The Wild Food & Medicinal Herb CSA (Community Supported Awareness) provides hands-on education for those who want to connect more intimately with their local landscapes and move towards more sustainable practices with respect to food and medicine. CSA participants will:
• learn how to safely use abundant local plants for food and medicine
• experience their local bioregion more intimately
• join a greater community to share knowledge about ethical wildcrafting
• experience their local bioregion more intimately
• join a greater community to share knowledge about ethical wildcrafting
To find out more, scroll down or use the quick links below.
The Unexpected Treasures in Your Local Landscape
What Plants Are We Talking About?
How the CSA Works
The Spring 2013 CSA
Cost
Wild Food & Medicinal Herb Slide Show
What Plants Are We Talking About?
How the CSA Works
The Spring 2013 CSA
Cost
Wild Food & Medicinal Herb Slide Show
The Unexpected Treasures in Your Local Landscape
The Wild Food & Medicinal Herb CSA is about getting to know your neighborhood and community with a different eye. Our local landscapes provide abundance all around us, we have just forgotten or just do not have time to stop and see what is at our feet.
Imagine that instead of clearing those spring weeds out of your garden with a furrowed brow, you extended your gratitude for their presence and harvested them as a nutrient-dense addition to pesto, salad or soup. Could you believe that the impassible Manzanita hedge in your neighborhood could actually provide a local and tasty source of vitamin C supplementation all winter long? Even something as dreaded as blackberry roots can be turned into a resource when recognized for its medicinal value. And don’t forget about all those acorns piling up under the oaks! With a little education and hands-on practice, you can stop ordering your expensive super foods from south of the equator and allow your local landscape to nourish your core.We believe by gaining these skills, our community members will become more self-sufficient by relying on local plants to meet some of the basic needs of everyday life. In addition, this practice will more intimately connect individuals with the flora and fauna of our local environment, and therefore increase the commitment to responsible stewardship of our precious natural resources in Nevada County.
What Plants are We Talking About?
We are advocating for the use of plants that are widely abundant, underused, and those that are easy to grow with minimal resources in our sierra foothill region. Our harvests include native, invasive, naturalized, and cultivated plants that grow readily in our local landscapes and are commonly found in large quantities. They are ethically collected from farms and other private land holdings.
Modern history has taught us that natural resources do not come in a limitless supply, free for the taking. Harvesting is a thoughtful practice that, when done ethically, does not deplete precious resources but rather encourages healthy growth. It often means leaving delicious or highly medicinal plants alone, because the population is not strong enough to tolerate harvesting of even one plant. It may also involve the complete removal of an invasive (but useful) plant population from a critical area where desired natives are in danger of being out-competed. The practice of ethical harvesting is complex, and ultimately, ethical harvesting is really about land stewardship. It involves a relationship of give and take, deep gratitude, recognition of the greater ecosystem, and the know-how and commitment to help cultivate healthy landscapes for the future.Watch a slide-show of some local plants that can be used as food and medicine.
How the CSA Works
We use the familiar term “CSA” because like a farm CSA, we are asking community members to commit for a period of time over the Spring or Fall harvest season. Not only will you enjoy a spectrum of nature’s bounty over the season, but the structure also provides an opportunity to build your plant identification and processing skills. By the end of the session, you will have processed a variety of plants into food and medicine and will have the confidence to further develop these skills on your own. 
Unlike the traditional CSA, you’ll do more than just pick up your produce and take it home. In this model of Community Supported Awareness, education is a primary component. At each distribution, participants will engage in a 1-hour session of hands on learning, which includes an introduction to each of the plants, identification tips, a review of some traditional and modern uses, and then process the plants as a group into food or medicine. You will leave with step by step recipes for any additional processing that needs to happen at home.Please note that the CSA meets for an extended period of time for the first distribution to provide an overview of the practice of wild foods and home-scale herbal medicine. This introductory session will provide you with a strong foundation for your CSA experience and help maximize your learning over the course of the season.
Watch a slide show of the last Spring CSA.
The Spring 2013 CSA
Actual harvest will be determined by weather and availability. Here is an idea of what you may experience during the Spring CSA:
- Wild greens for salads, pestos, and smoothies
- Wild root beverages
- Nutritive and tasty teas
- Salve making for scrapes and cuts
Schedule
There are three distributions, every other week:
There are three distributions, every other week:
Tuesday, April 9, 5:00pm – 7pm, includes Introduction to Wild Food & Herbal Medicine, plus 1st CSA distributionTuesday, April 23, 5:30pm – 7pm
Tuesday, May 7, 5:30pm – 7pm, followed by a wild potluck dinner
Class location in the Nevada City area TBA.
Cost
The Spring CSA Season includes:
- An introduction to the ethics and practice of wild harvesting
- 3 distributions over 6 weeks
- Basic instruction for how to process plants into wild food and herbal medicines
- Additional materials needed to process plants during demonstration sessions (jars, local olive oil, grain alcohol, honey, etc)
- Step-by-step recipes to follow for any additional processing at home
- Email and phone support between distributions for Q&A
Cost per person:
$120 Early Registration (paid before March 19th)
$130 Standard Registration (paid after March 19th)
Please note: class size is limited to 12 participants
$120 Early Registration (paid before March 19th)
$130 Standard Registration (paid after March 19th)
Please note: class size is limited to 12 participants
Registration
For more classes about wild edibles and medicinal plants, see Sierra Botanica and Sierra Living Skills schedules.
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I would like to sign up for your spring csa wild food workshop but would like to pay cash. Can I sign up & pay when I get there?
Great! Space is limited in the CSA, so its best to pay first so you can reserve a place. You can send payment to Matt Berry:
14205 Meadow Drive, Grass Valley, CA 95945, or contact us if you’d like to deliver it in person. Looking forward to meeting you!
Rachel
I’m interested, but at 76 not sure I can do this. For instance, canning and standing long times in the kitchen are difficult (‘back’ issues). I just sold all of my canning supplies last summer. Is this a necessary part of the process?
The educational sessions are 1-hour long, and you can be sitting for most of that time. We’d love to have you in the CSA (especially with all your years of experience), so call us and we can talk in more detail and figure out a way to make you comfortable.
Rachel
273-3083
I am interested in taking the class.I am very much into nature and natural herbs ect. this year I harvested acorns , manzanita berries and elderberries, as well and st. Johns wort. HOw much time is spent outside of the classroom?
Hi Greg,
In this format, the education takes place after the harvesting, so we meet inside where we have tables and such to process more comfortably. We hope to have an opportunity to meet “in the field” for one or more of our meetings, but that is dependent on what is available and when, and if its appropriate to bring the group to the private property where we are harvesting. Hope that helps!
Sorry to see you are full already! Can you offer the instructions as a course without the plant materials?
We will be offering some day-long classes this season (dates and details TBA soon) which will include some basic skills in wildcrafting food and medicine. And they will be outside where we can see the plants first-hand and interact with them in their chosen environment!
Perhaps I can join you later or for one of your day-long workshops.