I’ve been getting loads of flash-backs to childhood recently - and one of the things that popped into my mind whilst I was out walking yesterday was ‘playing houses’ during primary school lunch breaks. My parents moved around a lot, so I went to quite a few different schools and I’m not 100% sure which school this particular memory comes from, but I think it was a school in Swindon, Wiltshire.

We had a huge school field and used to collect bricks, sticks and other objects to mark out the foundations of a house on the grass. I used to like being in the kitchen, in charge of the food. I would gather loads of ‘vinegar leaves’ from around the edges of the field, which I would put on a pretend plate (a torn piece of paper) for us all to eat. It’s only recently that I have put two and two together and realised that the leaves must have been wild sorrel.

After eating our ‘meal’ we would wash our hands with the leaves of another plant which I’d completely forgotten about until I stumbled across a video on Youtube last night. It was, of course, ‘soapwort’, a member of the campion family. I won’t try to explain how it works because Steve Kirk from ‘The Bushcraft Magazine’ explains it so much better than I could in this video.

It’s lovely to be rediscovering things like this from my childhood and to realise that I have quite a bit of knowledge buried deep in my memory from those early years. I just wish I could find a way to access it all because, as long as you adhere to the codes of foraging, there couldn’t be a more sustainable way to put food on your table.

In case you fancy trying out the ultimate ‘green clean’ - here’s a link to a site that explains how you can make detergent and shampoo from soapwort.

If you, like me, are interested in wild food, please check out all the beautiful foraging articles Carol has written for our newsletters (here’s a recent one) and also watch out for Judy’s article introducing one of my favourite bushcraft sites in our next newsletter.

If you are new to the idea of foraging for food, please make sure you follow these basic but very important rules.

If anyone reading this has memories of foraging for wild food in their childhood, please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) because we would love to include them in our next newsletter!