My youngest is now 23. We never sat down and said, ‘Let’s look at what’s wild and growing on the farm; let’s start a business.’ When she was about eight – you know how you go out with your children and pick blackberries? This little girl, at 8-9 years of age, went up to a hedge and asked, ‘What’s that?’ It was a rosehip – she didn’t know what it was. What shocked me that day was I had grown up with all this wild food with my grandmother, and I somehow presumed that my children also knew about it. So, if she didn’t know, there were four older children [of mine] that I had not passed this on to.
We picked a few rosehips that day, I got out my grandmother’s rosehip syrup recipe.
I can remember going up the back stairs with it in two little cups for herself and her brother; it was still warm out of the pot. I looked up why my grandmother would have given it to me because I didn’t know – we were always just given it.
Medicinal benefits
I learned the [nutritional and medicinal] benefits of it and I started making rosehip syrup and elderberry syrup for my family. I was doing that for about four or five years. Somebody said to me one day, ‘There’s a farmers market in Quintan’s Way in Nenagh – you should go in; you might sell it.’
So I went in with about 24 bottles of elderberry syrup and sold the whole lot. It kind of went from that to researching old Irish recipes. If it wasn’t made in Ireland years ago or if I can’t master an old recipe, I don’t do it. I don’t create recipes, I try to find old forgotten recipes and bring them back. So we kind of went from me making rosehip and elderberry syrup for the children to making 29 different wild products. Gordon [my husband] has laughingly said, ‘Stop! We have enough; please don’t find any more!’ So we have 29 different syrups, shrubs [vinegars] and jellies. Twenty products would be all year round and nine would be seasonal.
Through our work, we discovered there was kind of a post-famine attitude to wild food in this country. When I was a child, it was never called foraging – it was picking. And there was kind of an attitude that if you ate out of the ditch, you were poor. So if your grandmother fed you nettles in the spring, you didn’t talk about it – that was what poor people did.
Wild garlic pesto
That was the attitude. And then this ‘foraging’ became kind of hip and everything was about wild garlic pesto. I remember my father-in-law saying to me one day, ‘It’s far from pesto you were rared!’ We try to keep our products simple; it’s what people made in Ireland years ago. We don’t do pesto or dressings as such [though you can use our shrubs for salad dressings].
It’s very hip now to do foraging but if we don’t hold on to our picking heritage, we’ll lose our own history when it comes to foraging and that’s what we’re trying to preserve.
We pick mainly from the farm, we have about 51ac and we keep some beef cattle. We don’t keep any more than about 25 cows at one time; they are mainly there for grass management. We pick mainly from home. Our ethos is: one third we pick, one third we leave for wildlife and one third we leave for regeneration. So if Gordon picks flowers from elder trees on one side of the farm this year, he doesn’t touch them next year – he leaves them alone. And what he’s also done is he will graft from elders we have on the farm – if there’s a gap in the ditch, rather than putting up barbed wire, Gordon plants elders, rowan or rosehip brambles – we’re just always trying to reproduce the wild. We don’t spray chemicals or use fertilisers. We have tertiary rights on a bog, so we would mostly pick our gorse from there.
We’re trying to pass on the land in good condition. We’re not looking to be a multi-million euro business .. To look out on the land and say, there’s butterflies and bees there. We have hares back on the land – you wouldn’t have seen hares for years. There are otters in the river. It’s just to do the right thing and keep it simple.
We would say to people, never pick things from the side of the road, because there’s pollution from exhaust fumes. Also, never pick at a level below your hip unless it’s a place you absolutely know, otherwise you’re basically picking in fox and cat toilets! I often say to people, ‘Pick an area of your own garden. Just let it off; you’ll definitely get nettles and you’ll definitely get dandelions and give it three or four years and you’ll see what else will come up.’
There are a lot of recipes I have that I cannot use because I can’t reproduce them in larger quantities. For example, I have a lovely recipe for thistle jelly. I made an attempt and I just said to Gordon, ‘We can’t do this.’ I was so sore from picking the flowers!
You have to be careful when picking as well. There was a wood near us and every year it was a carpet of wild garlic and bluebells and – when the wild garlic pesto trend happened, people dug the wild garlic out of the wood and now there are patches there which are just desecrated.
Passing on the land
We often have folks advising us that we need to upscale, automate our production system or mass produce. I always respond that that’s going against what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to pass on the land in good condition. We’re not looking to be a multi-million euro business – once we have a roof over our heads and food on the table, I’m happy out. To look out on the land and say, there’s butterflies and bees there. We have hares back on the land – you wouldn’t have seen hares for years. There are otters in the river. It’s just to do the right thing and keep it simple.
Wild Irish Foragers are based in Co Offaly. To learn more, visit wildirishforagers.ie
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