With a small group of women from the Angelou Centre, with Bruce from Wild North Discovery, we continued wild foraging for salad leaves and herbs to make a group soup within Harehope Quarry.
Elder, the flowers can be used to create a cordial. They can also be placed in batter and fried to create a yummy dessert. In winter, the elder berries can make a cordial and wine. We left these flowers and moved on to other flowers like Lady’s mantle.
The leaves of this plant can be placed into salads. It has a rather velvety texture or even hairy texture on the tongue. There are better flavoured leaves out there but not dock leaves. These are the ones to pick when there is nothing else around. In desperation turn to the dock leaf.
But luckily in the Quarry we were spoilt for chose of in the tasty salad leaves variety.
Cows parsley, from the carrot family is recognised by it’s umbrella shaped flowers. These are good salad leaves but be careful. Make sure you identify the correct plant as others that look like this can be poisonous.
The final two salad leaves to find while foraging are garlic mustard and ground elder.
Garlic mustard leaves are a great flavouring in salads, curries, stews and even creating a pesto. Or even just stuffed into a cheese sandwich the taste is sharp and refreshing.
Ground elder, another one from the carrot family and can be steamed and stuffed into fish and soup.
Once we stopped foraging, we settled into the bushcraft area of the quarry to create a natural soup. Potatoes, garlic leaves and seeds, garlic mustard and ground elder went into the pot with water. We made a lovely refreshing soup from our finds. We all had a wonderful day and look forward to doing this again soon.