Weedy Wednesday Foraging Class

When sustainability is your aim, you realize that your garden beds hold a whole world of food beyond cultivated vegetables. Those weeds you’ve been picking and tossing? Many of them are edible. Not only that, they often grow abundantly with little fuss. In the Broomfield Crescent Grange Community Garden, we acknowledge that knowing how to utilize edible wild plants as a part of our kitchen pantry can help to ease the burden on the land and our wallets. This is the principle behind our monthly foraging class, Weedy Wednesday.

Weedy Wednesday is a wild foods cooking class where students are invited to take part in all parts of the process of taking foraged foods from the garden to the plate. Held on the first Wednesday of every month throughout the growing season, participants learn how to identify, process and prepare a wide variety of wild plants, whichever ones are prime at the time.

This month, we gathered to learn about orache and lambsquarter, spruce tips, and raspberry leaves. We blanched lambsquarter and turned it into a wild version of spinach dip. Goat cheese balls were rolled in citrus-y young spruce tips. And we used a pasta cutter to crush and chop raspberry leaves to be turned into a fermented tea.

Weedy Wednesday is always hand-on, family-friendly, and held outside whenever weather allows. Participants are encouraged to join in the food preparation because we feel that touching and processing wild plants helps to familiarize aspiring foragers with these new ingredients. We also practice learning how to substitute wild ingredients into the recipes we cook every day.