Interested in learning about edible plants in New Hampshire? Join us for an evening with Russ Cohen as he talks about foraging wild plants locally. Russ Cohen, a naturalist and wild foods enthusiast, grew up in Weston, Mass., where he spent much of his free time in the woods, thereby cultivating a strong spiritual connection to nature. 

Russ' first formal exposure to edible wild plants occurred while a sophomore at Weston High School, where he enrolled in an "Edible Botany" mini-course offered by the high school biology department. He learned about two dozen edible species that grew around the high school grounds, and the class had a big "feed" at the end of the course. Russ got turned on to the subject, went to the local library and took out every book he could find on the topic, taught himself over fifty more species, and, in his senior year of high school (1974), he taught the Edible Botany class he had taken as a sophomore. Russ added edible wild mushrooms to his teaching repertoire in 1989 after returning home from a trip to the Soviet Union, where he caught the mushroom-hunting bug from the Russians.