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- School's in session- this Spring!
School's in session- this Spring!
Registration Now Open for Foraging School!
Bek Jopling
February 10, 2026
I am writing this on Monday, February 9th, the day after watching a beautiful celebration of diversity, art, resilience, and love presented at our country’s most watched event. For those of us who have been consuming too much media these past months, seeing so much hatred and violence daily, I think there is a widespread feeling of a shift in the air we are breathing together. Nothing has been changed or “solved,” but I know I am feeling a renewed sense of hope, just from being witness to so much joy and love in the face of all that is so horrible in our world right now.
It is hard to remember to seek them out, but these moments of experiencing joy & human connection are so important for keeping our spirits up as we try to move toward a better world. I hope you can take a moment today to feel into that collective hope, and maybe even take in some fresh breaths of the spring-preview warmth and sunshine we are getting
How else will you make room for being present to the beautiful parts of the world this year, to help you remember what we are all fighting for?
There are so many ways to do this, but for me, there is nothing like sharing the wonder and awe of the natural world with people in my community. I am so grateful to get to do this work - to see people’s view of and relationship with the earth change as they get to know plants & fungi up close and as friends & allies. To feel their delight as they can more clearly vision a future where we live in harmony with all the living parts of our world - the human and more-than-human world.
And today, I could not be more excited to be partnering with brilliant herbalist and teacher Abby Artemisia of The Wander School to offer our first series of Wandering Home: Appalachian Foraging School, a chance for folks to slow down to the rhythm of the seasons and learn about the abundant food and medicine of our Blue Ridge Mountains.
🌿🌿Be part of a small cohort, gathering in the forest and fields & diving into foraging life🌿🌿
🍄🟫Come explore with us and…🍄🟫
– Gain confidence in wild plant and fungi ID
– Learn wild cooking, preserving, & wild crafting
– Discover herbal medicine making
– Join a community of passionate plant people
– Wander your way to feeling at home on the land
We will explore, forage, and create together through the spring, and foster connection and continued learning in between classes with ongoing prompts, reminders, and discussions.
I hope you will join us.
Wild-Crafted Valentines
For this season of love I’ve put together a bundle of my favorite herbal heart products:
Rose Honey, Open Heart Tea, and Wild Love Potion
All made with lovingly and sustainably hand-gathered plants!
Order individually or save with a bundle of all three for $45
Order by Thursday, 2/12, for delivery in the Asheville area before Valentine’s Day!
Foraging Now
This month we are gathering Usnea lichen from the forest to stock our pantry with all-natural, better for your belly, free antibiotics!
Usnea can be gathered year-round, but in the winter there is less abundance of other foods and medicines to keep up with harvesting & processing, so we take this slower time to wander the quiet woods collecting this healing lichen.
Usnea lives up in the tree branches, but once it falls to the forest floor it won’t continue growing so it can be gathered graciously there. These species can be distinguished by their pale cream-green color, stringy growth habit, and a tiny stretchy white elastic string that can be found by carefully pulling the strands apart.
We dry and store them for use through the year. They can be used internally or topically, made into a decoction (long-steeped tea) or infused in oil, but the best method for capturing the antibiotic properties is a hot-extraction. Check out this recent reel to learn more!
Reading Now
Even though there are plants and fungi (and lichen!) to forage in every season, and a walk in the snowy woods is one of the most peaceful experiences I know of, it can often be harder to connect with the magic of nature this time of year.
Thank goddess for incredible writers like Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian who help us feel the warm, fascinating, weird wild world from the comfort of our warm beds. I just finished her book Forest Euphoria and it was such a gift to spend cold days still able to steep my brain in nature scenes, to find even more new ways to see and know the more-than-human world, or and to relate in all new ways species I don’t always think about.
If you like the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, you’ll probably love this, too!
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