After walking the dogs, I leave them in the house with Callum and walk along the many, meandering lanes through Gorsley and over the old Hereford and Gloucester canal at Oxenhall  to Brown and Green, an award-winning farm and local food shop at 3 Shires Garden Centre that my internet searching has turned up. (Word of mouth is slower to work; though writing this retrospectively, it would have come onto my radar soon enough from the number of people who seem to be aware of it.)

I am, unsurprisingly, hungry this morning, but to the worrying extent that I am hyperaware of all signs of food, including that which has already passed through other creatures: I find myself photographing cherry stones and wheat husks in poo – the latter badger, the former I’m not so sure. An unripe crab apple, fallen onto the road and squashed makes me feel momentarily mournful.

I’m also thinking more and more about foraging. Having read both Food for Free (Richard Mabey, of course) and Wild Food (Roger Phillips) years ago, I’ve long been obsessed with scanning hedgerows whilst riding and running, particularly in the spring when the first succuluent greens start coming through. I have been making all the obvious things for years: nettle soup and tea, Jack-by-the-hedge salad, elderflower fritters and cordial, blackberry crumble and sloe gin and giant puffball steaks. But otherwise, my interest in foraging has been more of an academic one: feeding my brain rather than belly. Revisiting those books now, I’m struck by how many of the recipes require significant amounts of additional produce – potatoes, butter, milk, eggs, flour, meat and fish – to make the foraged leaves into meals substantial enough to be filling. Quite often they’re more about flavouring and interest, and possibly texture, rather than calorific sustenance. (This is an observation that JoSh also wryly makes in his video blog, after a very difficult week of trying to survive purely on foraged (‘bitter’) leaves. I write an email in response to his blog, offering sympathy and agree ‘Like you say, foraging for sustenance came before we had full-time jobs – foraging WAS a full-time job, together with resting to preserve energy! ). Nevertheless, today I find myself drawn – by its scent, very sweet and almondy in the hot sun – to meadowsweet. I’ve just been reading about its use as a flavouring and sweetener, in tea, puddings and custard. There is something about its frothy heads of flower that is redolent of the richness of cream. A kind of synaesthetic olfactory-visual onomatopoeia.

After a quick duck under the shade of Cold Harbour Bridge on the disused Hereford and Gloucester canal at Oxenhall (sections of which are currently under restoration), I plod on to the main road and pass a series of sprawling garden centres (including Gloucestershire’s most inspirational plant centre apparently: I walk past). I arrive at Brown and Green. It’s like a traditional delicatessen-cum-farm shop, personal and homely and well-stocked but somewhat incongruously set in a massive, department-store style garden centre. I explain to the sales assistant what I am doing and she is instantly friendly and takes time to talk me around all the produce, making recommendations and knowing where every single thing has come from and how it was grown.

It’s very impressive and I fill a basket with as much as I think I can carry back: mushrooms, carrots, beans and peas, apple juice, May Hill ale (though I later realise that possibly the hops weren’t grown quite within my walking radius, sigh) and nettle-coated Charles Martell cheese (May Hill Green), made up the road in Dymock with their own Old Gloucester milk. I sit on a bench outside and wolf down the cheese with my salad leaves and broad beans.

On the way back, I fall into step with another walker, who’s joined my route from a different footpath. Slighlty awkwardly, we fall into conversation and she tells me she has lived rurally without a car for over three years. She cycles everywhere and when she can’t she walks, as she explains in the following audio (apologies for the poor audio quality; there was a breeze and I forgot my wind-jammer):

And finally within a few miles of home and passing back through Withymoor Farm, a dairy  at Aston Crews, I stop to ask if they sell any of their products on the farm. They don’t, but we fall into conversation anyway and I find myself being shown around the space-age tardis-like wood-chip water heater that runs two houses and a whole dairy unit. Now an audio documentation geek, naturally I record it:

And then walk the dogs again when I get home…