#ethical foraging

I wanted to highlight this because I knew it would come up as SOON as I mention common milkweed (asclepias syriaca), which is a milkweed from the Eastern and Central US.

Indigenous peoples, respected ethnobotanists, and veteran foragers eat milkweed by the bucket! If other people knew how amazing of a plant it is – there is something edible and delicious about it at every stage of growth, it is very easy to plant / spread its seeds, and it grows almost like a weed – they would love and cherish it.

If more people were encouraged to utilize it, they would be less likely to get rid of it in their yards. They might even start growing a whole patch. It’s a sustainable food source. We would be helping its insect friends who are HARMLESS to our gardens but important for the environment.

It’s not like, say, ramps that are overharvested every year and have disappeared from huge stretches of land where they were once abundant. Ramps grown from seed take SEVEN years to mature. Milkweed grows and matures the same year.

People eating milkweed don’t contribute to monarch butterfly decline. The use of herbicides, Big Agro, cities just mowing down whatever the hell they want are to blame.

That said, it’s still important to forage in an ethical way. Never strip a plant of all its flowers, leaves, or fruit. Never harvest an entire patch of plants from a single area. Check for beneficial insects and leave them alone. If a native plant has gone to seed, help spread those around.

This is NOT a callout — this is important information that I want everyone to know. Eating milkweed will NOT harm the monarch butterflies.

Learn More:

The Forager’s Harvest

Learn Your Land

Collecting pansies from my garden to give to friends; picking the flowers on occasion helps the plant to produce even more flowers. Especially when you remove the older flowers, you prevent the flower from going to seed (and producing seed/reproduction is the goal of the plant) so it will stay alive longer in order to create more flowers/potential seeds. This method is called “deadheading”

Ethical Foraging – Do’s and Don’ts

Foraging is something human beings have been doing since the beginning of time, but in the last two centuries or so this practice has fallen by the wayside at least as a mean for survival.

Recently this activity has seen a new resurgence in modern society as a way of communing with nature and finding more healthy natural food and herbal medicine.

The term “ethical foraging” came into existence to describe the guidelines and rules foragers need to follow to eliminate the adverse effect the harvesters of the past sometimes had on the natural surroundings.

This concept includes obeying the laws of the area being harvested as well.

These guidelines are designed to protect nature, the person foraging, as well as the owners of the property, from being damaged in some way by harvesting wild plants.

Ethical Foraging - The Do's and Don'ts - Guidelines & Practices

Foraging is something human beings have been doing since the beginning of time, but in the last two centuries or so this practice has fallen by the wayside at least as a mean for survival.

Recently this activity has seen a new resurgence in modern society as a way of communing with nature and finding more healty natural food and herbal medicine.

The term “ethical foraging” came into existence to describe the guidelines and rules foragers need to follow in order to eliminate the negative effect the harvesters of the past sometimes had on the natural surroundings.