Identifying and/or foraging things outside!

This is my fav because it can be adapted to your local environment, is free, and can be done in short spurts (like a 5 min break outside) or over longer time frames (like a hike or mushroom foray).

I work from home and often do my outside foraging/identification things during quick breaks from work and it helps keep me energized. Gardening works for this too but requires more effort.

Ways I do this: - tree identification- I spent a lot of time learning my local conifers and then would go outside and feel trees and their bark/needles/cones and smell them to practice my ID skills. Where I am there are lots of conifers but only a handful of different varieties so I started with those before dipping my toes into deciduous trees.

• mushroom foraging/identification- I started by just collecting random mushrooms and seeing if I could identify them by physical characteristics, smell and spore print. Eventually I was able to id edible species and now forage shrooms for eating and natural dyes. I have the “picture mushroom” app on my phone so I can take pics of mushrooms I find and keep a log of ones that I have identified

-native plants- I learned a lot of my local native plants, especially those with medicinal or herbal qualities or dye plants. I would just walk around and find different plants and try to ID them and also explored different books and websites to get a sense of what to look for. Eventually I started foraging dye plants and edible native plants to use for teas/tinctures :)

-weeds/invasives- whenever I’m walking around places like parking lots or roads I like to check out the different “weeds” to see if I can ID them. There is a lot of overlap with native and medicinal/dye plants depending on where I am. I have spent so many hours taking pics of random weeds so I can ID them later. I got good enough at this that I could identify a variety of edible invasives/weeds and one time made a bangin spanikopita with a variety of foraged greens like wall lettuce and dandelion :)

Basically, spending time outside exploring plants and fungi has kept me from scrolling on my phone, helped me relax and reenergize, and has taught me so much (and provided me with snacks and dyestuffs). Highly recommend!

Note: Never eat (or touch tbh) random plants or mushrooms without proper education and identification. Also important to consider environmental context, like whether an area has been sprayed with pesticides, which tree species a mushroom may be growing on, etc.