Mindful Gathering

Writer: Mads Wolter Nielsen

18.01.23

Sea Buckthorn

What is ‘sanke’ or ‘mindfull gathering’?

If you have ever begun a day of apple-picking or talked to people that find their own ingredients to use in their cooking, then maybe you have come across this term ‘sanke’ obviously only if you’re in Denmark. In English I’m not sure the exact term translates, therefore from here-on-out I will refer to sankning as mindful gathering.

No matter if you have come across this term before or not. It is a well-defined term. Mindful gathering means that you gather from nature with consideration, consideration that others might also want to gather this herb or from this place where you are, and also consider whether or not, you gathering this herb, mineral or whatever, is damaging to the environment around where it grows. For instance on some fields like meadows or heathlands, some very pretty flowers grow, flowers like orchids, these flowers might incidentally be very important to a number of species living on that meadow, so removing this orchid would inhibit the species associated with the orchid from living there. Obviously you can’t know everything there is to know about threatened wildlife and endangered species, but there are some good rules of thumb to help you navigate in this:

How do you do it

It should be obvious to anyone that how you gather ingredients from nature will vary greatly in according with the exact ingredient you are gathering, for instance picking apples in contrast to picking carrots. And even if it is not obvious to you, have no worries, I will teach you all you need to know, for you to be able to start mindful gathering.

The most important thing when doing mindful gathering, is to leave some of the plant to give it the possibility to continue growing in that spot. This cannot be done with all things you can gather, but in most cases, it will be possible for you to either leave enough of the plant behind, that it can continue growing or sprout again next season, or you can help spreading the plants seeds around. The next most important thing to remember, is not to “empty the pantry” if you have found a good spot to gather for example mushrooms or a certain herb or berry. Think about how other people would also probably like to pick some of those resources, and that you might want to visit the spot later yourself and pick these things again. By gathering mindfully, we can ensure that the occurrence of a given herb, fruit or other continue to exist in the place we found it. This way we can conserve the balance there is in the nature in the place we are picking resources from.

In summation. Pick no more than what you need and make sure to not damage the plant, organism or environment more than absolutely necessary for you to gather the resource. That is how you do mindful gather.

Why should I gather mindfully?

We Humans are very efficient in using and make use of nature, this is why we have been able to colonize almost the entire world and build grand and wonderous societies. But the word “use” has connotations to an unbalance that has let us to overuse resources and this means we have exhausted and are exhausting some of the world’s resources and we continue to do this. To combat this, we need to return to our ancestral roots as hunter-gatherer societies. I do not mean technologically but philosophically. The hunter-gatherers were great mindful-gatherers because their lives and the lives of their future generations were dependent on them, being able to come back the next year or years and gather the same resource. When you are mindfully gathering you are in most cases directly and in all cases indirectly helping the nature, all while getting something nice to eat.

Did you know

Many plants have evolved specifically for us to eat them? They are life-dependent on us (animal dispersers) to eat their fruits thereby ingesting their seed which is spread when the animal dispersers then defecate the seed out somewhere and fecal matter even provide a nice nutrient rich mulch/soil for the plant to grow in. other plants have evolved ways for animal dispersion without being ingested or to better be able to grow if it gets trampled underfoot, still depending on us, the animals, to visit the nature. Other than helping nature, mindful-gathering is a great way to utilize the plentiful and delicious resources that can be locally sourced from few miles from our own front door, and there is nothing more delightful than preparing a meal with locally sourced, self-gathered, wild-growing, seasonal ingredients.         

I hope, by now, you are interested in trying out mindful-gathering, maybe you know of a great place like a forest, meadow or other type of natural habitat. If you are not quite ready to go out and start gathering herbs and other ingredients. You can follow this blog, as we will be going more in to detail of what you need to know before going out at gathering food in nature. Next week will be all about what to know before a mindful-gathering trip and what tools to bring.

I hope you enjoyd reading this blog. As always, we at Yggdrasil Sanctuary love to hear from you, so if you have any questions about this post, what to gather or you have a question about something completely different, feel free to contact us either by our email or DM us on the various social media platforms we are on.

Have a great week and stay natural. 

Cheers,

Mads