Forager's Harvest

08/13/2024

Almost-Improptu Class Announcement! And free apples!

I just spent a few hours walking around my land, after a few weeks of neglect, and am overjoyed to see that the great ripening of late summer and fall has begun! And somehow, I have a Saturday with an open schedule. So, I will be having a foraging class from 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM this coming Saturday, August 17. 35 minute break for lunch.

We will be looking at primarily 3 groups of edibles. First is fruits and nuts (Elderberry, aronia, blackberry, highbush cranberry all coming in season, with many things soon to follow). Second, wetland plants: We have nice patches of cattail, calamus, wapato, wild rice, and more. And third, late summer vegetables, which may be leafy greens of disturbed ground (garden weeds), the flowers and buds of mature plants (like salsify, evening primrose, and rose mallow), or the new leaves of woodland perennials (like sochan and mitsuba).

Of course, there will be a lot of other curiosities along the way. If you want to see a real native mulberry, this is your chance. One of mine is in the middle of a late-summer growth spurt that makes me dream that it might actually fruit next year.

Because of the addition I'm building on my house, I don't really have time to sell apples right now. I have several varieties ripe. Bring a grocery bag and you can fill it for free. If you want more, like for a batch of cider or applesauce, you can have them for $5 per bushel if you bring the containers. You don't need to be part of the class to get apples; come after 4:30.

Also, if you want some aronia berries, bring bags or buckets. There are craploads. I want them to get used.

The group size will be limited to 18 for the class. Cost is $80. Because I'm not very competent with the computer, I'm not posting this for online payment. Send me a FB message or an email to let me know you want to attend, and I will confirm. You can pay when you get here.

In the evening I'm going to dance a batch of wild rice. This is not part of a class or anything. I was going to do it anyway. But if you want to hang around and watch, that's an option. It gets pretty boring to do it alone.

07/23/2024

Class announcement:

This Saturday (July 27) I'm going to be teaching a 7-hour class/plant walk at Color In The Outdoors in Mayville, Wisconsin.

for more info, see https://www.colorintheoutdoors.com

I am also excited to be involved with Christopher Kilgour and his work getting disadvantaged kids powerful time outdoors with quality mentors.

07/23/2024

We are INCREDIBLY excited to welcome renowned foraging expert and author Samuel Thayer, of Forager's Harvest , back for another year of foraging, laughs, and an incredible wealth of knowledge along the way. Space is extremely limited and this event tends to fill up almost immediately (which is why this is such a pop-up style announcement).
If you are interested in attending, please send an email to [email protected] and put “foraging event” in the subject line along with your message. Hope to see you this Saturday!

07/22/2024

Several good reasons to come to the Wisconsin Mycological Society's Trial-County Foray August 1-4 include:

1. Meeting really interesting people who share your passion for wild mushrooms. This is understandably an understatement, because it is hard to state how good the company actually is. Tavis, Melissa, Bruch, Linda, Chris, and an assortment of other fantastic people in a laid-back format that allows chilling and laughing and learning.

2. Meeting really interesting new (and old familiar) fungi. This has been a very wet summer, and the fungus is in full force in the forest, and lawn mushrooms are abundant, too.

3. Northwestern Wisconsin is a good place. If you have not been here, you might want to come check out the lakes and forests while you're at it.

4. Food. There will be good food.

5. I am hoping to meet you. You see, I've heard about you. Not by name. I just heard that there were very cool people whom I have not yet met. And if I have not yet met you I bet you are one of them. And even if you're not cool, I bet you're nice. I'm not cool either. Or nice. But I still want to meet people who are.

6. Maybe sometime during the weekend I will share a song. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.

06/12/2024

A short tutorial on how to use Sam’s new field guide

4965 likes, 145 comments. “How to identify unknown plants and determine edibilty using Sam Thayer’s Field Guide.”

05/25/2024

My native mulberry (Morus rubra) is flowering! This is its third year, but this time it is loaded, and appears to have some female flowers. And its even smaller neighbor is also loaded. I might actually get some fruit. And if I do, I can put bags over them to keep the robins and catbirds off, and get some seeds. Which means I can get seedlings! And then I can help other people in the Upper Midwest care for this rare (in our region), misunderstood, and incredibly beautiful native tree. It is so fun to be obsessed with native food plants.

