SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2026

10 AM - 4:30 PM

HONEYBEE HOMESTEAD

McDonalds Corners ON

Have you ever eaten the first wild greens of spring? '

The pungent, earthy flavour that awakens your senses and signals to your body that spring has sprung. It only exists once a year, wild, freshly picked, from the forest.

Forest, Feast & Wild Craft is a day in the forest at the height of spring's first flush. The air is warm. The scent of damp earth and emerging green rises up to meet you before you've even stepped off the trail. Leaves opening. The forest floor covered in dappled light - a brief window before the canopy closes in and the season shifts. Spring reveals her rhythm in these delicate yet potent first greens.

A celebration of spring with a morning wander, a shared meal and afternoon wild edible preparations to take home - with room for seasonal surprises and spontaneity.

Into the forest

As we wander to and through the forest, you'll come to see what's always been growing around you - wild leeks, stinging nettles, violets, strawberry plants and more - not as plants to be collected and used, rather as allies. As friends who have been waiting for you to slow down long enough to notice them. You'll come to know them, identify them, honourably harvest and taste them while in the forest.

You'll come to learn a way of harvesting that is relational - one that ensures the plants thrive, abundantly and sustainably - rooted in reciprocity and an understanding of the plant's lifecycle and needs.

Along the way, you'll come to know the plants gradually, expecting, as we would with any friends, to deepen your relationship over time.

You'll cook, eat, and create together

In community, we'll prepare a simple wild meal from the harvest and handcrafted wild preparations to take home - a condiment, a remedy, weaving these wild foods into your everyday life. You'll also learn ways of processing and storing plants to take you through the season.

What past participants are saying:

“Thanks for putting this on. I’m looking forward to meeting other like-minded people and getting some hands on skills about herbs!” 

— J

“I personally enjoyed the full experience, with like-minded people and connections to nature and nurturing ourselves in and with nature. I plan on attending more day programs in the future.”
— S

“Melissa, it was such a lovely day! It was rejuvenating and exactly what I needed. If you do more like this, I’m in!”
— L

What to bring

• A water bottle

• Dress for the weather - layers recommended

• Sturdy footwear for uneven terrain

• Tick protection - tucked pants, long sleeves, and bug spray

As this walk takes place on a working farm, we ask that pets stay at home. If you require a guide dog, please reach out ahead of time.

On the trail

This gathering runs rain or shine. Be prepared to walk up to 5 km off-trail on uneven ground. Please note this day is not fully accessible due to uneven terrain.

What you'll carry home

Handcrafted wild preparations you made yourself - condiments, a remedy - ready to weave into your everyday for weeks to come.

The ability to identify the plants growing around you, season after season. To know when to return, how to harvest, when to leave the rest. Observing, listening, asking for permission.

A way of harvesting that is relational - rooted in reciprocity, in the plant's lifecycle, in leaving things better than you found them. Once you’ve walked this path, this becomes a way of being.

Simple ways to prepare and preserve wild foods that extend well beyond this day - into your kitchen, your medicine cabinet, your morning walks.

A sense of community with people who feel this pull the same way you do.

And something harder to name - a remembering. That the forest has always provided. That you are part of this ecosystem, not separate from it. That the land and you are interdependent.

This is the kind of knowing that compounds - from season to season.

What takes root

There is something that happens when you begin to truly know plants. More than their names, their timing. The way they announce themselves before you've even looked down. That kind of knowing settles into you and doesn't leave.

One spring morning, you'll be walking somewhere ordinary and you'll see the plants pushing through last year's leaves and something in you awakens. You're in relationship with the land now. And the land is marking time with you.

Wild foods offer a vitality cultivated ones increasingly cannot. Nutrition shaped by this soil, this watershed, this exact turn of the season. Alive in a way that's hard to name but easy to feel.

When we know the plants, we protect them. We harvest in ways that let them return - more abundant, not less. The land thrives because we are tending to it. We thrive because the land is well. This is reciprocity.

You are not separate from this ecosystem. You never were. And remembering that - season after season, plant by plant - is one of the most nourishing things you can do. For yourself. For the places you love. For the ones who come after.

Come open handed and open hearted. Leave nourished - and remembering that you were never separate from any of this.

Who we are

Melissa has been in relationship with the plants since 2009 - when, as a farm intern, she first knelt down in a wild leek patch and everything changed.

In the years since, she has farmed, foraged, wildcrafted and tended the land through every season. She was part of the founding class of the Sacred Gardener School, where her practice expanded her relationship with the plants and deepened her spiritual connection with life on Earth. For the past eleven springs, she has been rooted at Honeybee Homestead in Elphin - watching the wild leek patch expand, learning the rhythms of this particular piece of land, and coming to understand that belonging to a place is its own kind of knowing.

She grows, wildcrafts, ferments, and prepares foods, teas, medicines and herbal oils — guided by folk herbalism, animism, and a lens of stewardship. The plants, to her, are allies. The land, a teacher.

There is nothing in nature that doesn't belong. That knowing lives at the heart of everything she shares.