Veld and Sea Spring Flower Workshop

Veld and Sea is the most incredible wild food foraging company. Located in the deep South of Cape Town, Veld and Sea offers amazing immersive experiences in nature. Their foraging workshops are seasonal, cycling through coastal foraging in summer, mushroom and wild food foraging in autumn and winter and flower foraging in spring. The workshops are hosted in their glasshouse and wild gardens in Cape Point and will take you on a wild food foraging and culinary experience.

Last year I had the privilege of attending the Veld and Sea Spring Flower Workshop and it was honestly one of the best experiences I’ve had! This beautifully and mindfully curated workshop takes you through a full flower experience. From flower crown making, creating your own bouquets, learning about the various medicinal properties of edible flowers, going for a walk through the spring flower garden picking edibles flowers for your lunch, preparing a full course flower-power lunch and finally enjoying your vibrant and pretty feast.

The workshop is hosted in the gorgeous Veld and Sea kitchen cabin, glasshouse and gardens by the amazingly knowledgeable Roushanna Gray. The day begins with everyone bringing their various bouquets of flowers and coming together to create their own unique flower crowns and flower bouquets while sipping on a delicious home brewed tea with subtle floral notes.

The foraging then begins as you walk through the Veld and Sea gardens picking petals from poppies, pelargoniums, nasturtiums, wild garlic, rocket flowers cape sweet peas and cornflowers. It’s a beautiful experience picking your own food from the garden and then seeing how the raw ingredients can be used to create delicious dishes.

You then move into the kitchen to prepare a wide variety of delicious dishes with your beautiful flowers. Last year the menu featured botanical cocktails, vegan flower sushi, floral rice paper spring rolls, a spring salad, bread with flower butter and floral shortbread with ice cream and berries for dessert. I think this menu changes with each workshop so you’ll be sure to experience a variety of new flavours. Last year we split into groups and each prepared an element of the feast. But this year with COVID protocols in place, an in-house chef prepares most of the food for you demo-style and you prepare elements of your own meal.

          

I absolutely adored every minute of this floral experience. As a flower child it brought me such joy to experience flowers in a completely different way and learn new things about them. I would highly recommend this Veld and Sea Spring Flower workshop to anyone who is interested in foraging, wild food, or considers themselves a flower lover or a foodie. It’s immersive, it’s beautiful, it’s fun and it’s so different to anything else you’ll experience. It sparked a new curiosity in me and I now love learning about the edible plants around me and enjoy experimenting with wild ingredients like carissa berries and veld kool.

To see their upcoming Spring Flower workshop dates visit their website. The cost is R700 per person and worth every cent!

A note on Covid-19 safety from Veld and Sea:

To ensure the health and safety of everyone attending our foraging events, we require all attendees to fill in and return a declaration form 24 hours before attendance and make sure to read and sign our Covid-19 protocols in place on our workshops. All attendees to please bring their own hand sanitizers and masks.

If you can’t make the workshops this year then be sure to follow them on Instagram for incredible foodie foraging inspiration. If you can’t get enough of the flower experience then why not plan a trip to see the wild flowers? I’ve written a full guide on how to plan your trip here. 

Why not turn your outing to Veld and Sea into a little weekend getaway. You can spend the weekend in the gorgeous Veld and Sea Surf Shack or stay in Scarborough at The Owl and The Pussy Cat.