Lost Valley Edible Forest Tours

Discount to forage for spring greens & summer berries this Sunday

Announcement

Let me paint you a picture.

Purple and white wildflowers bounce on the breeze through the parched tall grass of sun-baked Camas meadows. Young green tomatoes, berries, and summer squash begin to take shape and grow plump in greenhouses where once were just leaves and flowers. As you pass the threshold from garden to forest, the midday heat of the year’s longest days relents. Beneath the shady canopies, you’re surrounded by waxy leaves, citrus-scented pine needles, and songbirds’ melodies.

Do you know what those plants and mushrooms are brushing past your ankles? Can you separate the salal from the poison oak, the chanterelles from the death caps? If so, you can walk in the forest with not only reverence, but with the confidence to find nourishment, something to chew on along the trail or add to your picnic back home.

salmonberries, fir needles, and wild roses, oh my!

This coming Sunday, June 1 from 11 a.m. - 2 p.m., I’ll be hosting my next Edible Forest Tour at Lost Valley Ecovillage and Education Center in Dexter, OR, a half-hour’s drive from Eugene.

This beautiful setting will let us explore and learn about the onsite permaculture garden as well as the regenerating native forest, while the time of year will let us gather late spring greens and catch early glimpses of ripening summer berries. As a former student, I’m always honored to hold space and introduce others to this transformative land that’s home to so much love and beauty.

Within three hours, you’ll learn the basic principles and benefits of ethical foraging and forest bathing, enjoy a wild tea service, and experience a restorative sense of belonging in a gorgeous natural setting. As a bonus, you’ll also receive an exclusive digital recipe for foraged nettle pesto afterwards.

Plus, I’m now offering a special $10 discount for anyone who books by 5 p.m. on Friday, May 30. Just knock $10 off the normal sliding scale pricing structure:

• $60 per person if booking alone

• $50 per person for groups of 2-3

• $40 per person for children and groups of 4 or more

• Returning guests: get $5 off for referring a friend.

Reserve your spot via this link before the tour fills up. If you’re on the fence, now’s the time to come along, learn, and be nourished in mind, body, and soul. If you can’t make this one, you can also register for my Father’s Day edition, also at Lost Valley, on Sunday, June 15. Feel free to message or comment with any questions.

Poem of the Week

This week, I've been watching the great blue herons.

There's something ancient to the way they stand still on their twiglike legs in the shallows for hours on end, like crocodiles, conserving energy in wait for their moment, wispy feathers swept by the wind. Then, when they catch site of something tasty, their coiled necks extend, their wings spread, and they soar almost effortlessly, with just the occasional flap, above the water surface to snatch the next meal in their lanced beaks.

I've seen them swarming the trucks that restock farm-raised rainbow trout in the local park's ponds, or turning their bottomless black eyes to follow a dull mother mallard with her downy yellow ducklings.

Like us, herons are opportunistic feeders. When they can't get their favorite, fish, they'll go for anything available. In the semi-urban area where I observe them, they've clearly adapted to benefit off our human intervention in the environment as well.

Like herons, we are products of our environment, where we seek the nourishment we know. But what about what we don't know? What opportunities to feed on plants, flesh, fish, and other forms of love do we miss out on on the day-to-day simply due to lack of knowledge? Then when the sources of nourishment we do know dry up, like say grocery store supply chains, we could panic unnecessarily while missing all the food growing right under our noses.

Growing one's sense of food security in the event of economic collapse is only one of the most practical reasons to hone your edible plant and mushroom identification and other foraging skills. Another is that it's fun, engaging, and builds deeper connection to our environments and ourselves.

But back to the poem of the week. After a lovely spring day guiding a high school fishing class, this was my tribute to the great blue herons and the adolescents I saw fishing alongside them. Enjoy.

Fishing Herons’ Shores

Enormous, amphibious 
Reptilian denizen of stream and sky,
Great blue heron wades and nests 
With the pond's reflection in wide black eyes.

Patient, observant, and stuck 
With dinosaur legs in ripples of time, 
Spread wings swarm the restock trucks 
To snatch farmed trout in their prime. 

Teens with loner fishing poles
Share the slippery bellies they lure from shore.
Us visitors to these shoals
Fall in fully clothed, grasping sands for more. 

The swamp rolls off slick feathers 
But soaks in feral kids' hand-me-down pants.
The herons withstand any weather 
And sweep off their feet with a passing glance. 

If that spring loaded neck could 
Pierce the future like it could a lost fish, 
We'd climb their tangled dead wood 
To hook on the next flight and make a wish. 

Video Reading

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