My two flowering Morus rubra come from the northernmost location in the northernmost known population in North America, in Houston County, Minnesota.

Blows my mind that the berries already ripened amonth ago in the Deep South. Here it will be early July.

For those of you not sure about telling the native from the Asian mulberry (Morus alba, which normally has purple-black fruit), look at the DEEPLY DEEPRESSED VEINS on the upper surface of these leaves. Along with this, the surface has short, stiff, raspy hairs (like slippery elm, but not quite as sandpapery).

05/18/2024

Class announcement.

I have a few more openings in my weekend retreat with Alan Bergo June 28-30--the lodging is full but there is a few more spots for people who want to camp, or lodge off-site. Message or email me if interested.

Also, I have scheduled another Saturday class at Iowisota, near Lansing, Iowa, for June 1. There are still a few opeings there, too. To sign up go to iowisota.org.

05/08/2024

I am still feeling the warm afterglow of a great weekend with great people. I had my first weekend foraging class of the season, and my first ever event at Inn Greener Pastures. Also, my first weekend class with Joshua Vig and Holly Bounting doing the cooking--which was great.

I can't say enough about how pleasant this group of students was. I am blessed that you chose to spend the weekend with me, and trusted me to help you on your journey toward nourishing communion with wild plants.

You were all great sports despite the cold rain Saturday morning, and despite the high water. (Thanks for waiting as I placed the stepping stones in the creek for crossing.) Despite the differences in experience coming into the weekend, everyone was intelligent, kind, and dedicated. The dinner table talk was jovial and bonding; it felt like a group of friends by the time we left.

Although leading a weekend like this is exhausting, the reward is greater. Thanks to all of you for making this weekend the best it could be: Lauren, Diane, Trei, James, Holly, France, Troy, Carrie, Rochelle, Natalie, Jausica, Tanaya, Michael, Rachel, Josh, and Holly.

05/02/2024

I am convinced that the upper Mississippi Valley in the Driftless Region is the single best foraging area left on Earth.

For many years I have been hoping to find that PERFECT spot in this region for teaching edible wild plant classes. A place with the full range of diversity from shady mature mesic hardwoods to nut forests and to real native prairie, with some limestone springs thrown in, and, in the perfect world, close enough to access the wetlands of the Mississippi floodplain.

Thanks to Linda Haugen, I might have found that spot. Linda and her family own an incredible piece of property in northeast Iowa, just across the road from the Upper Mississippi WIldlife Refuge. They have been caretaking this land for decades, working to keep out invasive plants and maintain the prairie. Having retired from her work as a forest pathologist, Linda is now devoting herself to turning this property into a nature retreat and education center, called Iowisota (as it sits in the corner near where the three states meet). https://www.iowisota.org There are some very nice rooms to stay in while you explore the incredible natural beauty and diversity of the Driftless region.

I am excited to be holding my first class there on August 10, 2024. I think there might still be spots in the class available--you'd have to check the Iowisota website.

Iowisota hosts nature-themed retreats and educational events and welcomes guests to stay in one of the four guest bedrooms or in the cabin. Enjoy foraging events, bird watching, and other activities in 200 acres of private forest.

04/24/2024

I grew too many glade mallow plants. I couldn't help it. I had seeds and I had dirt. So now I have a couple hundred small ones left over, and after planting out about 40, I'm running out of space for them. I'm thinking of selling them very cheap, maybe a bundle of 5 for $10, so they don't have to turn to compost. Let me know if you want any.

If you live in the corn belt, and you have reasonably good soil in full sun, this plant can probably thrive there. Once you plant it, it will persist for years like a rhubarb or lovage plant. And after you have one, you'll wonder how this species isn't already way more popular as a native edible ornamental. It's worth growing just for its giant, exotic leaves, or for it's clusters of white flowers in midsummer. Or for the birds that feast on the seeds. But better than all of that is the delicious young petioles and shoots, which are like a sweet okra in flavor but in form are like a narrow stalk of rhubarb.

If you want to read bout this plant's special significance in my life, you can read my blog post here: https://www.foragersharvest.com/newsletter

04/14/2024

It's ramp season.

