Next offered on Saturday, April 12, 2025 from 9:30-5:30 at Blue Skye Farm in Puyallup WA and continuing into the wilds nearby to learn when and where to look for the Top Wild Foods and Top Medicinal Plants of our region. In the meantime, check out our May 18, 2024 Wilderness Skills Training Workshop that includes an afternoon of ethnobotany with Wolf Camp director Kim Chisholm..
On our journey, you’ll learn how to identify key plant families, we’ll discuss our tenets of herbal medicine and practice honorable harvesting methods as we select the plant parts we need for wild crafted recipes later in the day. We’ll also cover poisonous look-a-likes and wildcrafting safety. When we return to Blue Skye Farm, we’ll process and cook what we’ve collected, as well as prepare herbal remedies, with stations including:
- Station 1: Herbal Oil, Alcohol Intermediary & Salve Options: Plantain, Poplar Buds, Yarrow, Calendula, Lavendar
- Station 2: Alcohol Tincture Options: Vanilla, Oregon Grape, Usnea Lichen
- Station 3: Glycerite Options: Mints & More
- Station 4: Vinegars/Oxymel Options: Nutritional Dock Root, Pickled Garden Veggies
- Station 5: Teas/Infusions: Pine Family Needles for Vitamin C, Dried Nettles for Allergies/Immunity, Pineapple Weed as American Chamomile, Various Blue Skye Farm Medicinal Herbs
- Station 6: Syrup & Soda Options: Elderberry, Lemonbalm, Catnip
- Station 7: Sautes & Chip Options: Cattail Rhizomes, Dandelion Flowers, Nettle Leaves, Pine/Oak Bark
- Station 8: Nut Milk & Dessert Options: Cashew Milk, Hazelnut Milk & Truffles
- Station 9: Cooking Options: Nettle Soup, Nettle Pesto, Wild Edibles Gathered
- Station 10: Ethnobotany Books & Wildcrafting Supplies
“It was a relaxed group of participants with varying degrees of outdoors experience. Throughout the day, we learned about the uses of local plants for survival. Chris encouraged active learning among the group with his careful explanations on how to harvest and consume plants on the trail in a sustainable way. We spent the second half of the day at Chris and Kim’s farm, where we saw how to make a fire, soup bowls, and boiled nettle stew using nothing but wood and stone. We also used freshly harvested ingredients to make tinctures and balms that we took home in sample jars. As another eloquent attendee put it, learning how to survive in nature makes it possible to walk out of your home and feel like you’re walking into your living room. By the end of this meetup, sitting by our fire and drinking nettle soup, I had tasted the possibilities of living in the wilderness, and was ready to come back to learn survival skills in more serious detail.” – Samual Wan 2010/03/05
FAQs
Who are the instructors? Wolf Camp directors Kim & Chris Chisholm are leading the workshops this weekend.
What ages can participate? Workshops are designed for adults, but youth may enroll with a parent/guardian.
How should we prepare for the workshop? Please prepare as you normally would for a hike, including snacks, lunch, water bottle, 10 essentials, etc., but especially with appropriate clothing including rain gear and waterproof footwear. Also, if you don’t already have any plant field guides, consider the following that we’ll also have on hand:
– Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and MacKinnon, et al
– Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel
– Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs – A Beginner’s Guide
– Picture This app to supplement Seek for plant identification
Cost & Registration
Cost for this workshop is $195 for one person, and $150 per additional friend/family member registering in advance, with reduced tuition and scholarship options available by request.
Reserve your space by sending full payment via Zelle (preferred) to our email address as recipient, but be sure to include a note with your phone number, participant names, and workshop dates because Zelle does not automatically share that information, or call us anytime at 425-248-0253 ex 1 to register over the phone with a credit card.
Or Use PayPal/Venmo form below after it appears January 1st to register online securely with a credit/debit card, or via direct withdrawal from your bank account.
Or email us to be put on our our list for the future. We always keep your information absolutely private, and will never share it.
Our refund policy only offers credit for future programs if you cancel: payments are not refundable unless we don’t accept your application. If you cancel for any reason, you may receive a full credit good through the following calendar year on appropriate and available programs listed on our schedule, although an additional deposit is needed to secure your spot in the future program. If a program you sign up for is canceled and not rescheduled at a time you can attend, you may receive a full refund except in cases of natural (weather, geologic, wildfire, etc) disasters, epidemics, grid failures, government shutdowns, conflicts or curfews, or other unforeseen emergencies making it unsafe for staff and/or attendees to reach or use program locations, in which case all payments made will be held by us without expiration date for your future use in appropriate/available programs of your choice. Reasons include the expenditure of funds (property rentals, advertising, materials, admin staff time, etc.) long before programs take place, i.e. deposits make it feasible for Wolf Camp to schedule programs in the first place, but our mutually understood agreement is that Wolf Camp will run the program at the safest available time in the future. Finally, no refund, nor credit, is given if a participant is asked to leave a program for inappropriateness as determined by our kids, youth and adult agreements for participation.
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