How to save £500 a year by foraging

That figure seems quite high doesn’t it, and so it should as £500 could buy you a huge amount of food. There are only two problems with achieving this level of savings, with the first being the time it takes to forage, and the second being how comfortable you are with eating certain things.

(When it comes to saving money by foraging, it’s more about the time you have and what you’re happy eating)

For example, at the time of writing this a small 200-gram bag of baby spinach is going for £1.50 at Sainsbury’s and could be eaten by just one person in a main meal. Nettle leaves have very similar nutritional values to spinach and are even cooked in exactly the same way. All you need is a pair of gloves and you can fill a shopping bag with nettle leaves in under an hour in the right area.

Simply grab the stem at the base and run your hand firmly up to the top, pulling off all the leaves as you go. You can gather any amount you want using this method and as for the example, if you ate a 200-gram bag of £1.50 spinach every other day, that’s a total of just under £275 over the course of the year. It would take you no more than 30 minutes to stock up on nettles once a week, and that one ingredient gets you more than halfway to the £500 mark.

The problem with spinach is that most people normally wouldn’t choose it for themselves, and certainly don’t eat it every day. But for those who don’t like the taste, there are so many other salad-type leaves out there, and plants like burdock can grow in huge patches and make a great potato substitute.

Summer jams are another great saver, as they can last the whole year and if you find a good enough spot, you can gather a year’s supply of jam in a single day.

(It works out at around 20p in ingredients to make a pot of jam from foraged berries)

The best thing to do is find out what you have in your area and learn to use it as a replacement for the things you already eat. This is especially easy if you live near the coast as it adds seafood and plants like samphire to the menu. Whenever I go to the best cockleing spot in Wales, which is Llansteffan by the way, I normally end up with a load of fresh cockles that would cost around £25 in the shops for the same weight.

Flavorings like making your own wild mustard and horse radish also go a long way when it comes to saving money, with homemade wild garlic sauce being a personal favorite.

If you like to have a drink once in a while, making your own alcohol saves a massive amount, depending on how much you drink and how good you get at making it. It will cost no more than £50 to buy all the necessary bits and pieces you’ll need to start fermenting, but after the setup, it costs less than £10 to make a 5-gallon batch, of which you’ll get at least 2 dozen bottles. If you can get bottles for free or just so happen to have a small wine barrel casually lying around, then you can produce a bottle of wine yourself for between 30p and 40p.