Wild Foods

Kim shares her knowledge. 

On a rainy spring day, we headed to Wapato Access Greenway where awesome homeschooling mom Amy had arranged for our group to meet Kim and Chris Chisholm of Wolf Camp.  They offer some amazing classes for homeschoolers in all kinds of earth skills.  Our topic was wild edibles and medicinals.  This lovely spot on Sauvie Island is a bird watcher's paradise, and offers a gentle loop hike around Lake Victoria.  One of the interesting things we did was to gather leaves from nearby plants, and Chris and Kim told us all about the plants we'd found.   

One of the most useful things we learned was about plantain herb.  It's probably growing in your yard or a nearby park right now.  It's a short, sun-loving plant, and has the remarkable quality of being able to take the pain away from bee stings.  You would pick a leaf, chew it, and spit the pulp onto the sting.  Chris advises that it has never failed anyone he knows who has had need of it.  I had read many years ago that bee stings are acidic, and that an alcaline solution such as ammonia will do the trick. (For wasp stings and scorpion stings, the opposite is true, and vinegar will often help. You can remember this because "a" and "b", for "ammonia" and "bee", are next to each other in the alphabet, and so are "w" and "v", for "wasp" and "vinegar".)  But who has ammonia handy at all times?  And this weed seems to be everywhere.  Chris noted that it can be identified easily because of the distinct veins that line the back of the leaves, and the way that long threads will pull out of the stems when broken off.

Another thing all the kids learned from Chris and Kim:  "Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses are hollow down at the ground."

We definitely look forward to checking out Wolf Camp's regular classes, and to exploring Wapato Access Greenway again!

Chris tells us all about plantain herb.

Plantain herb.  You can  see the thick veins on the back of the leaf and the stringy threads where the leaf was pulled off.

Western dogwood.