IslandWood (IW) is an environmental education facility located on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound directly west of Seattle. This non-profit has a robust student overnight program serving public and private schools all over the Puget Sound. An essential element to the mission of IW is the educational graduate program, where the grad students act as the field instructors for the student overnight program. As a grad student, I can personally attest to the power of learning education philosophy in conjunction with teaching in place.
A popular activity during students’ stays is foraging for edible plants in our region. I have heard many concerns over the years about teaching students to forage. What if they eat something dangerous? Will they destroy everything if we teach them to harvest from the wild? What about Leave No Trace principles? Aren’t we damaging habitat? Are elementary students even capable of safely and sustainably harvesting?
To the last concern, my resounding answer is YES!
When we teach students how to harvest, they get to connect with the environment in a visceral way. The plant becomes part of them, and they can begin to see that all good things come from the earth. When we teach sustainable harvesting, as opposed to resource management or even the colonial obsession with conservation, we help students understand they are a part of the ecosystem and not apart from it. In addition, foraging presents many cross-disciplinary opportunities, including cooking, chemistry, art, math, history, and social studies.
So, how do we keep students safe and the environment safe from students? Student safety always comes first. At IslandWood, we have a short list of edible plants that each instructor is individually certified in identifying. Each of these plants is safe to harvest all year round and not easily mistaken for a dangerous plant. For example, there are at least five different rubus plants in the Pacific Northwest: trailing blackberry, salmonberry, black raspberry, Himalayan blackberry, and the evergreen blackberry. They are easy to mistake for one another, but they are all edible. The other berries on the list are very distinct and difficult to misidentify. As for mushrooming, I leave that to experts and tell students to assume they are all poisonous!
One of the few non-berrys on our list is licorice fern root, the small fern we often see growing on the side of trees. I would like to use this specific plant to demonstrate how to teach children to forage ethically. I take most of my ethical foraging rules from Robin Wall-Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass.
I begin by introducing the students to licorice fern. “Hi, licorice fern!” After asking what they know about this plant, I usually tell them about its growing habits. It has a rhizome, a special kind of root that anchors the plant to the tree but doesn’t hurt it. Since the fern needs so much moisture, its roots require moss to grow. In fact, it’s the only fern in our region that dies back in summer and really grows in wet autumn, while other ferns are dying back. After introductions, I tell the students about Kimmerer and her rules for foraging.
1: Take only what is given. Only take when things are ripe; this is usually when it’s easiest to harvest. When ripe, the apple falls from the stem, nut husks split; this is when the plant is giving you its gifts. For licorice root, I tell the kids, “If you have to climb the tree to get the rhizome, it wasn’t given.”
2: Never take the first one you see. When I ask students why they think this might be a rule, at least one usually understands and will tell the group: if you don’t take the first, you’ll never take the last.
3: Never take more than a third. A third for me, a third for other foragers and non-human animals, and a third for the plant to regrow and re-populate. This is where I also point out that they need to use judgment in high-traffic areas like IW and sometimes accept that there may not be enough for you.
4: Never take more than you need and use it respectfully. It would be disrespectful to the plant if we took the rhizome and let it shrivel up, unused. I tell the kids that an inch of licorice fern makes a strong cup of tea.
Now that they have a knowledge of the plant and understand the rules of an ethical harvest, it’s time for us to grapple and discuss the disturbance we are creating. We are taking the root of a plant. Another rhizome will have to travel and grow for licorice fern to grow there again. It’s important for students to understand this can take some time. However, I point out that we are animals and all animals disturb things sometimes. Deer smash grass and eat shoots, bears rip open logs to find grubs. However, we can all agree that humans have taken and disturbed more than has been given to us. But we have the gift of critical thinking and can use our judgment to think about when we’re acting within the environment and when we’re acting upon and against it.
For any foraging, we should minimize our disturbance. Watch where you step and be considerate of the more-than-human others around you. For licorice fern in particular, we have to carefully split the moss apart to find the rhizome and gently work it loose. If the moss falls off, just tuck it back in so it can keep growing and sustain the many organisms that depend on it.
Lastly, we thank the plant. I let the group decide if they want to give it carbon dioxide in the form of a “thank you” or a song, or if they would like to leave a hair, a symbolic gesture to leave something of ourselves as we have taken something from the plant.
Foraging is an activity we can safely engage elementary students in to connect them to their surroundings. It teaches stewardship, plant identification, and about place. Elementary students understand the impact humans create, but even more importantly, they are capable of mitigating those impacts. I love to see students who have never eaten food that wasn’t bought at a grocery store intentionally harvest and prepare a wild edible. That kind of connection can plant the seeds of lifelong environmental stewardship. So go pick some berries and harvest some licorice fern!
