March

In this newsletter you’ll find suggestions for foraging and nature connection practices this time of year (including a recipe for enjoying edible flowers in the most magical way!), upcoming Foraging Home events, our favorite herbal blend for waking up & supporting our bodies in the transition out of slower winter times, and a few activities and rituals for finding presence with the Spring Equinox.

Oh, March! The Spring Equinox is nearly upon us, and each day I am reminded why this season is so dear to my heart.

The full moon of each month is often given a title to describe the season, and this month’s is best known as the Worm Moon- when the soil warms and loosens enough for the wriggly decomposers to start moving their bodies more, and showing themselves at the sunny surface. In our house, we sometimes call it the Mud Moon - for the season when we get to begin spending more time outside, our hands and bare feet sinking into the spring-rain-and-melted-snow-wet earth. We hope you, too, get to feel the mud wherever you like it and begin wriggling your body in the sun more and more often.

One gift of getting to know your local flora and fungi is that whenever you step outside, you feel surrounded by friends. Instead of just seeing a field of green (though we may already deeply appreciate its beauty), we are greeted by dozens of living beings we know by name - and may have even deeply connected with by filling our bellies or healing our bodies with them. And this time of year, it means that every day I get to greet a new friend who I may not have seen in nearly a year! We are all part of and infinitely intertwined with this living world, and it is this feeling of close connection and familiarity that I strive to share with everyone who joins me for a class or walk.

Flowers of Early Spring

At any time of year, it does my heart a world of good to step outside and spend time noticing the thousands of lives - outside of my own- thriving right in my own yard and neighborhood. But this time of year in particular, stepping out into the green world seems to lift my spirits more than ever, and I have a sneaking suspicion it may be the flowers’ doing.

There are so many beautiful blossoms bursting open in March - how many do you know well? I encourage you to try meet a few new floral friends this season. The more time you spend with them, the more joyous their return in the coming years will be!

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Violets hold so much magic- and not just for the way they beautifully carpet our yards and forests this time of year like scattered amethysts, beckoning us out into the warmer sunny days, or for their soothing healing medicinal properties, or their secret underground “true” flowers…. they also create some of the most vibrant color change tricks on wild food scene!

When steeped in hot water, violets produce a lovely purply-blue tea. But this liquid is PH sensitive - so adding anything basic turns it teal-green, and acids cause it to turn HOT PINK - making these flowers a wonderful lesson in science, nature, and beauty!
Below you will find the recipe for violet jelly - but you can use the tea any number of ways. For instance, we love pink lemonade, so this weekend we added lots of lemon juice, then a splash of lavender-infused simple syrup for a cartoon-gem colored refreshing spring beverage.

Want to see how we do it? Check out the latest reel on our Instagram.

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Violet Jelly

A loose cup or two of violet blossoms
Lemon juice
Pectin
Sugar

• Collect your fresh violet flowers in a clean jar, filling about halfway. Be sure to leave plenty for the just-waking-up pollinators!

• Pour hot water over the flowers, filling the jar. Cover and let steep overnight, or for several hours. Your tea should be a deep beautiful purply-blue.

• Strain out the flowers, being sure to give them a squeeze to get all the good color out.

• Add fresh squeezed lemon juice to the tea and get ready for the magic. (We use about 1 tablespoon juice for every 2 cups of liquid)

• Follow directions on your pectin to turn this beautiful liquid into tasty pink jelly!

Important note! Violets are a mild laxative. So while snacking on them or drinking a glass of lemonade won’t effect your belly, consuming them in large amounts can cause loose stools. (I have only seen this become an issue when folks made a pesto with almost exclusively violet leaves- meaning they ate multiple cups of leaves in one sitting!)

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As always, make sure you are 100% sure about ID, safety, and sustainable harvesting practices before gathering or consuming any wild plants & fungi. 

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Spring Events and Classes

We have a number of exciting walks and classes in the coming weeks!
Click on any event to register.

Wild Tea Crafting
Sunday, April 6th, 11am-1pm

Wild Spring Greens
Sunday, April 13th, 11am-1pm

Foraging Spring Tonics
Saturday, April 19th, 11am-1pm

And a bonus free event! Come see us at Asheville Integrative Psychiatry for their Spring Equinox Open House. You can enjoy forest bathing, a foraging walk, and learn about psychedelic medicine all in one beautiful spring morning!
Saturday, March 22nd, 10am-1pm

RSVP 

Lymph & Liver Love

Every year, as we come out of slower winter mode, the earth offers up a bounty of greens and roots that are just right for waking our bodies up and getting things moving. You can join us to learn all about them on Saturday, April 19th - and we also have a lovely tinctured blend to enjoy right now!

Our favorite cleansing tonic, these wonderful allies stimulates the lymphatic system and moves stagnant energy. A great aid as we move out of the winter months, when our bodies are feeling slow and tired, to give a boost to our circulation, digestion, and drainage systems. Bedstraw, yellowdock and burdock help remove toxins from the body and boost immunity with white blood cell growth.

Being Present in Each Season

Time has been seeming to fly by more than usual lately- with unprecedented amounts of unbelievable news every day, the overwhelm can be intense and make it hard to ground into any one moment. But it feels like an especially important time to find ways to be grounded, especially in joy and focusing on the good in the world that we want to be moving toward - not just on the bad we need to fight against.

So that has been our practice this month - making time to tune in to this special moment in the year, the spring equinox, as signs of life and hope return to the world around us and we find our footing in the perfectly balanced half-day/half-night moment of the start of spring. If you would like to try to find some stillness in tuning into the season, here are some of our traditions and rituals for this time.

• Noticing new growth, and incorporating beautiful spring edibles into our meals. Pictured above are stinging nettle deviled eggs - with pureed nettles mixed into the egg yolks and decorated with all the flowers we can find!

• Making an “altar” to the season. Long before our modern Easter, there were celebrations to spring beings, gods, and goddesses, to express the joy of warmer days and welcome new life. We clear a place on our mantle or bookshelf to brighten our home with reminders of the natural world all around us in this present moment - fresh cut flowers in vases or formed into flower crowns, feathers for the return of our winged friends, empty nests we have found on the forest floor in years past, hollowed out eggs, living house plants or young sprouts, and of course candles to celebrate the extra light we are enjoying each day now.

• Clearing out the stagnant energy of winter. Is there anything better than the first days that are warm enough to open up the windows and doors and let in the spring air? With the front and back doors open, we move through our house with homemade burn-bundles of local plants, clearing out energies we no longer wish to keep around, and welcoming in the fresh new winds of the season.

• Moving as many of our regular activities as we can outside. Dinner, homework/work, reading time, crafts… whatever we can now do outside in the sunshine, we do. Just being on the porch or in the yard gives us the opportunity to notice more new plants, returning bird friends, emergence of hibernating neighbors, and to appreciate the world outside of our own often narrow focus.

• Our first barefoot days of the year! There is nothing like getting your tender winter feet onto the spring earth to bring you into your body. Cool squishy mud, dew-damp grass, or a stony path - they all help us focus in on each step we take and ground into the present moment. There are many studies showing the health benefits of barefoot walking - from increasing serotonin to supporting our immune system and fighting inflammation. All the more reason to mark this season with a shoeless stroll!

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