There aren't really any short cuts when you start foraging for wild food: no substitute for getting right out there, in the thick of a hedgerow, and learning by trial and error. Me? I'm still just below the novice stage.
There's probably no better illustration of this than the text message mix-up I have with Adele Nozedar, who has been helping me forage high on the hillside above the Welsh town of Llangattock, just after she bids me farewell. "LOADS of ramsons on the lefthand side of the verge as you come down the hill," she writes. "R" is close to "D" on a keyboard so, assuming she's made a typo, I tear off down the hill, with visions of damson gin.
It's only later that I remember the damson season is still a couple of months away and, having consulted Adele's beautifully illustrated, beginner-friendly new wild food guide, The Hedgerow Handbook, realise that "ramson" is another word for wild garlic, which Adele has earlier recommended to me as a flu remedy and garnish for soup.
The 20-square-mile patch of the Brecon Beacons where I'm staying has been called Wales's wild food mecca. It's a place of witchy legends, spectacular craggy vistas and unusually verdant foliage. Self-deprecatingly, Adele refers to herself as "just a hobbyist" in the foraging world, but within a quarter of a mile of the old quarry-worker's cottage where I'm staying, she manages to find water mint, yarrow and sorrel, and also shows me how to eat my first ever nettle (by pulling it from beneath the leaf, folding it inwards, then neutralising the sting between my molars).
In the 1980s, Adele fronted the synth pop band Indians in Moscow – who had minor hits such as "Jack Pelter and His Sex-Change Chicken" – then went on to an A&R job at a major record label. In 1994 she forsook the music business for a former water authority building halfway up a Welsh mountain, three miles from any neighbours, which she purchased from a bearded Elvis impersonator. "I knew I needed to move when I was living in a flat on the Archway Road, collecting dog hair and realised I had enough for a Tam o'Shanter," she tells me.
She's never looked back, and it's easy to see why. From my guest cottage at night, the twinkling lights of the town of Crickhowell in the valley below look like the opening shot of a big-budget movie based on a fairytale, and after I dunk my hair in the clear waters of the nearby River Usk it feels every bit as soft as its lead character's tresses might be.
But as Kevin Walker, the mountain guide who takes me out hiking the following day, explains, it's a misconception that the area is "unspoilt": just over a century ago, this was the heart of industrial Wales. Kevin shows me the tram tracks that remain from where lime was once transported down the hill to the kiln at the bottom. And yesterday on our forage, in an overgrown area several yards from the footpath, Adele and I had stumbled across an overgrown bottle dump: not just any rubbish but vintage rubbish. This place is still in the process of rebeautifying itself.
It's also particularly ripe ground for foragers. Even on the strangely spongy surface of the mountainside, near the quarry, Kevin and I manage to find some wild thyme. Alpine strawberries grow up here, too. This landscape is so vast, there is a feeling that the supply could be inexhaustible, but Adele advises not to take too many plants from one patch, explaining that wild foods (primroses, for example) that were taken for granted when our parents were kids are now scarce.
She compares her foraging ethos to Elizabeth Taylor's jewellery-buying philosophy: "It's not the having, it's the getting." The gathering of wild food puts you in a good place: a meditative state where you're just a person chewing on a leaf, and the future is in the future and the past is in the past. Again and again during my weekend in the Brecon Beacons, I hear wild-food lovers having the same conversation about a point in their life when they reassessed the definition of happiness and realised it was a smaller, day-to-day matter. It seems to go with the territory and, when you're experiencing it first hand, hippie nonsense is the last thing it sounds like.
On my final night, I eat at the Felin Fach Griffin, a restaurant 15 miles north of my foraging territory that specialises in wild produce: almost all of its ingredients come from the Black Mountains Smokery in Crickhowell or the Griffin's very own wild veg garden. Traversing the latter with forager-cook Liz Knight, from the Forage Fine Foods company, I can barely keep up as she hands me sorrel, apple buds, ox-eye daisy and Jack By The Hedge to munch on.
"It's important not to overdo things," says Liz. "A whole plate of wild food would taste like sludge." The tastes of the stuff she gathers do merge into one another slightly, but the ground elder and nettles in my own garden have been a problem recently, and knowing I can eat them makes me feel a bit less defeated.
Back in the restaurant, we combine half-a-dozen of these ingredients with cider vinegar, oil, salt and sugar, to make the best salsa verde I've tasted. It's probably more magical for the instantaneous and hands-on nature of its creation, but I can confirm that, in this case, the having just about has the edge on the getting.
The Hedgerow Handbook by Adele Nozedar is published by Square (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
Essentials
Adele appears at the free Green Man Festival, 17-19 August (greenman.net) and the free Abergavenny Food Festival,15-16 September (abergavennyfoodfestival.com). Brecon Beacons Holiday Cottages (breconcottages.com) provided accommodation. It has cottages for three nights sleeping two from £260. Forage Fine Foods (foragefinefoods.co.uk). The Felin Fach Griffin restaurant (eatdrinksleep.ltd.uk) provided accommodation. It offers doubles from £289 per couple for two nights including breakfast and supper. Kevin Walker Mountain Activities (mountain-activities.com) provided the navigation course, which costs from £80pp per day
