Foraging wild garlic (ramslök/ramsløg)
These days, there is an abundance of wonderful wild garlic in Denmark. As my partner and I were walking through our local park, we decided to forage wild garlic to use in a pasta dish in the evening. He has foraged wild garlic for many years, and his brother uses it to make pesto. Some fellow humans dry wild garlic, but I use it fresh in various dishes. Our local park is not an ideal place for foraging. It doesn't feel as clean as a forest.
Foraging wild garlic made me think about foraging again. Apart from wild garlic, in the spring here in the Nordics I usually pick birch leaves and spruce tips to make tea. Spruce tips can also be used as a vegetable in salads. There will also be some dandelions and nettles soon. They are wonderful to make herbal tea with. My grandmother often used nettle to make hair rinse too.
Later, there will be raspberry leaves and currant leaves that I will use to make tea as well.
My partner and I have a dream to do a small project about foraging. Foraging is an alternative food "production" (in reality, gathering the gifts of Mother Nature) practice. Both him and I have foraged since we were small children, and my mother, stepfather, and grandparents foraged too. Usually, I forage mushrooms, berries (e.g., blueberries, lingonberries, wild raspberries, currants, rowan berries), apples, spruce tips, yarrow, dandelion, nettle, wood sorrel (harsyra in Swedish). I've written about foraging in this autoethnography at times, but never looked into my experienced more systematically. There's such a great contrast between foraging and buying food in a supermarket. Foraging feels so much more intimate, meaningful, playful. Everything that I ever foraged was also delicious, so full of flavour and life.