The UK Foraging Calendar | Nafford Junction

In this post you can find a link to a simple uk foraging calendar that gives typical dates that wild foods can be foraged for you to use in home cooking and brewing.

Before getting into the calendar it’s important to know that you need to do your research first and you need to be confident when foraging. There are some fruits that most people will easily recognise, such as the blackberry, but there are other edible wild foods that look very much like plants that will make you ill or worse.

Before going foraging I recommend you thoroughly read the River Cottage Handbook No.7, Hedgerow by John Wright. That book comes with the most popular wild food including pictures. Once you’ve read that book, take it out with you when you go foraging and use the details and pictures to help you become familiar with edible wild foods.

As a next step you could progress to Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants of Britain and Ireland by Robin Harford. This book gives further detail of edible wild food and comes with a free online photo identification guide.

Foraging is fun, and free, but it is important to gain experience. Even after reading and researching you can go out with all the enthusiasm, with pictures of wild foods in your head, then when you get to what you thought was Garlic Mustard you can be left wondering if it’s actually something poisonous. On my first foraging trips I found myself becoming an expert at identifying plants that could kill me but wondering if anything was out there that I could eat. That’s why I combined the seasonal calendars that I found in various foraging books into the one that I am sharing with you in the post.

Your UK Foraging Calendar

I created this UK foraging calendar (access here) on Google Sheets that is free for all to copy, use, and improve.

UK Foraging Calendar

Explaining the calendar

I have colour coded the months as a reminder of the seasons, although they should only be taken as a heads up because global warming does mess with seasonality. Also, when plants grow is hugely influenced by the location so there will be differences all over the UK.

Where a wild food has different parts that are edible I have noted those in the relevant months, such as roots or leaves.

I’ve added a note at the top of the calendar as a reminder to buy your yearly yeast and other items if you are home brewing. Brewing using foraged food is extremely low cost if you use up old wine bottles so it’s at the heart of being self sufficient. It’s also incredibly fun but you do have to wait a year for your home brewed wine to mature so it’s worth starting as soon as you can to get the experience and start storing batches so you have them in future years.

Found the calendar helpful?

If you find the UK foraging calendar useful please share this post so others can find it as well. Let me know if you have ideas to improve the checklist. Post a message on Twitter to @naffordjunction or message me on Facebook and Instagram.

If this post was helpful you can find other posts in my series on growing.

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Production Notes

This was produced by me, James Walters, as a personal project to help stop climate change by inspiring others to grow, eat, and live sustainably.

Any advice given is the opinion of those involved and does not constitute medical, financial, or legal advice.

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