About
Jane ‘hedgecomber’ Sarchet has built a successful career online as a food writer and presenter.
She started her food blog, hedgecombers.com way back in 2008, and since then has gone on to qualify as a photographer with a special interest in food photography.
Her fun YouTube channel led to a TV series, The Hedgecombers, being filmed in the summer of 2019. This 6 part show features Jane and her cute camper van Myrtle and officially launched on Amazon Prime in 2020.
After everything else that unfolded in 2020 she, like so many others, started seeing the world a little differently and strived for a slower and deeper way of life. The ‘busyness’ she thrived on before suddenly became alien. The hustle and drive of running an online business failed to fulfil as it once had, and she looked inward to find a more traditional and creative way of working and being.
With a previous career as an acupuncturist working in both private clinics and with cancer patients in the NHS, and many years of foraging and using wild and garden plants for food and medicine, she started formally studying herbalism.
This led to the insight that more than the individual needed healing which is when she took an intensive Permaculture Design Course.
This was the missing piece.
She’d finally returned to the land physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Working with leather
As a small child, her parents moved from Guernsey in the Channel Islands to a small farm in Cornwall.
Growing up she would bottle feed orphan lambs before school, then months later help her Dad with the butchery of these same lambs.
“I have no doubt that these early childhood memories instilled in me a deep sense of respect for the livestock in our fields, and the meat on our plate”.
Jane is vocal in her work as a food writer about the inhumane treatment of animals in the ‘cheap meat’ industry, and gently urges her readers to buy ‘less, but better’ when shopping for meat.
And so working with leather, a waste product of the meat industry, become the natural next step in her journey in life and in business.
“I love working with leather as it’s so tactile and hard wearing. As it will eventually biodegrade and return to the soil, in my mind it’ll always be a better solution than using fake ‘vegan’ leathers that are ultimately just plastic. The world’s got enough of a plastic problem.
Instead I purchase high quality, veg-tanned leather and strive to make beautiful and useful pieces that I hope will be used and loved for decades to come.”
You can find Jane’s leather work on this website, plus hundreds of free recipes on her food blog hedgecombers.com.
She is on various social media channels (search for @hedgecomber) and loves to connect with followers and fans over on her Substack channel. Do go and say hi, she’d love to chat!