The Forager's Calendar

a guide to wild harvests

January

• Black Mustard - spicy leaves
• Velvet Shank - golden fungus on decidous trees
• Wood Ear - jelly fungus on dead elder

February

• Hairy Bittercress - woodland weed with disc leaves
• Scarlet Elf-Cup - bright fungus in damp deciduous land
• Three-Cornered Leek - leek-like triangular stem from bulb, white flowers
• Winter Laver - sticky hair-like seaweed high up on shore

March

• Alexanders - carrot family with early leaves
• Common Sorrel - spear leaves in grasslands taste like grape skins
• Corn Salad - oval leaved with tiny lilac flower clusters
• Dandelion - salad petals and leaves with coffee root
• Primrose - soft leaves and yellow petals
• Sea Kale - tasty purple pebble beach cabbage
• Silver Birch - tap sap
• Stinging Nettles - yound leaf heads and seeds like sesame
• Wild Garlic - smell of garlic in shady woodland

April

• Bulrush - cat-tail heads shooting up by ponds
• Chickweed - pointed leaf pairs and single hair-line stem
• Common Mallow - folding serrated lobes with a dark spot in the centre
• Garlic Mustard - soft serrated kidney leaves with pods
• Gorse - those pina-colada flowers
• Ground Elder - oval leaves in threes and fives
• Gutweed - inflated tube seaweed to deep-fry
• Pignut - hidden inch-sized tubers
• Scurvygrass - coastal tufts of spade-shaped leaves
• Sea Beet - huge delicious seaside leaves
• Sea Spaghetti - long branching flat brown seaweed fronds
• St George's Mushroom - grassland ring of off-white domes
• Sweet Cicely - northern carrot family with downy lace aniseed leaves

May

• Beech - baby leaves plus nuts later on
• Carragheen - flat branching purple-brown seaweed for setting jelly
• Dulse - dull-red large fingers of flat seaweed to steam or crisp
• Fat Hen - diamond pale green leaves with whitish granules
• Fennel - aniseed feather leaves
• Scots Pine - tufts of needles for tea
• Sea Rocket - fiery sand sprouts
• Watermint - furry bronze-green leaves with square stem
• Wood Sorrel - carpet of clover like leaves and red stems

June

• Elder - fragrant white umbels
• Gooseberry - hawthorn-like tree with hairy fruit
• Samphire - small cylindrical jointed stems
• Wild Marjoram - tufts by the roadside with clusters of pink-purple flowers

July

• Horse Mushroom - large white mushroom with pink into brown gills
• Meadowsweet - heady painkilling cymbe of white blossom
• Mugwort - rosemary-scented deeply lobed leaves but light underneath
• Redcurrant - perfect red capsules
• Wild Radish - tall rough emerging leaf pairs