Sustainable Foraging

SUSTAINABLE FORAGING

  •  Once you’re confident about your first-hand experience identifying a wild plant, you know the right time of year to harvest, and you feel the calling to pick and use it for food or healing remedies, the best way to do that is to grow it yourself or harvest it from a friend who has it on his/her land or from a farm that is growing it. If you choose to harvest in the wild, please do so in a mindful and respectful way.
  • The Chumash and other Indigenous tribes give thanks and ask permission of the plants before picking. This may be done in the form of a prayer, a song, a little water, or a small offering of a sacred herb or something symbolic of the plant’s value. Juanita Centeno, my Chumash teacher, instructed us to do this upon encountering the first specimen of a native plant we intended to harvest. She told us to then continue looking for the plant where it was abundant before picking.
  • Juanita Centeno’s Way: A 3-Point Guide to Ethical Relationship with Plants
    • Stop and Give Thanks
      Acknowledge the plant as a living being. Pause to recognize its presence and the role it plays in the ecosystem before you consider collecting.
    • Make an Offering
      Establish a “give and take”reciprocity through a gift of value. This can be any or all of these:
      Physical: Tobacco, sage, water (a libation), or any biodegradable item of personal value
      Verbal: A prayer, a song, or a spoken “thank you”
      Actionable: A commitment to the land, such as volunteering for habitat restoration or supporting conservation.
    • Look Around
      If it is the only one you see, or the first of its kind you encounter on your path, leave it be. This ensures the plant’s lineage continues and checks the human impulse to take without regard for the future.
  • Jacque Nuñez of the Acjachemen tribe of the Orange County region gives this simple advice:
    • “Don’t take more than you need.”
    • “Give back.”
    • “Be resourceful.”
  • Off the trail, you can give back to plants, nature, and Indigenous people by supporting organizations like the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, the California Native Plant Society, or the Native American Rights Fund, three of many such groups to which I belong.
  • Learn about the ecological status of your chosen plant in my book Medicinal Herbs of California, at Calflora.com, or the California Native Plant Society’s Inventory of Rare and Endangered Plants. Is it native or introduced? Harvest native plants only where they are abundant or, at the very least, not rare or endangered. Eat the weeds!
  • Pick where local laws allow it and, again, only where sufficient quantities of your chosen plant are growing. Preserves, state parks, and designated USFS campgrounds and wilderness areas are set aside for the public and not intended for harvesting. Some National Forests, such as the Los Padres, do not have an official policy but allow for gathering small quantities of aboveground parts for personal use (i.e, what will fit in a grocery bag.)
  • If you plan to collect plant material in the Los Padres National Forest, here is their most recent statement on collecting permits as of 2/26/26: “We don’t issue those types of permits on the Los Padres currently. You can collect plant material for personal use as long as it is incidental and can be carried in your arms. If you would like to collect more than an incidental amount, you can contact our Southern California zone ecologist, Nicole Molinari at nicole.molinari@usda.gov.” Outside of the Los Padres, permit requests must be submitted to the local Forest Botanist or Zone Ecologist in your region or forest.
  • Collect only the aboveground parts unless you are on private land with permission or you are in possession of a USFS collecting permit. In any case, never take more than 10% of the mass of any single plant. Prune while picking to try to encourage new growth and leave the plant looking better than you found it.
  • For your own protection, do not pick where there are signs of pollution, spraying of herbicides, or alongside paved roads and highways (where most spraying takes place). Dust can be washed off before preparing fresh or drying for storage.

©2026 Lanny Kaufer  HerbWalks.com