Let the debate begin.

Listen to all voices. Observe the ramps. Then decide.

Can ramps be sustainably harvested?
Leaves only, or bulbs too?
Is sustainable foraging acceptable?
How do we know that a practice is sustainable?
Is foraging morally wrong?
Who appreciates a plant more than the person who eats it?
Is foraging necessary?

This has been four years in the making, but finally, I'm releasing the ramp video that I've been working on with Jesse Roesler. This plant has been dear to me for many years, and my life has become deeply intertwined with it. This video only scratches the surface, but hopefully it can help push the conversation about sustainable ramp harvest beyond the knee-jerk, anti-foraging, ramp-shaming that has grown rampant over the last two decades. You can watch it on youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHbV4p4_AhU

Let us have some rational discussion.

Let's not let the insidious misinformation of anti-foraging outsiders dictate the terms of our own discussions about what we do.

In this video there is not time to go into the details of my own ramp research. I have put up a new page on my website summarizing this research, which you can view here: https://www.foragersharvest.com/rampresearch.html I have almost 20 years of data. It's not going to take 20 years to get it posted, but it won't be overnight. I will be adding to the analysis and data posted as time permits.

04/12/2024

I can't believe they encouraged two 14-year-olds to catch an endangered western box turtle, but it was the most exciting and important mission an adult had ever put me up to.
Josh and I had spent years researching the reptiles of southern Wisconsin, and months planning our bicycle trip to Spring Green Preserve, a Nature Conservancy property in Sauk County to see some elusive speies in the flesh. After school got out, we rode the 40 miles to Tower Hill State Park, which back then had a campground. That would be our staging ground.
As we signed in to our campsite at the office, a park ranger asked what we were going to do during our stay.
"Look for snakes."
"What are you going to do with them?"
"Look at them."
"Keep them as pets?"
"No way. We just wanna see blue racers and bullsnakes and six-lined racerunners. We're going to Spring Green Preserve."
Somehow he trusted us. "I know someone you should talk to." He put me on the phone with Gigi Labudde, who was then doing a research oproject on western (ornate) box turtles. And somehow, Gigi trusted us too. She even told us that if we came across a box turtle, and it didn't have a radio transmitter on it (back then they were big enough to easily see), we could bring it to the park office, and she would come put a transmitter on it.
"But we can't transport an endangered species," we protested.
"Technically, you'll be helping me, so you'll be covered under my permit."
She could not have found two more eager helpers. The next morning we rode to the preserve and explored the dry, sandy prairie, an abandoned turkey farm that the Nature Conservancy had purchased some decades earlier, as the last best remanant of this prairie, dominated by middle-height grasses and prickly pear cactus, that had once carpeted the lower Wisconsin River Valley. The preserve exceeded our wildest expectations. That morning we found a bullsnakes, blue racers (a snake), and several six-lined racerunners (a lizard). Just as we were departing, from thirst and hunger rather than boredom, we almost tripped over a box turtle.
"No radio transmitter."
Typical underprepared 14-year olds, one of us went shirtless, and we bundled up the turtle for the ride back to the park office. Never mind that somewhere north of the River the turtle rolled out onto Highway 23; we scrambled to recover it, wrapped it better, and held the precious parvel even more carefully.
We returned triumphantly to the office and placed the call to Gigi. She came over, got the turtle, and did her technical stuff before releasing it.
This is how my relationship with The Nature Conservancy began. After this I volunteered in high school, licking envelopes and crossing off names, cutting redcedars and red pines, piling brush, helping with reptile surveys. I took training to become a certified representative of TNC, so that I could speak on behalf of the organization publicly. Which I guess I'm doing right now.
For those of you who don't know about The Nature Conservancy, we are a nonprofit organization that preserves and manages critical habitat for wild organisms and communities that are under threat. TNC does not support political candidates. We focus on the ecological work on the ground, which governmental insitutions, foundering in politics, often fail at. As an example, the state of Wisconsin and Sauk County each own properties that were formerly large sections of habitat for the ornate box turtle. The state owned property has been mismanaged, but still has decent populations. The much larger county property has seen its box turtles disappear completely (or nearly) due to intentional destruction of the dry prairie habitat. Another small piece of habitat, on a highway shoulder, was destroyed for road construction in the late 1990s. The most effective and responsible management for this species in Wisconsin has been done by the Nature Conservancy--not by the state government that listed the species as endangered, and even adopted it as the symbol of our endangered species program.
When I suggested that Alexis Nelson and I use our recent comedy show to raise money for TNC, it took us about 2.3 seconds to come to a consensus. Thanks to all who attended.
Please support the preservation and restoration of native habitats. If not though organizations like TNC, then with other local volunteer opportunities, or by learning how to manage your own property and implementing a plan.

