Geraldine is dining out on the hedgerows
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF NIBBLED ON ROSE HIPS AND CHEWED SHEEP SORREL WHEN HE TOOK A WALK ALONG THE BYWAYS OF AUGHRIM WITH GERALDINE KAVANAGH, WICKLOW’S ONLY PROFESSIONAL WILD FOOD FORAGER
THERE’S none so blind…
Geraldine Kavanagh speaks of apples. What apples, asks the reporter, lifting his nose from his notebook. The apples right here at this gateway, replies the lady in the blue wellingtons.
And then the scribbler realises that we are, indeed, surrounded by crab apples. There are apples under foot. The branches of the tree overhead are creaking with their load of apples.
They are, in the words of the song, little green apples. Their greenness gives them some marginal degree of camouflage against the background foliage but they otherwise make no attempt to disguise themselves. The journalist would have walked past the apples that overhang this public footpath a dozen times without ever noticing them. Geraldine not only notices them but also harvests nature’s under-stated bounty.
The lady in the blue wellies makes a living out of uncovering apples – along with all manner of herbs and fruits that are there for all of us to pluck and savour, if only the scales would drop from our eyes.
Going for a walk with Geraldine around the roads and boreens of Aughrim is not the most physically demanding of exercise as she is forever stopping to examine the plants in the ditches.
She apologises for the state of her hands, explaining that she has been picking sloes this morning, filling a large wicker basket with the little blue-black balls which she plunders from thorn bushes.
She laments that fact that there appears to be a shortage of mushrooms today, specifically the prime porcini mushrooms which pop up on grassland at this time of year.
Apparently, these tasty fungi keep their heads down until the correct combination of warmth and moisture comes along. Today has been too dry, she reckons, and no amount of willing them to show themselves will force the issue.
Geraldine Kavanagh hails originally from notso-far-away Rathdrum and she is proud to have lived in her native County Wicklow for most of her 43 years. However, she did spend a year as a young woman working in France as an au pair with a family in an area south of Paris, off the track beaten by tourists.
There she learned to share the passion for good food eaten in its correct season which is at the heart of French culture.
All these years later, she still recalls the excitement surrounding the making of calvados from the local apples or the preparation of pâté and other delights from the meat and offal of wild boar.
Her second protracted stint overseas came shortly afterwards when she was dispatched to Russia as a student and it proved less successful, though none the less influential.
Her mission was to learn the language but her memories of two months in Eastern Europe are overwhelmingly dominated by the awful cold of the climate there at that time of year.
She returned home from her teeth chattering placement set on abandoning her Russian course and all thoughts of third level qualification.
Instead she ‘went into organic farming’ as she puts it – a phrase which she translates with a smile as ‘mostly weeding’.
She also proved adept at manning stalls, selling organic produce at various markets which were beginning to spring up around Wicklow and Dublin.
The work may have been unglamorous but it brought her into contact with some of Ireland’s pioneers in the production of food achieved without sprays and chemical fertilisers.
She acknowledges Denis Healy and Marc Michel as two of the most successful and influential organic farmers, whose produce is so good that it often requires very little preparation or cooking to taste great.
‘I have a deep love of nature and organic farmers are working with nature,’ she observes.
‘I have never worked indoors very much.’ The one exception to this was a stint with the now defunct Good Food Store in Dublin selling products
made by individuals rather than by large companies.
Her love of nature has long been channelled in part into an interest in wild plants and flowers which manifested itself from an early age.
Geraldine looked at the specimens that most of us ignore or maybe treat as weeds, acquiring the botanical knowledge to help her identify and put names on each one.
It was more than two decades ago that a friend gave her a book on ‘wild food’, suggesting that some of these plants were not only to be admired but were also good to eat. She worked her way through the book as a hobby.
It was in 2011 that the pastime began to turn into a livelihood after she decided to introduce a party of friends to the goodness lining the roads.
The hedgerows that year were bursting with edibles and the friends were duly impressed, after their morning spent pulling flavour from the ditches. The word was out that foraging could be fun and Geraldine was soon fielding enquiries from others wanting to join in.
‘I felt that I could make a business out of it, so I have been doing the walks ever since,’ she says, pleased to report that they nearly always attract a full house – see wicklowwildfoods.com for her timetable.
‘It is something I really enjoy. People’s eyes are opened.’ She takes particular satisfaction from seeing her followers eating something they previously waged war on as a pest.
As we wander up a slight hill, the reporter spots what he thinks may be a friendly leaf and suggests that he has spotted some mint.
Not at all: ‘ That’s wild sage – and it’s horrible.’ She prefers the garden variety of the herb, though traditional gardens baffle her with their sterile lawns and their showy shrubs.
‘A lawn is not useful or environmentally friendly – putting all that energy into cutting grass with no net return! I am more into perma-culture.’
Perma-culture? Her version of the phrase seems to mean allowing the denizens of the hedgerow into the garden and growing a few vegetables.
She is convinced that an awareness of the value of rose-hips as a source of vitamin C is something that should touch national policy makers. We live in uneasy times and she is reminded that, during past World Wars, hips not only saved Ireland’s population from rickets but also provided a nice little earner as they were exported to Britain.
A more sophisticated age has opened up alternative economic opportunities for Geraldine, finding unorthodox ingredients – gorse flower, elderflower included - for Glendalough Distillery’s award winning gins. However, she retains a homely interest in squirrelling away reserves of goodies from the hedgerows in the form of fruit syrups and dried fungi for family consumption.
Like practically everyone else, she is a customer of supermarkets but she cannot understand why they import elaborately packaged blackberries when we have our own growing in profusion on Irish brambles.
‘I see food everywhere,’ says the mother of three who has learned to avoid the poisonous stuff in the meadows and verges.
She extols the virtues of the good stuff, pointing to herb robert (a nice addition to a green salad) as a possible cancer treatment, for instance. Sloes are good for the eyesight. Dandelion root stimulates the gallbladder. Yarrow, with its white flowers, helps wounds heal.
As we walk, she devises a hypothetical wild food dinner party menu.
Starter. That could be nettle soup. Nettles were once a staple of the rural diet. The leaves must be picked young. She demonstrates how to draw the sting from the nettle before popping one into her mouth.
Alternatively, make sorrel soup. Sheep sorrel is common at the moment, looking like spinach and tasting citrusy.
A wild herb sorbet would go down well, with a glass of chilled elderflower prosecco.
The main course would have to be something created from hazelnuts or beechnuts to provide protein, unless there is roadkill venison or pheasant (to be cooked with sweet chestnut stuffing) available.
Add elderberry sauce as an accompaniment that the best of chefs would applaud and serve with a leafy salad of wild greens as well mushroom dumplings. Delicious.
Finding fruity ingredients for dessert is not a problem at this time of year – just reach up for those crab apples or seek out blackberries and wild plums to make a tart using chestnut flower. She recommends Glendalough’s beech leaf gin as the ideal accompanying drink to the tart and washes the notional meal down with dandelion root coffee.
‘If you are foraging, then you are being observant and you are being connected with the seasons.’
I SEE FOOD EVERYWHERE. IF YOU ARE FORAGING, THEN YOU ARE BEING OBSERVANT, AND YOU ARE BEING CONNECTED WITH THE SEASONS