This blog is about the adventure of foraging for food. Scrumped fruit, gathered greens and mushrooms, fish and shellfish from the sea, hunted animals, and some of the things we do to it all before it reaches the table. When I started the blog, I was based in a rented flat the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney and a half-built cabin in the mountains 3 hours from there. The cabin remains half-built and happily used in that state, but I have since moved into a house with a sand dune out the back that is becoming a garden using only edible species, so there is also a little bit about food gardening, chickens and beekeeping thrown in. It all seems to change as time goes, but it is always about a relationship with plants and animals as food; and how this, more that any thing else we do or say, is the principle determinant of who and what we are to the rest of the living world.
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The Forager's Year 
Yes, the beauty of nature. Immersing oneself, tasting, smelling, listening, feeling, watching, these in my opinion are wonderful teachers.
I look forward to regularly reading your adventures,
Sounds like we may well forage in similar environments.
Kind wishes, J
Great Site, love the pictures and obviously, the concept 🙂 Erik in Los Angeles
Looking forward to following your blog. I grew up foraging catching, fish trapping rabbit, even the odd duck and gathering mushrooms in the central highlands of Victoria.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I just recently transplanted to Sydney from New York and in doing so left behind my foraging buddy and my knowledge of what’s available where and when. I have been finding it increasingly difficult to find information on the subject specific to NSW. Keep up the good work!
[…] https://foragersyear.wordpress.com/about/ This blog is about the adventure of foraging for food. Scrumped fruit, gathered greens and […]
I’ve nominated you for the One Lovely Blog Award
http://solarbeez.com/2012/12/16/one-lovely-blog-award/
Not sure what happened on the above comment, but I’ve been back and forth on how to do this…:-)
Very kind, thanks Solarbeez. Reminds me I have a small hive beetle post that I need to write up…
Great blog, I found you when you followed me, so thank you from a new blogger! Glad to read a foraging blog – there are so few. Keep up the good work, look forward to reading your posts in 2013.
Happy New Year! Tracey
Thanks Tracey. It sometimes strikes me as odd that there isn’t more on foraging if just because it is a topic that suits the blog format so well. But then it also pleases me that foraging remains something with the best knowledge still getting across between people actually out doing it and in old fashioned print.
Oliver
Would love to see courses start up on wild foraging. I live on the Gold Coast and can’t find any information on the subject. Do you have any contacts on the Gold Coast, Qld please?
Sorry Michelle, I can’t really help. A guy called Diego Bonetto does teaching tours down here in Sydney that people speak very well of (see here: http://wildstories.wordpress.com/about/). There is a good book from your area (came out of a school in Eagleby) called “Mutooroo: Plant use by Aboriginal Australian people” that could help; along the two best standards by Cribb and Cribb (“Wild Food in Australia”) and Tim Low (“Wild Food Plants of Australia”). Best of luck. Oliver
Hi
Peace be with you.
I work In the eastern suburbs of Sydney, as a professional, but live at my house in the western suburbs. I wanted to save fuel and food costs so I built a comfortable full length bed in the back of my car to sleep near work and came up with a cheap but filling work menu for breakfast lunch and dinner with produce all sourced from Aldi supermarket (shower and kitchen are available at my work :).
I now save 168km worth of fuel money and happily sleep in the outdoors of the eastern suburbs!
I believe in living humbly and simply and that any extra money I don’t need I give I should give to those in need/ charity.
I am developing my money saving and life hacking projects further and would like to forage for bush tucker in the Eastern suburbs (especially seaweed) to supplement my menu.
I would like to speak with you to ask about tips and tricks for foraging in eastern suburbs. If you can talk please call me on —- — —.
Faithfully
Mark
Hi Forager, I love your blog except for one tiny thing…you dont share locations!!! I’ve just started a Facebook page about scrumping and would love to be able to point people in the direction of some free food but I’ve found scrumpers and foragers are very secretive about their sources. So how about a little caring and sharing hmmm???
Cheers, Shayne
Hi Shayne,
I give a few locations – state pine forests for mushrooms, shorelines in general, etc. But there are indeed some spots that like any forager I would protect with pretty serious secrecy (my best mulberry trees, abalone, some fishing spots). And I would defend general secrecy in an online account because I believe that a good foraging patch comes with some obligation of custodianship. Where I might take a sustainable few, some reader (few though they are) may take a lot, maybe too many. When I divulge a secret spot, I transmit some knowledge that is not necessarily mine to share indiscriminately. I am all for scrumping maps with the resilient things like street fruit trees and abundant ‘weeds’ on them; but for a lot of things, all I feel able to offer is guidance on the species themselves, some thoughts and hopefully not too much self-indulgent waffle. For me, foraging is not about food for free, it is about an engagement with the environment and the personal or shared experience of it all. People just have to get informed and get out there, learning by their own discovery or by knowledge shared with more trust that can come over the internet. Anyway, I apologise that it is not the answer that you wanted, but I hope it is nonetheless one that makes sense…
Hi Forager, What you say does make sense and I had not thought of it that way. I know some people can be greedy and would ravage a good find but I like to think there are more considerate people than less. I have only put out there places that have several trees and plenty to go around and the rest of the things on my page are really to peak interest. I don’t believe in giving private addresses where fruit or vines are hanging over a fence.I have been given specific addresses but I don’t use them,if you spot one yourself, thats different. I have a beautiful mulberry tree, a guava and I always grow chokoes on the fence and am happy to have people help themselves but that is my choice. Just in case you like a little peek at my page..
