When I get hungry and tired my temper starts to rise a little.  It’s a term my friends call the ‘Hunger Anger’ or even ‘Hanger’, ‘You getting a little hangry?’ is a phrase I hear a little too often.  After a big row in Barcelona with my ex-girlfriend we ended up in a local bar. [...]

They’ll take over your garden
They’ll grow like the wind
Plant them just once
And they’ll grow again and again
Old English Rhyme – written by Dave Hamilton Sept 2008
Nasturtiums are often over looked as a food source but in a bad year on an allotment they can really come into their own.  The flowers and leaves can be [...]

Sorrel is one of those plants that once you find seems to be everywhere! I can’t resist nibbling on the odd leaf while passing. The main wild sorrel you will find is sheep’s sorrel, in the late spring and early summer it sends up clusters of red flowers – like a dock or rhubarb. By [...]

THE ELDERBERRY WINE RECIPE – taken from The Selfsufficientish Bible published by Shodder and Stoughton
Our parents, who are fortunate enough to have an elder tree at the bottom of their garden, have tried various different elderberry wine recipes over the years and they have now settled on this one as their favorite. This recipe makes [...]

Hazelnut milk
If you’ve been lucky enough to grow or forage an abundance of hazelnuts then this is a great way to use them up. It also makes a delicious alternative to cows milk.
Method – makes around a pint
Shell the hazelnuts and half fill a breakfast bowl with them.
Top the bowl up with water and soak [...]

This year I have moved to a house backing onto quite a wild area of land that has a huge apple tree growing about 30 yards from my house. I decided to make the most of it and strip it of as many apples as I could carry to not only make cider but [...]

Autumn is a great time to pick apples, blackberries, the last of the plums and nuts. This recipe combines all of them together in one delicious smoothie. It is a quite complicated process if you want to make all the ingredients from scratch but the reward at the end is defiantly worth it. It’s [...]

Dave and I were sitting having a meeting the other day (End of August) and we noticed a massive pear tree laden with pears from the window. Straight after the meeting we ran out to the garden and loaded up our bags. I know have some soon to be pear wine fermenting away in a [...]

The Selfsufficientish Urban Guide to Foraging – Day Courses
We are pleased to offer a unique experience, namely day courses foraging wild food across three Environments on our tried and tested route in Bristol. We start in one of the most picturesque places in the city an area surrounded by a huge community of [...]

There are always hawthorn berries all over the place in the Autumn and this year I decided that I would make the most of them and drink them.
Last year I wrote “There are probally a few hawthorn berry wine recipes out there that are tried and tested, if you are reading this near or in [...]