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Wild Food Immersion

Join us in spring, summer, or fall to explore the world of edible and medicinal plants and fungi, prepare food and medicine, and draw closer to the natural world.

Each 10-week course meets weekly for three hours of hands-on learning in the field, forest, and kitchen. We will get to know over 100 edibles through the seasons and cover topics including:

  • sustainable harvesting
  • preservation and preparation
  • history and folklore of wild foods
  • fungal-plant connections
  • wild food nutrition
  • stocking your wild medicine cabinet
a group of people in a forest

Instructors

Dimitri

Dimitri

a person smiling for the camera

Kat

Justin

Justin

Alan

Alan

Location

Classes will meet at various natural locations within 45 minutes of Asheville including Earthaven Ecovillage in Black Mountain and Hawk & Hawthorne Farm in Barnardsville.

Schedule

Spring Session: April 18 – June 20th    
Summer Session: July 11th – September 12th    
Fall Session: September 19th – November 21st

Classes will be held on Thursdays from 1:30-4:30pm.

Cost

$950/10-week session or $800 each if you sign up for all three sessions.

Cost includes 30 hours of instruction; all materials needed for foraging, cooking and medicine-making; our t-shirt featuring the top 40 edibles in our area; and the option to join our public foraging tours whenever there’s space available the day before.

At No Taste Like Home, we believe that everyone deserves to be able to feed themselves healthy, real food, and our mission is to share this important knowledge with as many as we can, to bring us all a little closer to the world we share. We are able to offer limited scholarship funding for each session of our immersion series. If you require financial assistance to attend, please contact us to apply for a scholarship. We are also happy to offer payment plans with a non-refundable deposit of $200.

Registration

Follow this link to register for one, two, or all three sessions, or email info@notastelikehome.org for more info.

Registration limited to 12 participants per session.

Participants completing all three sessions will be eligible to apply for a paid wild foods internship with No Taste Like Home.

Who is this class for?

If you are ready to go deeper with wild foods, this series offers the opportunity to immerse yourself in the abundance around us as it fruits and changes through the seasons. Like learning a language, we find that the practice of spending time in nature week after week is the best way to really build safe foraging skills and to learn how to incorporate wild food into your everyday life.

Maybe you are a hiker or gardener interested in getting to know some of the wild plants and fungi you encounter every day or a chef looking to incorporate unique and truly local ingredients into your cuisine. Or maybe you’re a homesteader ready to dive into crafting your own food and medicine from the wild abundance that surrounds us here in the richly biodiverse southern Appalachians. Wherever you are starting from, these courses will help you go deeper with wild foods as we reconnect with the land that feeds us.

If you're thinking about joining the course, I highly recommend you do!

If you're interested in learning how to forage, I would highly recommend No Taste Like Home's Wild Food Immersion Program. I've taken several different foraging classes over the years, and this course was by far the one that taught me the most. I didn't know much at all about wild foods in Western North Carolina when I began, but I felt comfortable identifying quite a few wild edibles, on my own, after the immersion. Being in the forest every week allowed me to observe and learn the life cycles of the various plants and mushrooms we learned to forage. Every week we were taught new items, but the guides also made sure to review things we had learned previously, in order to really help things sink in. The course is taught in several different locations around Asheville and with different guides, so you get to see and learn from different perspectives, which gave me more confidence to start foraging on my own. As a bonus, the guides also show you how to properly cook the food you're finding. I used to think mushrooms were gross, but that's because I didn't know the right way to cook them! If you're thinking about joining the course, I highly recommend you do!

– Kristen