the summer, I harvested about 30 different herbs. What I did with them was dehydrate them. This is the way that most of my herbs are stored. I dehydrated them both in my drying rack as well as in the electric dehydrator. Some of them I ended up harvesting a multiple year supply of and plenty of abundance to share with others. Others I wasn’t able to get enough to be able to drink as much tea that I would want to, but enough to be able to add into the routine and be able to get some of the medicinal benefits. And then, of course, there were some that were more potent medicines that I only needed to harvest a little bit of just in case I would need them.

Berries were another of my very important goals for the summer to harvest a lot of antioxidant rich, very nourishing, nutritious berries to be able to eat through the fall, summer, and spring and get me back to the berry season. However, it turned out that the berry season ahead was not going to be the best berry season that we’d had in the Northwoods.

First, there were blueberries, and I only ended up harvesting about one gallon of blueberries. We had one of the poorer blueberry seasons. Yet, that one gallon that I harvested is something that I would be able to thoroughly enjoy about once a week to be able to have a pint of blueberries. Serviceberries or Juneberries: I intended to harvest 10 gallons, 20 gallons, maybe more to can and freeze. But after everything, I only ended up getting about one gallon of serviceberries.

And chokecherries, that’s another one that I only ended up getting a gallon, maybe two gallons. And the reason for this is because there is a fruit fly that has come in and it has come through domesticated crops and spread to the wild crops and it has ended up being a pretty substantial problem where a lot of the summer fruits are really, really suffering. I ended up having a pretty challenging year as far as my summer harvesting of berries. If I was fully dedicated, I could have gotten a lot more. But with those circumstances, I just did not manage to pull it off.

Now, what was incredibly bountiful were the elderberries. And I managed to, on my trip to Madison, harvest as much elderberries as I had the time to process. The elderberries were incredibly plump, juicy, and vibrant this year, and I harvested more than I will need. Two other berries that I harvested were aronia and highbush cranberry. And these actually aren’t summertime berries. They’re more of the late summer, early into late fall berries.

I managed to get some of those to store, actually a pretty good supply of highbush cranberries. And those were really pretty endless. I could have harvested a lot more, but time was what I didn’t have when the highbush cranberries were in their super abundance. What berries don’t make in my diet is the substantial amount of calories. They’re very nutrient-dense, but when it comes to the real sustenance and calories, then I’m looking to apples and pears and plums. That is a whole other level of sustenance.

Where I’m based in northern Wisconsin, I consider it to be basically the mecca of wild and feral apples. I could take you to over 100 different apple trees that are growing abundantly. We’re talking about thousands of pounds of apples. Between apples and pears, I managed to store away about 42 quarts or over ten gallons of apple and pear sauce. So, a very substantial amount. The only thing that limited me was the time to be able to process and store it. Not even harvest. That was not an issue. It doesn’t take much time to harvest a year’s supply of apples, but to can it and to store it was my limiting factor.

Besides applesauce, I also made juice from the apples and pears and froze that. What I was really excited about was to have a substantial supply of apple cider vinegar as well as some pear cider vinegar. I’m happy to say that this year I finally pulled off really high quality, very acidic apple cider vinegar. And one last fruit that’s not a berry and that’s not a hearty fruit like an apple: grapes. The riverside grape. I managed to find a new patch that I had never seen before and harvested a good abundance of wild grapes which I store in ice cube trays to be able to just take out an ice cube or a couple ice cubes through the winter, add it to a cup of water, and then have fresh grape juice. It’s a really great return to the summer and fall right there in a glass.

An early gift of summer for me were the chanterelle mushrooms. I didn’t do a lot of foraging on the property that I made home, but the real foraging that I did was the chanterelles. I ended up harvesting about 42 pounds of chanterelles that I dehydrated and froze. There really were endless chanterelles in the woods. It was a true joy to be able to go out with a couple of buckets and fill them up in a matter of an hour.

The other really big mushroom abundance was maitake. I harvested maitake mushrooms primarily on Madeline Island and I harvested over a 100 pounds of maitake that I both froze and dehydrated. Chicken of the woods was another abundant mushroom. I love to find chicken of the woods as I’m out and about. If I’m driving in a car, I’m always keeping my eyes open for the brightly colored chicken of the woods.

Of course, the king boletes. It was a beautiful year for the king boletes and I just absolutely love the boletes. They’re one of my absolute favorite mushrooms. I also want to give a mention to the hedgehogs. I have gotten so much joy from the hedgehog mushrooms. I didn’t harvest a lot of them, but what I did harvest was a real joy. When it comes to the edible mushrooms, it was a very abundant summer, and I was able to put away what probably amounted to close to 200 pounds of mushrooms, much of which I dehydrated and much of which I froze.

