Introduction to Foraging Course, Northallerton

Children under 12 come free. Well-behaved dogs on a lead are also more than welcome.

This course will cover the best ways to start and progress through the early stages of your foraging journey. We will take a two-and-a-half-hour walk (covering about 1.5 miles) around the countryside of a private farm, stopping regularly to discuss (and where possible, eat!) the many edible wild foods we find along the way, whether that be foliage, flowers, fruits, nuts or mushrooms! What we’ll find depends on the time of year. The route is mostly flat and we’ll go at a steady pace.

The main focus will be foraging for wild food, but we will also touch upon medicinal or "bushcraft" uses if relevant to what we find.

The course will include:

• A brief introduction to myself and foraging in general.
• Finding and discussing around 20 species common across the UK that have food uses.
• How to identify the species we come across.
• Information about toxic species to avoid.
• Foraging laws and principles to ensure you forage legally, safely and responsibly.
• Trying a couple of pre-prepared wild food-based samples!

I also follow up the course with an email to participants with a summary of the species we found and other useful information such as my recommended books for further reading.

Foraging is fun and fascinating, with so many benefits it's unbelievable. It's as safe as anything when approached with the right level of caution, awareness, and knowledge. It’s important to realise however that foraging can be dangerous IF you approach it with a lack of caution (recklessness), and/or a lack of awareness of the risks and without the respect nature deserves. During the course, I will show you how to approach foraging in a way whereby you don't just minimise but eliminate all risks, so you are free to enjoy the many benefits that foraging brings into your life.

Humans have been foraging as a way to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. Before farming, this was how we survived - finding what nature provided in harmony with the seasons and the land. This period before farming forms over 95 per cent of our existence as a species, so to our brains and bodies, foraging is incredibly natural - this is one of the reasons it feels so good!

Foraging is one of the best ways to disconnect from our busy modern lives of emails, social media and technology, and reconnect with nature and our ancestral roots. During this course we will log off from the modern world and log in to nature!

For this course, we will make use of a private farm location – Avenue Farm, Boroughbridge Road, DL7 9EP – though please note that following this postcode on Sat Navs or Google Maps won’t take you precisely to Avenue Farm, so please use the below Google Maps “dropped pin” location instead if you can:

Dropped pin:

You can park at the farm, and I will advise you exactly where to park on your arrival.

• Comfortable, weather-appropriate clothing and footwear. The path and route we take will be about 1.5 miles in total and is mainly flat. However, large parts of the route will be grassy and with the morning dew or any recent rain, it may be wet grass, so please ensure you have appropriate footwear, otherwise you may get wet socks!
• Your phone but only for the camera function should you wish to take any photos/videos/notes. I will however send out an email at the end of the course with a list of the species we come across.
• Some water or other kind of hydrating drink if you wish.

The Forager Within, founded by James Hill, runs public and private foraging courses across Yorkshire and Manchester. His love of foraging started on nature walks with his parents, where picking wild food was just a way of life. In adulthood, James hit a low point in 2015 which re-ignited a passion for foraging. By the Spring of 2016, foraging was a hobby, an obsession, and then in 2022, a business with a mission to connect people to nature and improve physical and mental health in the process.

Host or Publisher The Forager Within