Wild lettuce usually grows to about eight feet tall, and has mild sedative properties. Queen Anne’s Lace is actually wild carrots. Prickly Ash provides a spicy peppercorn and can also numb toothaches.
These are just a few of the things learned by about 30 visitors to a foraging workshop with author Sam Thayer and Alexis Nikole Nelson, better known as @BlackForager on Instagram, hosted by Color in the Outdoors in rural Dodge County on Saturday.
It was the third such workshop hosted by the organization dedicated to connecting people of color with the outdoors, said founder and director Christopher Kilgour.
Attendee Marie Jensen, who said she’s been a fan of Nelson’s social media accounts for years, said she appreciated learning abotu the connection between Wisconsin plants and plants of her native Korea. The prickly ash, for example, is also known as the American Szechuan Peppercorn for the citrusy, spicy flavor it produces.
“That made me feel really cool, because I never thought I could have that connection to another place in that way,” she said.
Nelson, visiting from Columbus, Ohio, said she began foraging when she was 4 years old and her mother pointed out how oniongrass was different from all the other grasses in their yard.
“That was a light bulb moment for me, and the light just kind of never went out,” she said.
By the time she got to college, she was pretty well-versed in all the edible plants growing even in urban areas. That came in handy when she was “super broke” like most college students are.
“You can’t just eat ramen every single day. Sometimes you gotta jazz it up a little bit, and a great way to jazz that up is with the free greens that are growing outside of your college apartment,” she said. “That led to me starting Black Forager, my Instagram page, almost like a blog, just for me to keep track of the recipes that I enjoyed, and for me to keep track of the spots around my neighborhood that I liked harvesting. It ended up becoming part of this bigger wild food community, which was amazing.”
The social media presense took off in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think the pandemic highlighted how fragile our food systems are. It took two weeks for grocery store shelves to be empty and everyone to be freaking out,” Nelson said. “My first video that took off was quite literally my response to that saying, ‘hey, everyone’s freaking out right now. I’m also freaking out right now. Here are five really common weeds that are probably growing wherever you’re watching this from that you can just make yourself a little salad. One less thing that you feel like you need to, you know, brave the grocery store for.’ And that took off. And I think that there is this want of self sufficiency and this want of resilience, and this want of connection with the green spaces around us that people didn’t realize how much they needed until the pandemic made everybody slow down.”
By the end of 2022, she was able to make foraging her full-time job, creating videos and social media content as well as leading wild food cooking seminars and leading plant walks like the one in Wisconsin this weekend.
In several hours of pointing out wild parsnip, lettuce, carrots, false solomon’s seal, yarrow, mustard, serviceberries, basswood, butternut and more, Thayer and Nelson hoped to help attendees feel more connected to the natural spaces around them.
“There’s this magical thing that happens when something actually becomes part of your body,” Thayer said. “And after a few times of eating that plant, you feel this connection that plant that is hard to explain to anyone that doesn’t eat it.”
Nelson said she hoped to impart “an increased appreciation for the spaces that they inhabit. I think the more you learn about anything, the more you cherish it, the more you want to take care of it.”
She also noted that you don’t need to venture out into the forest to forage.
“Everyone thinks that I live in the middle of the woods, like a little woodland pixie,” she said. “I live in downtown Columbus. I can see the skyscrapers from my front porch. I live in the city, and I still make foraging happen.”
But even if you do want to go foraging — or do anything else — in the great outdoors, don’t hesitate based on who you are, she said.
“The outdoors are for everyone. There’s no one group that ‘owns’ outdoor activities. If it’s something that makes you happy and makes you a little bit more content on this rock that we live on hurtling through space, then you should do it,” she said.
That’s the core mission of Color in the Outdoors, Kilgour said.
“The biggest thing is to show a diverse population of people from all over the area that this is something for them, and that literally going out in your backyard, you can find all the things you want to snack and have fun,” he said.
He said the attendance had roughly doubled since the second foraging workshop in 2024, and this is the first time Nelson jonied Thayer to lead it. The two have attended and led other foraging events around the country together.
The organization will host a paddle trip and a “Camping 101” event in August, as well as “Learn to Hunt” and “Learn to Fish” events later in the fall at Piece of Mined Acres, its 90-acre headquarters east of Horicon.