Then, of course, there were the medicinal mushrooms, which, for me, are one of my keys in my medicine. I make a medicinal mushroom blend. That is chaga, which I harvested on Madeline Island; reishi from the dying hemlock, turkey tail in great abundance, the maitake as well and the boar’s head tooth, which is very similar to lion’s mane.

Another incredibly important category for breaking free from the global industrial food system and living on a wild diet or a diet from the land is greens. Greens are a powerhouse of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. They don’t make the calories, the fat or the protein, but they are just as important for me. They are absolute keys in fiber. All of this important nutrition. It’s actually the area where I did struggle.

I found that northern Wisconsin is nowhere near as greens rich as much of the midwest. The climate, the environment in northern Wisconsin, does not have the abundance of greens of many other places that I’ve been. So, I didn’t harvest nearly as much greens as I had hoped. But the number one green that I harvested was stinging nettle and wood nettle. And I harvested those in great abundance. I dehydrate that, store it in jars, and then I add that into my soups and to my stews.

I will eat stinging nettle just about every day of the entire year that is ahead. Stinging nettle is without a doubt in my top ten wild foods for a wild diet and one of the foods that I eat consistently the most. Another important green that I really started to get into this summer is basswood greens. This is a tree where all of the leaves are edible. So we’re talking about a huge abundance. I managed to put away some of that in the form of green powder, but not nearly as much as I would have liked to.

Then the other green that was a really big one for me was watercress. There’s a watercress patch in Prentice Park in my homeland and I managed to harvest a lot of that. Throughout the summer, I also ate a lot of food that I harvested, a lot of foraged food. So, not only was I storing food for the year ahead, but I was also eating a lot of wild food during this three-month preparation stage.

Although wild greens are abundant and so incredibly important, I’ve found that they’re also one of the easiest to neglect because it often is going out and harvesting it fresh each day. And it’s so much easier just to eat what’s in the pantry. So wild greens were something that was neglected in this preparation stage to some degree.

Nourishing food is great, but if it’s not tasty, it’s really hard to nourish yourself. This is what I learned in my month of foraging all my food in 2022. So, during this preparation stage, it was important that I harvested a lot of tasty herbs so that I would be able to have really delicious, satiating meals in the year ahead. This is an area where I still continued to … I would say … struggle, just not prioritize it with so many things going on.

But the areas the herbs that I did harvest, as far as spices go as far as flavoring my food, of course, are monarda or bee balm. That’s my number one wild herb. It’s very high in oreganol. It’s very similar to oregano, and I harvested that in pretty substantial quantities, especially along the bike path in Ashland.

Then, of course, there’s wild onion. I managed to harvest a substantial amount of wild onion in Madison in a patch that I’ve gone back to many years, shown to me by a fellow forager named Andy. Thank you, Andy. And, for the first time, I experimented with fermentation without salt. Most of my fermentation is lacto-fermentation, but I wouldn’t have salt until the year began, not during this three-month period. So, I wasn’t able to lacto-ferment anything during this time. So, I did a little experimentation with fermenting onion without salt.

I also managed to harvest ramps or wild leeks. I harvested just the bulbs because it’s the season where the greens are already gone. Of course, some people would say, “Don’t harvest the bulbs. That’s unsustainable.” But the reality is, if you know your patch and you know how much pressure it gets, you can very much harvest in a way where you thin it and you can actually be helping this patch to thrive and you can then come back in the fall, harvest seeds and spread them to help increase the patch. I joyously harvested some ramps and that was a very important one. And then some of the herbs I was really hoping to get to, but I didn’t. But one is cow parsnip. And so, there’s still more herbs. And that is part of the exploration ahead and part of the harvesting ahead.

With many of these plants, yes, I really wanted to be able to harvest them. I didn’t get to all of the list of plants that I had, but it wasn’t like it would be the end of the world. There were plants that could fit in and they could take the place of that. And then also, if I didn’t get enough herbs for flavoring my meals. Well, I only had to make it through the winter and spring would be ahead. It’s not like this would mean I’d have to go without for the entire year. So I was able to deal with some of my losses and deal with some of my lack of success in other areas by knowing that I’m only having to get through a certain window and the plants will be back.

Nuts and seeds were another priority for me. And in my previous years of or my previous experiment of foraging all my food, I never really got into the wild nuts. It’s just another level of foraging. So this year I was very excited to get into the hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are very abundant in northern Wisconsin. I managed to harvest a couple gunnysacks’ worth. They’re the earliest nuts, so they’re actually a summertime nut compared to most nuts, which are ready in the fall. I harvested a good amount of hazelnuts.

