Wild Foods and Living Cultures

We make delicious, nourishing wild-gathered and wild-fermented foods, available at farmers’ markets and for home delivery in the greater Madison area! Hot sauces, kimchi and other vegetable ferments, wildflower & fruit jellies, jams and vinegars, elderberry syrup and more–we’re excited to share what we’ve made with you. Please be in touch if you’d like to find out what’s available now!

We also offer guided Wild Food Wanders throughout the season. Check the calendar for upcoming dates (private walks are also a possibility). Come learn about the amazing food growing all around us!

Special Happenings

Wild Food and Fire–a full-day workshop with What Got Gathered and Wild Harvest Nature Connection

May 6th, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Lake Farm County Park.

Fire and food are deep, ancestral needs, and making both by interacting with plants found in our natural landscape nourishes body and spirit in ways unmatched by newer technologies, and that go far beyond “survival skills.” Join Alex Britzius of Wild Harvest Nature Connection and Andy Gricevich of What Got Gathered and learn the basics of fire by friction, craft your own fire kit, meet a community of wild edibles, and prepare and share a delicious meal. Beware–this stuff may change your life!

Open to ages 12-112. Limited to about twelve participants.

Cost is on a sliding scale of $100-200 per participant. To register, write to whatgotgathered@gmail.com, and pay by Paypal (whatgotgathered@gmail.com), Venmo (@whatgotgathered), or check mailed to 3606 Cross St., Madison, WI, 53711.

Foraging Poetry–a workshop with the Arts & Literature Laboratory

May 20th, 2-6 p.m., Lake Farm County Park.

What plants and fungi surround us in generous abundance? What might happen when writing intertwines with the ancient art of meeting and gathering wild edibles in their habitats? What could it mean to forage in language itself?

In this workshop, Andy Gricevich will introduce us to a range of wild food plants and discuss their ecology, ethnography, and uses for amazing food, medicine, fiber and more. Over the course of the day, we’ll write while slowly meandering through a landscape. We’ll then explore approaches to writing in response to other texts, and engage in practices that encourage surprising encounters in language, inviting a certain wildness into our own ways of making poetry.

The goal of the workshop is no more to produce finished works than it is to produce master foragers (though there will be plenty of information and ideas, and though delight in the writing is definitely a goal). Rather, we hope to encourage encounters with the unfamiliar and unanticipated, both in more-than-human nature and in more-than-human language. In this way, the day is designed as much for “non-poets” drawn to writing as it is for self-identified makers of verse. Foraging and poetry can each be lived as processes and practices, less about results than a multifaceted, responsive way of being in the world.

write to us at whatgotgathered@gmail.com

photos on this page by Leo Ruggiero