Participants in UGA Extension’s Master Forager program find a taste for the wild

ATHENS — On an unseasonably warm winter afternoon, three women armed with baskets and shears made their way along a nature trail in the woods of Pike County. Peering into the underbrush, they stopped occasionally to examine spots of interest in and under the trees and around fallen logs and decaying stumps.

A curious observer might wonder what they were searching for with such intent — unless they overheard the trio’s conversation.

“Oh, there’s yaupon holly! When it is dried and made into tea, it is highly caffeinated,” Carol Flanagan, who made the trip from neighboring Coweta County, said. Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria) is an evergreen shrub with petite, dark-green, oval leaves and bright, cherry-red berries that emerge in the winter.

Picking a small tuft of delicate, greenish-grey tendrils, University of Georgia Master Gardener Cathy LeBar identified the fringe-like lichen on sight.

“Usnea is a fern-like plant that grows on wood,” said LeBar, who drove an hour from Newnan for the outing.

“If you pull it apart, it has white strands — that’s an identifying characteristic,” added Brooklyne Wassel, a UGA Cooperative Extension agent and Agriculture and Natural Resources coordinator for Pike County, who was leading the excursion. “It treats bacterial infections and is good for your lungs.”

The woods ramble and conversations weren’t random. Flanagan and LeBar were graduates of the first class of UGA Extension’s new Master Forager program, taught by Wassel and Philip Hensley, the ANR Extension agent in neighboring Spalding County.

The 12-month Master Forager program was launched in August 2022, and Wassel said the program came about by surprise.

“I had no idea how to teach it,” she said. “My undergraduate and master’s degrees are in animal science, but the more I dug, the more it snowballed. It started, like most good extension programs in Georgia, as a county-based need. I had a client come to me and say, ‘You really need to do a wild harvest and foraging program.’ And I really had no concept of what that was going to look like.

“We approached her after class and said, ‘We’d like to really develop this.’ It eventually went from the idea for one workshop to an entire class. You get a taste for it in one workshop, but you really want to go all year because foraging is a yearlong, season-after-season adventure. So we took that and ran with it.”

For the first year, Wassel and Hensley drew on Campbell’s workshop content to create a 12-month Master Forager program they launched in August 2022.

After attending a year of monthly meetings and foraging forays, 10 UGA Master Foragers from around the state completed the program, which culminated in July 2023 with a potluck dinner the participants prepared using foraged materials.

“Kudzu and mushroom quiche was everybody’s favorite,” said Wassel. “There wasn’t a piece left.”

The demand for the program was so strong that the next class started in August 2023. It’s in process at present, and 14 aspiring Master Foragers drive from around the state to participate.

“We had folks from other states reach out, as well as people from across Georgia. We ended up implementing a waitlist, which we never expected in a million years,” Wassel said. “Most of our waitlisted participants from last year are in the cohort this year. That just shows that the need has followed from year to year and that these people are really driven to get this information.”

In preparation for the second Master Foragers cohort, Wassel and Hensley fine-tuned the class to narrowly focus on items of the most interest and to incorporate more interactive elements.

“This gives them the reason to step outside, to find things and to ask questions about things they want to know,” Hensley said. “The amount of things people want to know if they can eat that they found growing in their yards always amazes me. We’ve learned about mushrooms and things from dandelions to tree bark. I even taught a section on insects we can forage for.”

Barnesville resident Brutz English is a member of the second Master Forager class. An Eagle Scout in his early years and now a UGA Extension Master Beekeeper and internationally known honey judge, he was drawn to the program to learn more about the outdoors he loves.

“I’m a big fan of flowering plants, trees, shrubs and flowers with pollen and nectar,” he explained. “Beekeeping drew me to this.”

For LeBar, the Master Forager program was a natural extension of an interest developed during childhood.

“My mother would take us for walks in the woods and taught us how to identify trees by their leaves, and after they fell, the bark,” she said. “She thought it was important to learn about nature and wildflowers.”

LeBar said that learning new things was her favorite part of the Master Forager program.

For Wassel, the Master Forager program has become much more than an extension program.

“It has become a passion,” she said. “It is a larger part of who I am, not just part of my job. I’ve incorporated it into my personal life, teaching my three kids.”

Her 4- and 6-year-old sons come running to her to ask permission to eat the oxalis (Oxalis pes-caprae), commonly known as “sour grass,” that grows right outside their door.

“With the Master Foragers program, we gained a new appreciation of something that was there all along. Nature means a lot more once we can look at it through a different lens,” Wassel said.

That same enthusiasm for learning extends to grown-ups.

Special Photo: UGA