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15 October 2007
Wild Food at Waresely Wood
A special lunch on Seed Collecting Sunday
Over thirty people gathered in the Wildlife Trust’s Waresley Wood on Seed Collecting Sunday for a Wild Food Lunch prepared by Jacky Sutton-Adam, who designs and runs leisure educational courses and workshops in foraging and cooking with wild food.
On the menu was celery and chestnut soup, venison burgers, with a selection of cheese rolls as a vegetarian alternative, accompanied by an amazing range of wild fruit chutneys and sauces and wild berry fairy cakes and hazelnut cookies. The food was washed down with homemade elderflower cordial and rosehip tea. As well as sampling the food, visitors found out about foods that could be collected on a self-guided trail through the wood on their way to lunch. For more information on wildfood and details of courses go to www.wildfoodie.com
After lunch other visitors joined the diners for a choice of guided walks and to collect tree seed for the Wildlife Trust’s Woodland Linkage Project. The warden, Graham Moorby, showed key features of the wood and explained how the wood is managed, including coppicing, and removing some mature trees from ride edges to let in more light to encourage woodland plants.
Peter Walker, a fungi enthusiast, took a group around the wood, and found 38 species including the honey fungus Armillaria mellea), the hard, black King Alfred’s cakes Daldinia concentrica and Piptoporus betulinus the birch polypore, a bracket fungus growing on silver birch.
The Woodland linkage project is a scheme to link Waresley and Gransden Woods with Gamlingay Wood to create a large area of woodland for the benefit of wildlife and people, and to create wildlife corridors between these and other woods in south-west Cambridgeshire. Local school children visit the woods each autumn to learn about woodland management and wildlife and to collect tree seed. The children plant some of the seed on the former arable fields which The Trust are reverting to woodland, while the rest of the seed is specially treated then grown up in a tree nursery to provide local provenance trees for future planting. Schools or other organisations wishing to get involved should e-mail helen.moore (at) wildlifebcnp.org or judith.lemon (at) wildlifebcnp.org.