Nettle Soup and Rolls

For me Waldorf Education is so much about celebrating the earth and our unique connection to it. It’s really about allowing our inner souls to experience the world fully with our feet planted firmly in the rich earth we call our home.... over the past year as a family we have become more secular (and I have struggled with this as someone who has always found my identity in my ‘faith) I have read and deepened my knowledge and passion in this world through the wisdom and stories of indigenous people (at home and afar) this knowledge along with some of Steiner’s writings has had a profound effect on my experience of being part of nature, part of this world. Of how it gives when cared for, when respected without effort, without toil.

It’s amazing isn’t it, how much modern life and living has removed us from ‘knowing’ the earth.

Of knowing it’s sustenance, it’s remedies, it’s power to nourish and heal. This is knowledge where I live, which started dying out with my Nanna in the post war era and even now when I talk to some people even about picking the blackberries from my garden or local walks in autumn, I’m referred to as being ‘a little hippy or crazy’.

We foraged nettles for the first time as a family on our walk Sunday, when I announced to the children we will be making nettle soup and rolls my announcement with exception to the little one was met with a face of....’Really?’.

So we got on with the work of preparing the soup and rolls.

They came out delicious, and as the children tucked into them for lunch yesterday their faces were a picture of pleasant surprise. Nature won, and shown them how from even the humblest places and unlikeliest of plants, you can make a nutritious meal!

We don’t NEED to forage to eat this day and age, but we SHOULD! We should share the joys and sustenance of the wild untamed earth with our children for them to carry forward into future generations. We should bring back that connection and knowledge that modern life has set aside.

If you don’t forage please do try it! My advice would be to start simple, to get a good book LOCAL TO YOU (images help) if you are in the U.K. I recommend @wildfooduk and to enjoy the process!