Wild food course
July 10th, 2009 | by Nick |
Soup with alexanders & lesser celandine.
Interesting course on gathering and cooking wild foods. The Wild Food School in Cornwall offer 2-day, day and half-day courses in which students can gain hands-on experience in identifying and using as many as 90 odd edible wild plants in the UK. There are also guided walks on the subject. Looks great fun.
“Ever eaten nettles? Or even some of the edible thistles? Well how about telling your friends that you’ve become a wild food gourmet, eating those edible weeds chickweed and bulrush, and know all about finding and cooking food from the wild? If that’s the sort of thing that tickles your fancy, then Wild Food School courses are probably the sort of thing that will capture your imagination…” .
Note: the courses are run by Ethnobotanist-Forager Marcus Harrison, author of a series of wild food cookbooks who has had an interest in wild foods for over 30 years. Prices: Day and Introductory courses - £30-85 pp. / W/E & 2-day courses - £160 pp.
A new measure to help the rapidly declining British eel population will oblige owners of weirs and locks to install bypasses, allowing the fish to swim up and down stream unhindered. See 
When asked what he thought about 
Prisoners from a number of prisons in the UK joined the hundreds of thousands of Britons recording sightings at last weekend’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch.
The eel population of the Thames has dropped by 98% in 5 years and conservationists can only speculate why. The Thames eels (Anguilla anguilla) are born 4000 miles away in the Sargasso Sea, located in the North Atlantic Ocean, from where they migrate to British fresh waters. After up to 20 years they return to their breeding grounds to spawn and die. To make these long journeys the eels rely on ocean currents, which are susceptible to changes in temperature.
Disease and pollution could also be causing problems for the eel. Although the Thames has revived since its “biological death” in the 1950s, the river remains under heavy urban pressure. And the Sargasso Sea, in contrast with its romantic image, suffers from a particularly high concentration of non-biodegradable plastic waste, trapped there by ocean currents. 
