We’re well into the warm weather and the wild plants are going bunta! (that’s Australian for ‘very nicely’). So I reckon it’s time for this year’s Food Underfoot foraging walk in our lovely Henry Chenoweth Park in Gawler. Many of the herbs on our Wild herbs pages are or were found here and I’m sure more will turn up as time goes by.
When and where will it be?
It looks like Saturday the 14th of September is through go, a couple of weeks after the Gawler Show. Let’s gather by the footbridge near the Elderly Centre at 11 am. For those who come in from the other end of Gawler, the gathering point will be at the opposite end of the park from the Gawler Community House.
I like to hold the event every year in this park because it is flat, has good access, most of it can be traversed by folks with mobility issues. Also it’s big enough for kids and dogs to run amok in. It’s also easy to get a park near!
Henry Chenoweth Park is home to a grand selection of edible and medicinal wild plants (AKA ‘weeds’) in a location where they’re easy to see and photograph. This year, Gawler Council killed a lot of lovely Pepper Trees along the river banks, turned them into mulch and covered some of the best wild plant patches with it I was a bit saddened by the act but it will pay off eventually because the killing was done in the name of revegetation n with local native plants.
This year’s walk will be particularly enlightening because many of the wild plants have survived the abuse and are springing up in abundance. Every year the mix of species changes but this tear will be spectacular because the truck and bobcat tyres have brought in a whole bunch of new additions.
It’s more than foraging though, we spend time looking at the ecological roles that different weeds have, explore their history in Australia, learn about their food and medicinal values and I they’re around, look at the insects they coexist with.
I’m booking tickets on a sliding scale at $20, $30 or $40 dollars. For transparency, I’d like $30 per ticket but acknowledge some folks are really doing it tough so have the $20 tier. Purchasing a $40 dollar ticket helps subsidise someone else to come along at a lower rate or even for free. We will never discuss or mention what price you’ve paid for a ticket. Bookings will be directly through this website to cut out many of those nasty companies who take their cut from ticket prices. If you’d like to pay cash on the day (nice!), message me on 0414661455 or by email at ligayagarden@gmail.com and let me know what tier of ticket you would like.
Oh yeah….Kids and dogs are always free!
Booking details
Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden
We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are –
