Private hire foraging course for home schooling group with focus on fungi identification.

Here is what we did:

Learning about fungi identification, key families and features. On the table we had samples of:

1. Clouded funnel
2. Tawny Funnel
3. Russulla
4. Honey Fungus
5. Sulfur tuft
6. Sulfur Knight
7. White saddle
8. Lilac bonnet or rosy bonnet
9. Amethyst Deceiver
10. The Blusher
11. Hare ear
12. Common Ink cap
13. Buttercap fungus
14. Snowy waxcap
15. Parrot waxcap

Quick look around the carpark for a few edibles:

Hawthorn – tried fresh berries and ketchup

Plantain – good for wounds healing

Rosebush (demonstrated how to taste fresh rosehips and we all enjoyed rosehip tea-soak 80C water for 1h dried halved rosehips) and few managed to get the berries just soft enough to eat.

Entering the park we stopped to try fresh Chickweed.

With a short stroll, we have entered the woodlands and started finding mushrooms. First the poison pies. (Clearly not very useful to a forager) but once we reached the greener part of the wood, here we were welcomed by abundance of varieties.

Birch polypore, blushing bracket, oysterlings, several webcabs, jelly fungus and even edible deciever.

Just getting out of the bush, we stopped by elder tree and tasted well liked elderberry cordial.

Nature making a full circle this year, we found fresh common hogweed with seeds just ripe for picking, roasting and using in Charnwood foraging signature treat: hogweed (chocolates).

Further on we looked at the palatable side vegetable: ground elder

And finally as time was pressing us on, we stopped to taste our final 2 samples: Stinging nettle and its crisps and dead nettle and the dead nettle cake was our final treat.