.https://www.facebook.com/ScrumpingAroundAustralia
Thanks for giving me food for thought (no pun intended!)
Cheers, Shayne
Your posts have inspired me to try my hand at foraging for some greens here on the western plains of NSW. This morning I got some nettles from the old chook pen – unfortunately absolutely infested with aphids! Never mind…seeing your pictures should help me pick the ‘right’ weeds when I go looking for more varieties.
By the way, what are your thoughts on feral goats and pigs? Locals here are happy to go shooting (legally) but look horrified at the thought of eating their catch.
Hi Sandra,
On hunting pigs and goats, I have hunted them, although not often, and will again. I personally only pull the trigger if I am resolved to see it all through to an ethical death (as quick and painless as possible) and eating as much of the animal as is reasonable. But this is of course from a city man who goes out with this as the purpose. Strange as most people find it, I am ostensibly a ‘vegetarian’ in most social contexts, because I only eat it if I am prepared to kill it, and the few animals that I do kill get eaten at home.
When an answer to the question makes any judgement on land managers dealing with the problem of more than two million feral goats and ten times that many feral pigs (more than there are people in this country!), I am reluctant to go in for general statements. Hunting is undeniably violent and can be very ugly (especially with pigs in my experience). It would be hard for most people to conscionably endorse it all as a witness; but faced by the land management issues, that same majority would struggle to conscionably oppose it in principle.
I would say this though, that hunting needs to be part of a coordinated long-term program that will actually result in sustained population control if it is to claim any viable dressing up as ‘pest control’. If a city hunter goes bush, guns down some pigs and leaves them lie to provide a carrion subsidy to foxes and rot, and then takes off home again claiming they have done anyone a favour with pests, then they are kidding themselves; they have just been out killing.
So perhaps I am prepared to make general statements after all: A ‘pest controller’ should be able to clearly justify their causes and effects through population management; a ‘hunter’ should have providing for their pot as a primary goal; and that leaves too many who are ‘killers’ who should not sully the others names.
Great Blog. Eagerly awaiting the next post. I am a keen fisherman, spearfisherman and naturalist in the eastern suburbs too. Let me know if fancy heading out sometime. Looking to do some abalone and lobster dives soon while they are in close.
Hi! I’ve recently been given the ‘One Lovely Bloggers Award’ by Noemie from noemieskitchen.com and am now passing this award on to others via my post: http://growgatherbarterhunt.net/2014/09/30/one-lovely-blog-award/. Your blog is incredibly interesting, inspiring, thoughtful and intelligent. Reading your blog is a pleasure I always look forward to. I hope you can pass this award on to other blogs you feel the same way about. Happy foraging!
Very many thanks Alex. Forgive me for not doing the pass-on, but yours, Sydney Foragers, Diego Bonetto’s would be getting it again if I did. But then I’d have to stop, not knowing where to draw a line or what or who to choose… Thanks again,
Oliver
I live in Durban, and my cottage garden is overflowing with 4 of these wild spinaches you depict. We hardly ever have to buy our spinach greens! Such a great feeling to be just a teeny bit self-sufficient!
Dear Oliver,
very interesting and well written blog, but there again, you know that. Look forward to exploring it when I have a bit more time, lots of stuff relevant to what we are doing here. Do you mind if I link to it from my end?
Hi Marco, of course not, link away. It looks like a huge and wonderful project there!
With some jealousy from the urban part-time realm,
Oliver
Lovely and most appropriate angle on a life well-lived!
Oliver
I was surprised to read your article filed in 2012 re Holm oaks in Australia. I am searching for Q. ilex acorns currently to produce holm oaks as trees for my farm. Could you supply the site address where these Holm oaks can be found. I am desperate for this seasons seeds and have found very few on the single oaks I have already located. Would appreciate any help you could offer.
Hi Nic, Centennial Park in Sydney has well over a hundred of them, dropping acorns right now. Any time over the next month will do you fine, some will even start shooting (although then eventually cut down by mowers). They are all over the Park, just do a lap of the ring road and you’ll find some. If you are after them to serve as a mast crop for pigs, you might pick some with larger acorns though. If you are planning on them being available for human consumption, you might want to take a few from a few trees and see if you can find some that are less tannin-bitter (I keep meaning to, but never get around to it).
Many thanks for that information.
Was shocked to see your image labelled slippery jacks was incorrect, and is actually the deadly Amanita mascaria. Please change this before somebody gets hurt. I think it’s just labelled wrong because of the article it’s in.
Appreciate the concern Yvonne, but the slippery jack and fly agaric pictures are clearly labelled correctly.