I have moved away from using aluminium foil in cooking and wrapping, partly because a lot of aluminium is not good for your health and we have quite enough of it in our food additives. And partly because aluminium foil does not bio-grade for about 250 years. But mostly because the fig tree is still staring me in the face. I think of it as the buffalo tree – as in Native American Indians – we are utilizing all parts of it, wood, fruit, leaves not just for food but for other household uses.

But I’m not suggesting we should wear fig leaves (I think that’s been done before! ).
Cooking with fig leaves works… and smells deliciously coco nutty. But I wondered if there were other natural alternatives. A little research informs me that dock leaves were used in the past to wrap cheese. Some sources on the internet say that the dock leaf is poisonous, while others, such as The Spruce, say young dock leaves can be eaten as a spinach substitute?

Pic by Jo Green

I think most people can resist the urge to binge on them! So I have tried dock leaves to wrap cheese once it has been opened instead of using MORE plastic bags or aluminium foil.

Alternatives to dock leaves for food wrapping are vine, bamboo and plantain leaves. The bamboo leaves seemed too narrow to wrap anything other than a single strand of spaghetti! The wider leaf plantain was good for quite a few sea buckthorn berries.
I guess the bamboo leaves might be good for tying – guess that’s my next experiment!
N.B. If you go picking wild alternatives please make sure you know your plantains from your parsnips as some plants are poisonous.

Pic by Jo Green

Words and pics by Jo Green, a former allotmenteer, forager, amateur herbalist, pickler and jam maker who squeezed her allotment greenery into her tiny garden