I also harvested a substantial amount of evening primrose seeds. Although nuts were important to me, they are another level of skill because most nuts require effective and efficient processing and harvesting in order to make it worth the time. I was really glad to get to spend a decent amount of time with the hazelnuts, and then also the evening primrose and step into that hoping that in the fall ahead there would be some real connection with the wild nut trees.

One of the great balances that I had to strike during this preparation period is that there are foods that I was really excited to learn and to harvest, but they were new to me. And that would mean time and that would mean energy. And there was the balance between doing what I knew and what I knew well and using those skills and being very effective and efficient and then also getting to explore new plants.

Hazelnut and evening primrose seeds were two of those examples where I got to explore them. I got to grow a relationship with two different plants. I got to build some new skills. But I had to limit myself because I had to make sure that I put in time on the sure bets, the things that would give me the definitive calories, the fat, the protein, and be able to harvest in a real abundance, knowing for sure that I could.

When it comes to hearty vegetables, that’s another category where I didn’t have a lot of experience and I had high hopes. I managed to harvest some milkweed pods, but my goal of having many pressure canned vegetables, including milkweed pods, on my shelf when I started is a goal that I absolutely did not accomplish. I put away about a half-gallon bag worth of milkweed pods into my freezer. And I did not harvest wapato or lotus nuts or lotus tubers, some of the plants that I was really hoping to get in substantial quantities. But I also knew the fall did lie ahead to continue harvesting some of those hearty vegetables.

I’m saving one of the absolute most important plants for last, and that is wild rice. One of the reasons I’m saving it for last is because wild rice was a late summer, early fall plant. So, it was towards the end of the stage of processing, but it was absolutely one of the most important.

Initially, I planned to harvest 200 pounds of wild rice. That’s 200 pounds finished that I would store. Through the summer, I really started to have some concern. There was word that it was not looking to be the best wild rice year, and as the season developed, it was showing that it was actually one of the worst wild rice years on record. It turns out that the Canada wildfires negatively impacted and then also some of the different rain events. I started to have a pretty substantial amount of concern if I wasn’t able to get a substantial harvest of wild rice.

This whole entire year of foraging was in deep jeopardy. There’s other forms of calories out there. Acorns being one of them, but it’s not something that I have the skill to effectively and efficiently process to be able to be a staple calorie harvest. So, there was a lot of concern going into the wild rice season.

Wild rice season came and I managed to get out five times. I quickly reduced my goal of 200 pounds down to 125 pounds. And in previous years, I’ve gotten 35 pounds in a day. So, that’s only a couple days of ricing when things are going well. What ended up happening is, we had a very cold spell come in right at the beginning of wild rice season and a lot of very cold rain, which makes ricing very challenging and it makes the ripening of the rice very challenging.

Through the ricing season, I managed to harvest 75 pounds of rice. Substantially less than I was hoping for, but I was grateful. It was a substantial amount and I was also grateful because it meant that it would force me to explore some new plants, like potentially acorns in the fall. So I took the challenging rice year as a blessing in itself to expand my knowledge in other areas. My time out with the wild rice was an absolute highlight of the entire three months of preparation.

For me, being out with the wild rice is, it’s like being in a church, if I had a church. It’s like being in the temple of nature. For me, it’s just a deep connection. It’s a deep relationship. It’s deeply nourishing to the mind, body, and soul to be with the wild rice all day from morning until evening, and to have that deep relationship. Maria and JD in Bad River processed my wild rice, and I was so grateful to have 75 pounds.

After all of that, I intended to go into the year of foraging having a substantial amount of fish, both canned and frozen. I went into the year with zero fish. I went out, I think it was three times leading up and caught nothing except maybe one little perch. I mostly went out for white fish, which when successful, you can harvest a month’s supply in a day, but I went out three times without success. I wasn’t highly concerned because fish can be harvested year round, but it was a substantial setback to invest that time and not have a yield.

As far as venison goes, I intended to hunt in the fall and other things took priority and I wanted to have a substantial amount of venison put away for the beginning of the year. At the end of the preparation stage, I had basically given up. I thought that it wasn’t going to happen. I really wanted to have it put away for the upcoming tour where I was going to be on the road for a month and I had almost given up and then a friend who lived four miles away called me up and said a deer had been hit right at her driveway.

I went over there, picked it up and I managed to harvest about 40 pounds of meat and bones for bone broth. That was a great gift just a couple weeks before the year began and I was able to store that and have a bounty of canned meat to be able to travel with in the month ahead. That was September 29th that I harvested that deer. Everything that I’ve just spoken about was July, August, and September.

