Posted on 29 August 2010, 22:08

I joined 60-70 people for a tramp across the Greenbelt site early this morning, foraging for natural food. I’d just arrived after a decent English breakfast in a Cheltenham hotel, but most of my fellow trampers had that ‘been living in a tent for three days’ look about them and possibly needed the extra protein.

Guiding us on a safe course between toxic mushrooms and the kind of berries you can safely turn into jam were Bruce and Sara Stanley (she’s a development chef and baker, he’s a project manager and life coach), who have recently bought a small farm in the Cambrian mountains of Wales.

Over the next hour we found a colourful (ok, mostly green) variety of plants growing unseen under our feet, including nettles, sorrel, rushes, rowan, yarrow and hawthorne, which can be turned respectively into twine, salad, loft insulation, jelly, bandages and ketchup. Bruce and Sara waded into ditches and marched across fields to pick and show us the good stuff they’d found, and then shared found-food tea and eatables which magically emerged from hampers and thermos flasks.

An eye and mouth-opening hour. Follow Bruce and Sara’s food adventures on Twitter.