04/05/2024

Here is a recent article in Time Magazine with Sam about foraging.

Everything you need to know before making wild violet syrup or serviceberry muffins.

04/01/2024

The Leda Sotiria Meredith Memorial Scholarship
In honor of Leda Meredith, longtime teacher and friend of the MWHF, we are instituting the Leda Sotiria Meredith scholarship.
Many of you had the chance to learn with Leda, both through her books and in her classes. This scholarship honors her memory as an accomplished forager and dedicated teacher. It covers full registration at the MWHF for the winning applicant.
Applicants should either write a brief essay (no more than 300 words) or record a short video (no more than 2 minutes) explaining why they should receive the scholarship. This scholarship is need-based, and we rely on the applicants to self-select appropriately. No disclosure of sensitive personal information is required. Please tell us why you should receive the scholarship and what it would mean to you.
Applications should be submitted as email attachments to [email protected]; the deadline is April 30, 2024. The winner will be announced before registration opens for this year’s festival.

03/31/2024

Some thoughts on ecology inspired by my recent trip to France

These must start with a profound thanks to my three hosts in France, who extended incredible hospitality. First, Francois Couplan and his wife Keiko, at their incredible home in the lower Alps of Provence. Then Guy Laliere and his wife Annick, in the town of Perrier near Issoire in Auvergne. And finally Nathalie and Bertrand Deshayes at Chatillon-sur-Loire. You all facilitated an experience of France off the beaten path of tourist attractions that would have been hard for an outsider to navigate.

I had read before coming of the lower diversity of plant life in Europe, due to glaciation, and the lack of a non-mountainous plant refuge south of the glaciated area. All three of the plant-loving people I stayed with reminded me of this biological history. But no written or spoken words can tell this louder than the experience on the ground--the low diversity of plant species is remarkable. It is tempting to blame this on the long history of dense human population in Europe, but this is not the answer. The diversity of birds (which are far more mobile than plants) is not notably lower. And there is no record of any large die-off of European trees caused in recent centuries. Furthermore, although there are a few large mammals that have been driven to extinction by humans in Europe, there are far more of them that have been exterminated by humans in North America. As usual, the answer is glaciers. Glaciers have shaped the istory of the world so profoundly (and this must be the most underemphasized fact in American education) that it is imposible to understand history without thinking about glaciers lurking in the background of every major historical question.

Before the glaciers, Europe had lots of trees that are now extinct. Among them, multiple species of hickory. What would the economic history of Europe have been like, had Europe had hickories in its recent past? And what would have been the European reaction to hickories in North America?

The understory of a hardwood forest in Europe, at a glance, looks much like a hardwood forest in the eastern US, although the dominance of the mint family (mostly genus Lamium) is pretty unusual. There are carrot family plants, arums, mustards, and even an ecological near-analog to our ramps. But after a few hours you start to see the herbaceous layer as monotonous, because once you are used to the species, you realize how few of them repeat themselves over and over again.

The diversity, in person, is lower than you might imagine by looking at a book or a map and accompanying statistics. Here's why: Warmer climates are supposed to have hihger diversity, mountainous areas are supposed to have higher diversity, and coastal areas and coastal climate effects are supposed to create higher diversity. The number and diversity of mountains and climates in Europe enhance the diversity dramatically--but on the ground, in any one forest, you don't see this. The number of species visibe in say, 40 acres of temperate, flat, high-fertility woods, is shockingly low. I would love to see some sytematic comparisons.