Originally, I was planning on starting on the first day of fall, but I decided to push that back to October 9th. This was just over three months of preparation. A lot of people wonder where was all of this foraging done? The foraging was done in a very wide variety of places. Some of it was done on the land that I was living on, but only a small amount. I foraged in public parks, in cities. I foraged along the roads wherever I was going, country roads and highways. I foraged in state parks, in national forests, in the big cities like Minneapolis and Madison that I traveled to and in rural countrysides where I live, and in between. I foraged in front yards and backyards and in schoolyards. Some was private property, some was public property. I foraged really wherever plants are growing. Plants are growing just about everywhere. I foraged in a very wide variety of places. I foraged a lot along the lakes … along the shores of Lake Superior. I foraged along bike paths, especially the bike paths in my hometown of Ashland, Wisconsin.

The big challenge during this three months was not finding enough food. There was so much food. The challenge was harvesting it, the time to harvest it, but even more so, it was really to process it. I would have substantial amounts of food at my home, and there was so much more out there that I would want to go harvest, but I had to process what I had. So, the most challenging part was the time that it would take to process it and store it. And then before that, it was the time to harvest it. Finding it generally was not the challenging part.

With some exceptions, there were some things that I really wanted to harvest, like the fish and the deer that I wasn’t getting, but with a lot of this, there was such an abundance. Now, it was coming into early fall and the abundance became even more prevalent. The abundance of the fall is often incredibly overwhelming. It’s almost this state of somewhat mania that some of us foragers get to because there’s just so much to harvest. It’s all around us and we want to be able to store it and put it away and have it for the winter and the year ahead.

The later stages of this fall were times of often not getting enough sleep. Being up early first thing, starting with processing things that were harvested the day before, getting out doing some foraging or processing foods all day long, and then in the evening and sometimes late into the night, more processing and storing foods.

On October 5th, I left the abundance of northern Wisconsin behind in a very bittersweet way. There was so much more to harvest there. There was so much abundance to store away. But I was bound for the Atlantic Ocean where I would harvest my salt and the year would begin. Leaving Wisconsin, I had about 65 different plants and mushrooms, as well as venison that I had harvested and stored in my pantry. I had dehydrated foods. I had frozen foods. I had pressure canned and water bath canned. And then there were foods that I could just store at room temperature, like wild rice.

I had stored away a good amount of food. It wasn’t everything that I had wanted, but there was a pretty substantial abundance on my shelves, in my freezer, and in my little tiny house. I took an inventory. For those of you who would really like to see exactly what I had at that time, at robingreenfield.org/foragingyear, you can see my inventory of every plant that I had stored away, and with most of them, the actual quantity as well.

I want to be very clear about one thing, and that is that I did not do this alone. I couldn’t do this alone. This is very much a community endeavor. Dozens of people helped me in this three-month preparation period. Sure, I am foraging all of my food and medicine. I have to have my hands involved with the entire process. But I am receiving a lot of help from people who are out there harvesting with me, who come back and process food, and who give me rides, since I don’t drive a car.

I received help from multiple dozens of people during this three months of preparation. We’re talking about people that are taking part. Why? Because they want to learn. They want to develop their skills. They want to develop the knowledge that I have to share with them. They want to be involved in something greater than themselves. They want to see me succeed. They want to see that someone can break free completely from the global industrial food system. And foraging is something that is done so much more joyously in community. So experienced and new foragers alike, it’s so beautiful to get to do this together.

I’m not doing this alone. I’m doing this as a community. I am doing this with you, and I’m really grateful to be on this journey together. So whether you are an experienced forager, a brand new forager, or you’ve never foraged a single plant, I am really looking forward to this year of foraging ahead. I encourage you to come back to follow this journey with me.

You’re going to be introduced to a lot of new plants and mushrooms that you’ll be able to forage. You’re going to be introduced to the big picture of why forage, how to forage, how to do it safely, how to forage sustainably. And that’s the big one of the big questions. Why am I doing this? In a time when I could easily go to the grocery store and just buy my food or I could easily grow food, why would I forage all of my food and medicine down to the salt?

And my answer for that is very simple. I want to know in every cell of my being. I want to experientially feel in every part of my body that I am a part of this Earth, that I belong to this Earth, that the Earth has my back, that the Earth can provide me with everything that I need. This for me is a practice of finding my home, finding a home on this Earth and falling in love with this home and practicing that love with each and every action.

I am grateful to have been able to share about this immersive three months to get ready for the year and I’m really looking forward to sharing the year ahead with you.