Week 5 Challenge: What I Wildcraft

March 03, 2021

Week 5 Challenge: What I Wildcraft

This was an interesting prompt for me due to the complex relationship my regional culture has with these skills. Wildcrafting has a bit of a weighted history in West Virginia. There's a lot of wildcrafting traditions and practices woven into Appalachian culture, but until very recently these practices have born the dismissive and patronizing label of being "backwards" or "hillbilly."

In my grandparents' and parents' generations in particular, there was a big push to stop practicing these traditions and "modernize" instead...which often meant moving out of the forests and into the cities, to participate more actively in convenience food and industrialized culture, and to abandon traditional knowledge and practices in favor of outsourcing to third party purveyors.

At the same time, West Virginia experienced a paradoxical post-Vietnam era "Hippie Homesteader" movement where a lot of disillusioned counterculture youth determined that Appalachia was the last remaining authentic vestige of American life, and bought up newly vacated family homesteads and lands to live close to the land and resume the wildcrafting traditions so recently left behind by emigres.

So we have something a rather interesting history with wildcrafting in my state, the practice of which says a lot about your family and background.

Photo: my husband and our little one with fistfuls of freshly foraged wild garlic. (Summer 2020)

Having said all that, my great-grandparents wildcrafted by both interest and necessity. My grandparents were a bit mixed in their practices, engaging in limited wildcrafting coupled with hunting/foraging and home gardening. My mother continued our family tradition of extensive home gardening, but only practiced bits and pieces of medicinal and edible wildcraft. When I expressed an interest as a child in practicing Appalachian wildcrafting traditions like ramp suppers, my mother was bemused but accepting. The community my generation looked to was a blend of old time practitioners and new hippie homesteaders, but all anecdotal and experiential learning. To this day, I have never taken any kind of wildcrafting or naturalist class or studied anything formally.

Now I am raising my daughter in a community where local restaurants use local ingredients like venison, ramps, morels, chestnuts, and sorrel, "pawpawpalooza" events are annual fun, and the great Appalachian traditions of harvest festivals and community suppers in the Celtic and Germanic traditions grow larger each year. Interesting times, right?

Photo: gathering wild dandelion flowers + greens, wood sorrel, and violets for tonics and meals. (Spring 2020)

Photos: my little one helping with some foraged ramp and daikon pickles. (Spring 2020)

So, what can I wildcraft? A lot. A little. A good collection of odds and ends that are most preferred by my family. We forage for edible spring foods for tonic suppers, make decoctions/infusions/poltices for skin irritants like poison oak or ivy, preserve wildcrafted goods for later use, fry dandelions and chop greens, roast chestnuts, boil sassafras, tend wild gardens, grow the Three Sisters together, practice ethical and sustainable harvesting, dry ginseng, infuse vinegars and syrups, craft warming winter tonics like fire cider, that kind of thing. My family leans strongly to the edible, so there's a lot of that in my life. In fact, from the time between now and late May is a really big time for wildcrafting in West Virginia (once the ground warms and the thaws are well established), and I would normally be looking forward to lots of community harvests, suppers, and foraging events pre-pandemic. I'm going to really be missing the ramp suppers this year, though we will of course gather our own and have our own "Rampage 2021" festival at home.

Here's a few of the wildcrafted edibles my family enjoyed around this same time last year:

Photo: ramp and napa cabbage kimchi. (Spring 2020)

Photo: foraged greens salad with garden vegetables and seeds + German style warm potato salad with wild garlic and foraged herbs + assorted other foraged/wildcrafted yummies like ramp oil and dandelion vinegar went into this meal. (Summer 2020)