Also, although Europe is generally at high latitudes compared to the eastern US, you have to keep in mind how much warmer its climate is. For example, Paris is 140 miles NORTH of Duluth, MN. But, in Paris, people are growing cabbage palms. Which in North America are confined to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the Deep South. I saw cabbage palms all over France. At the latitude of Lake Superior in Europe, there is a climate comparable to what we have in the American Deep South. How come we don't talk about that?

That is my first big ecological impression of Europe.

03/29/2024

I'm going to the North Carolina Wild Foods Weekend, April 19-21, In Reidsville, NC.

For those of you who have not been there, this event (in its 48th year) is a packed with fun and learning. If you've never heard of it, that's probably because it's so good they don't need to advertise. It's held at the Betsy-Jeff Penn 4H Center. Participants stay in dorm-style cabins or camp. There is a lake surrounded by beautiful wooded hills with hiking trails. This event is one of the highlights of my year.

Come and make friends, with foragers and plants. For more info or to register, contact Carolyn Quinn, [email protected]

02/28/2024

Registration for 2024 Weekend
Foraging Classes is Now Open

After a year off, I am excited to be hosting my regular weekend classes at a new location close to home, Inn Greener Pastures, a nature retreat from an old dairy farmstead, encompassing 300 acres of forest, field, and wetland. We have lodging, camping, a small commercial kitchen, great teaching spaces, a large dining area, and a friendly host who also forages. The site is a short drive from my property and several public lands where we can increase the variety of plants and habitats to discover.

For more info, see https://www.foragersharvest.com/classes--events.html

Shorter programs are still being scheduled, and more will appear on the site as the details are ironed out.

02/26/2024

Hello fellow plant people! Samuel Thayer has finally listed his classes for 2024. Please follow this link and sign up ASAP (they have a habit of filling quickly....):

Forager's Harvest

02/25/2024

Suffice it to say that my senator, Tammy Baldwin, doesn't give the slightest s**t about the concerns I raised over plagiarism software.

02/17/2024

Chat GPT is not "Artificial Intelligence." It is Complex Plagiarism Software. I will no longer dignify it by calling it AI. It is CPS. It is not designed to think or solve problems; it is designed to scan multiple sources and then copy them in a complex way using multiple streams of verbal input simultaneoussly and then making decisions based on algorithms about which particular word stream to plagiarize from at each linguistic juncture (whether this is a word or short phrase). This design is not traditional plagiarism, and does not meet that definition. Complex Plagiarism is a different process, with a different result, that is enabled by computers. But it has nothing to do with intelligence. It is a plagiarism system designed to avoid detection as such.

Humans with morals must take over this conversation. Let's call CPS what it is, and not by some disingenuous euphemism that those powerful institutions financially benefitting from it have inserted into our lexicons.

I am talking about Complex Plagiarism Software (CPS, formerly incorrectly characterized as AI).

I'm waiting to be shown a single meaningful benefit of this garbage CPS software to weigh against its profound and enormous negative impacts on human society.

02/15/2024

If someone wants to help battle the literary terrorism of AI books, it would be great if a person with the skills to navigate the legal landscape can dig up published legal reasoning for why book titles are not protected by copyright. Then we can show that this reasoning no longer applies in the case of AI-generated books.

Many titles in our genre, by hard-working, dedicated, intelligent, kind, reasonable authors, whom I respect and admire, contain similar wording, such as "Edible Wild Plants" or "Foraging". There are only so many words in our language to describe these activities. There is a tricky balance: How do we convey what our book is about, while also making our title distinguishable from other related books? Human authors who put years of labor into their work handle this carefully and respectfully. IF they choose a title that is easily confused with another competing title, their WORK, product quality, and promotion would also benefit the competing title--they would not gain, but lose audience share by choosing a confusing title. Thus, there is an incentive to make the title distinguishable.

However, when human labor is removed from the process of creating books, and the books are inherently garbage, the calculus is completely different. When an AI book is generated to imitate pre-existing titles, No WORK or AUDIENCE is lost through the confusion of titles, because there was no work to begin with, and the book does not have sufficient quality or content to build an audience or generate its own sales. Under the new calculus, there is everything to be gained by making a title that is identical to others, or difficult to distinguish. With books being sold in an online marketplace ruled by SEO and paid search placement, dozens of identical title listings can flood the search results and make it mathematically unlikely that shoppers looking for the original work, THE QUALITY AND REPUTATION OF WHICH GENERATED THEIR SEARCH, will actually find what they are looking for. The new book can siphon sales away from the competing, pre-existing title--the people behind it lose nothing, because they had nothing to lose.