IslandWood (IW) is an environmental education facility located on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound directly west of Seattle. This non-profit has a robust student overnight program serving public and private schools all over the Puget Sound. An essential element to the mission of IW is the educational graduate program, where the grad students act as the field instructors for the student overnight program. As a grad student, I can personally attest to the power of learning education philosophy in conjunction with teaching in place.
A popular activity during students’ stays is foraging for edible plants in our region. I have heard many concerns over the years about teaching students to forage. What if they eat something dangerous? Will they destroy everything if we teach them to harvest from the wild? What about Leave No Trace principles? Aren’t we damaging habitat? Are elementary students even capable of safely and sustainably harvesting?
To the last concern, my resounding answer is YES!
When we teach students how to harvest, they get to connect with the environment in a visceral way. The plant becomes part of them, and they can begin to see that all good things come from the earth. When we teach sustainable harvesting, as opposed to resource management or even the colonial obsession with conservation, we help students understand they are a part of the ecosystem and not apart from it. In addition, foraging presents many cross-disciplinary opportunities, including cooking, chemistry, art, math, history, and social studies.
So, how do we keep students safe and the environment safe from students? Student safety always comes first. At IslandWood, we have a short list of edible plants that each instructor is individually certified in identifying. Each of these plants is safe to harvest all year round and not easily mistaken for a dangerous plant. For example, there are at least five different rubus plants in the Pacific Northwest: trailing blackberry, salmonberry, black raspberry, Himalayan blackberry, and the evergreen blackberry. They are easy to mistake for one another, but they are all edible. The other berries on the list are very distinct and difficult to misidentify. As for mushrooming, I leave that to experts and tell students to assume they are all poisonous!
One of the few non-berrys on our list is licorice fern root, the small fern we often see growing on the side of trees. I would like to use this specific plant to demonstrate how to teach children to forage ethically. I take most of my ethical foraging rules from Robin Wall-Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass.
I begin by introducing the students to licorice fern. “Hi, licorice fern!” After asking what they know about this plant, I usually tell them about its growing habits. It has a rhizome, a special kind of root that anchors the plant to the tree but doesn’t hurt it. Since the fern needs so much moisture, its roots require moss to grow. In fact, it’s the only fern in our region that dies back in summer and really grows in wet autumn, while other ferns are dying back. After introductions, I tell the students about Kimmerer and her rules for foraging.
1: Take only what is given. Only take when things are ripe; this is usually when it’s easiest to harvest. When ripe, the apple falls from the stem, nut husks split; this is when the plant is giving you its gifts. For licorice root, I tell the kids, “If you have to climb the tree to get the rhizome, it wasn’t given.”
2: Never take the first one you see. When I ask students why they think this might be a rule, at least one usually understands and will tell the group: if you don’t take the first, you’ll never take the last.
3: Never take more than a third. A third for me, a third for other foragers and non-human animals, and a third for the plant to regrow and re-populate. This is where I also point out that they need to use judgment in high-traffic areas like IW and sometimes accept that there may not be enough for you.
4: Never take more than you need and use it respectfully. It would be disrespectful to the plant if we took the rhizome and let it shrivel up, unused. I tell the kids that an inch of licorice fern makes a strong cup of tea.
Now that they have a knowledge of the plant and understand the rules of an ethical harvest, it’s time for us to grapple and discuss the disturbance we are creating. We are taking the root of a plant. Another rhizome will have to travel and grow for licorice fern to grow there again. It’s important for students to understand this can take some time. However, I point out that we are animals and all animals disturb things sometimes. Deer smash grass and eat shoots, bears rip open logs to find grubs. However, we can all agree that humans have taken and disturbed more than has been given to us. But we have the gift of critical thinking and can use our judgment to think about when we’re acting within the environment and when we’re acting upon and against it.
For any foraging, we should minimize our disturbance. Watch where you step and be considerate of the more-than-human others around you. For licorice fern in particular, we have to carefully split the moss apart to find the rhizome and gently work it loose. If the moss falls off, just tuck it back in so it can keep growing and sustain the many organisms that depend on it.
Lastly, we thank the plant. I let the group decide if they want to give it carbon dioxide in the form of a “thank you” or a song, or if they would like to leave a hair, a symbolic gesture to leave something of ourselves as we have taken something from the plant.
Foraging is an activity we can safely engage elementary students in to connect them to their surroundings. It teaches stewardship, plant identification, and about place. Elementary students understand the impact humans create, but even more importantly, they are capable of mitigating those impacts. I love to see students who have never eaten food that wasn’t bought at a grocery store intentionally harvest and prepare a wild edible. That kind of connection can plant the seeds of lifelong environmental stewardship. So go pick some berries and harvest some licorice fern!
