There are many items on youtube to help identify wonderful plants. I will be harvesting cattails next week and Iooked out on the front lawn today and it was almost covered in 'heals all'. I am very happy.
It grows almost everywhere. My lambs quarters are past being tasty, as is my nettle but this is good to throw a bit into salads and make some medicine with.
REALLY. It is best to have a stockpile of your normal supplies. To start from nothing makes you have to survive, sometimes barely, not thrive. I will not have a lot of 'wild' food stockpiled; some but not a lot. If it turned really bad, I would farm some of the 'wild' stuff next year more than normal and put more up.
This is exactly how I look at it, too, @Mary Stetler . There is no way, at my age and health problems, that I can just survive on things I can grow and find around my area. I have been gradually stocking up on foods that Bobby and I already eat, so we know that we can eat these foods as a more complete diet if necessary. Wild greens can go into a pot of beans, cooked with part of a can of spam for flavoring. Or they can go with a meal of rice and tuna fish, as steamed/sautéed greens. If the shortages are bad this summer, we will have some foods from our little garden to help out, but no where near enough for a survival garden. Since we live in the south, we have wild edibles of some sort for most of the year, at least enough to add to a plain meal. Bobby planted a lot of clover, which makes a beautiful green lawn, and both the leaves and the flowers are edible, and it lasts most of the year. I have been trying to explain this to my son in Washington, but he just keeps saying that his wife wants regular grass in her lawn. In the winter we have the wild onion/garlic (whichever it is ?), and that would add flavor to the dried beans or rice, too. I ordered some of the storable food from Augason Farms, but (for us) it is pretty expensive. The Morning Moos whey milk mixed with dry powdered milk makes it taste like regular whole milk, and works for cereals and foods that need milk.
Good Girl! There are not a lot of sources to tell the vitamins and minerals in each of the weeds but they are often more than in the veggies and fruit in the stores which might take days to get from farm to table. Our food is often irradiated to 'kill bacteria' but it destroys vitamins and enzymes in our foods and makes seeds unsproutable. A conspiracist like me could surmise that the dark side is doing it, not to help us, but for other reasons. Mature people need extra vitamins and minerals, not less; and apple cider vinegar or extra acid in our stomachs to help us digest protein. I get it in capsules to keep my enamel. Not trying to be preachy but Heartburn is often from too little acid, not too much.
One of the best places for information that is easy to understand about wild edibles and their nutrition is Victoria Boutenko’s book, Green For Life. Both she and her son, Sergei Boutenko have some awesome videos on youtube that help identify common wild edibles also. Sergei lives in western Oregon, but he picks plants that are fairly widespread and can be found in most of the United States. Here is a short tutorial from Sergei, and there are many more on the youtube channel for his family.
mary...we've been looking thru some of those videos and learning is a process...we have chicken of the woods on an old oak stump here....was beautiful the past 2 years... it's turned white and brittle this year...I thought it would come back from it's spores...it didn't
That is sad. I LOVE that mushroom! Look around the neighborhood, might be more in time to come. I think it comes here in August.
We just had all those thousands and thousands of beef cattle supposedly die from heat in Kansas (climate change, naturally), now there is a whole train full of coal that derailed in Kansas, too . I was just looking at Twitter and it is showing a whole pasture of dead sheep, somewhere in Georgia , and they are claiming that a lightning strike killed around 500 sheep, all spread out in their pasture. I know we just had storms, and lightning could have killed sheep, but a whole pasture full seems pretty unlikely to me. Prices are going to skyrocket even more now ! We have all of the cattle , chickens and sheep dying, Smithfield Farms closing their plants, and food processing plants being destroyed at an unthinkable rate. This cannot be all accidentally happening all at once, one thing after another.
I was not going to get any more chickens. We have enough for our own but there is a mandate out from this spring that no commercial chickens can be transported or brought to bird swaps because of possible spread of bird flu. We are to keep our chickens from associating with wild birds too. Uhhmmmm Someone needs to tell the swallows and sparrows and sometimes pigeons that inhabit barns. Also, I don't know what parties my guys go to while Iam not there or who is pooping in the fields. What is that weather controller up in Alaska? Haarp? Harrp? Hharrp? rumored to be able to be weaponized?
Back in the 50s when I was young my Grandmother would have a little garden and always planted things that were easy to grow. We had fresh okra and corn and greens and of course tomatoes. She was really good at making that hot sauce using her Christmas peppers growing in large plant pots on the front porch. Just simple vinegar and peppers aged a bit. We were for the most part Beans and Rice eaters but each meal per night was always different. It was always fresh rolls and cornbread and pork chops or chicken. Her holiday meals were just super good, some of the best dressing with oysters and gravy. She would put a small amount of chopped celery into the dressing and I loved that.