These AI-book businesses are nothing but parasites on authors, publishers, and readers. They provide no service of any value to any human being.

02/15/2024

It is not "freedom of speech" or "freedom of press" for companies to produce AI-generated books with fake author names, any more than it is freedom of speech or freedom of press for food manufacturers to lie about the ingredients on their labels.

When money is changing hands based on the representation of the product, the seller has the responsibility to be honest about the product's origin, nature, and other characteristics.

When money changes hands based on false claims, it is fraud. AI-generated books sold with fake author names are the literary equivalent of insurance fraud or securities fraud. This needs to be stopped immediately.

02/14/2024

Trying to batttle the unscrupulous bastards who are using AI to destroy the online market for nonfition books. I had never contacted any legislator before this. But I had to try something.

Dear Tammy (or whoever is reading this on your behalf), I am an author and the owner of a small publishing company. In the last 16 months, almost instantly with the release of chatGPT, the online book market has seen a shocking influx of AI-generated books. A large number of online services have popped up helping people instantly create nonfiction books for a rather small fee. Because titles themselves are not protected by copyright, many of these books have been created with the express purpose of siphoning off sales from well-known or successful titles in particular genres of nonfiction. An actual human author would want his/her title to stand apart from pre-existing titles in a genre to maximize sales by distinguishing the book through actual effort and quality. The strategy of these companies is to glut the search results with numerous titles nearly identical to a successful title, essentially stealing the sales from any potential buyer searching for that title. For example, my best selling title is, "The Forager's Harvest." Yesterday I counted 16 brand new AI generated books for sale with titles like "The Forager's Harvest Bible" and "The Forager's Harvest 101."

In the last year, it appears that on Amazon, new AI- generated titles outnumber human-authored nonfiction titles by a wide margin. This is not just happening to my books--it is happening to thousands of titles and authors already. The purchasers have no way of knowing the books are generated by a machine, as this is never disclosed, and most of the books have fake author names attached, along with AI-generated photos of non-existing people. This is not just a concern regarding fair business practices, but also of consumer protection. These books (some of which I examined) are of terrible quality, and contain misleading and dangerous misinformation. Just one example, one of them has an image (linked online) of Canada yew that is labeled chokecherry. The seeds of chokecherry are traditionally crushed and eaten by Native Americans, while Canada yew seeds are extremely toxic and potentially deadly. This is what we get with no human accountability and no human insight in nonfiction creation.

From my discussions with numerous book buyers, I can tell you that the human beings who buy the books WANT TO KNOW that they are buying books written by ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS. And they want to buy quality books, not AI-generated fluff and garbage. I am asking that you might consider this issue for potential legislation. Perhaps we could require something like "All AI-generated print media offered for purchase shall have the words "Generated by Artificial Intelligence" clearly displayed on the cover in print equal in size to the largest print of the title. The bottom third of the cover shall contain the words "This book was not written by a human being" in print equal to one half the height of the largest lettering in the title." It would also be helpful if it were specifically outlawed to make fake authorship claims.

Here are some reasons you should act on on this legistlative suggestion (even if not in this precise form, of course). 1. If we jump on this quickly, we can hopefully get this done before the powers behind this deceptive practice generate enough money and inertia to organize opposition. 2. This effects many millions of American consumers, who deserve to know about the products they buy. 3. Very few individuals benefit from this practice; it is hard to argue that any public good comes from it. 4. This issue is so new that it seems like neither the political right or left has any claim to embrace or oppose it, so it seems like it has a good potential to be acted on even in a divided house. 4. It's just plain right and fair.

Tammy, if you are aware of this issue, please consider me just one more constituent asking you to act on it. If not, I encourage you to take a few minutes and explore Amazon to see the extent to which AI-generated content is taking over online book sales. I would be glad to discuss this further at any time, and to help draft legislation, or advise in the particulars of the publishing industry that might help your staff do this. Thank you sincerely for your time and service.
-Sam