Kids Day Camp: Wild Cooking & Herbology
Details
Give your child the gift of our Wild Cooking & Herbology day camp which is excellent for focused learners ages 8-15, and seven year olds okay if they attended a prior camp, if attending with older sibling, or if really focused in group teaching situations. Campers are grouped with others closest to their age within our hallmark 6-1 average student-teacher ratio that’s so critical for safe and profound outdoor experiences.
##### July 28 – Aug 1, 2025 Wild Cooking & Herbology Day Camp Description
Wild Cooking & Herbology is celebrating its 27th summer as we continue our mission to provide real skills and connections in nature for a new generation of young people who need this experience more than ever. Enjoy the fields, forests, streams, ponds, and backyards of Puyallup’s beautiful Clark’s Creek Park and Blue Skye Farm as we discover wild foods and medicines reflecting all the gifts that Pacific Northwest plants have to offer.
Campers will work with even more than the Top 10 Most Important Survival Plants of our area, and be able to identify their look-alikes. The kids will also learn to start and use fire safely, cook with ancient and modern methods, spin natural rope, purify drinking water, and come home with oils and creams they blended with herbs to heal common ailments, among other accomplishments.
We wish parents could watch the unfolding of this camp week, because the journey for these young chefs and healers is amazing. From discovering wild foods and medicine, to investigating their properties, to fully utilizing their gifts, and finally being able to tell their true stories, campers develop more real skill than you might imagine.
Camp includes optional wading/swimming and games/archery during lunchtime, depending on annual park rules, camper safety tests, weather and other conditions.
##### August 18-22, 2025 Advanced Herbal Medicine, Cooking & Craft Day Camp
Advanced Herbal requires successful attendance at Wild Cooking & Herbology or two other Wolf Camp programs earlier this summer or in past years. The advanced camp provides participants with an opportunity to go deeper into the skills of ethnobotany. Each day, participants will produce at least one herbal project and one wild foods/cooking project. Roast cattails over open flame, process nettles into a delicious pesto, drink delicious teas, and produce medicinal salves and glycerites to help heal maladies**. The goal** of this week is to provide participants with additional hands-on learning about Wild Edible Foods & Herbal Medicine. Skills covered include:
- How to understand the meaning of plant characteristics (astringents, etc.);
- How to harvest, process and administer the most important medicinal herbs of the northwest;
- How to honorably harvest and process plants;
- How to make fire, cook over an open fire, and “rock boil”;
- How to make rope from stinging nettle, cattail; cedar bark, and fire weed;
- How to harvest and cook with cattails, and hazelnuts;
- How to dry and store herbs to take home, make herbal chocolates;
- How to purify water naturally for cleansing wounds and making teas;
- Practice wilderness medicine emergency response scenarios;
- How to make and maintain fire in any weather, and witness traditional fire by friction;
- Learn Easy Plant Drawing and complete Journal Entries on your healing plants, and on corresponding poisonous plants;
- How to dry and store herbs;
- How to make salves, oils, tinctures and other medicines to take home.