Nurturing Wild Foods.

It has been a interest of mine to boost up wild food sources. For instance I've been thinking about trying to plant wild rice in my flood waters, it may take it may not. There is wild rice through out places in Michigan.

Also I have wondered about the trimming wild fruit trees. There are many apple trees and such scattered about. A trim job may increase yield. Not sure about juneberries, wild cherries, cranberries etc.

I have a few patches of artichokes AKA sunchokes planted here and there. There are a few huge patches of leeks or ramps scattered bout my territory .

There are probably other ideas, any thoughts?

 

Yes, plant perennial weeds or specifically those invasive types that reseed themselves. There are also perennial vegetables that don't look like food to most people and are hardy enough to thrive without human intervention.

I got a lot of ideas from the book, How to Grow Perennial Vegetables by Martin Crawford. Although it was published in the UK, it covers many plants that grow in the USA and elsewhere. It is the most comprehensive and enjoyable book in its niche that I have ever seen. The title specifies vegetables, but it covers a lot of "weeds" as well.

The cheapskate that I am, I was happy to find a bargain in Amazon.com's used book section.


.

 

Some plants that come to mind that will grow in your area are hazel nuts, wild grapes, arrow root, cattails, mayapple, blueberries, wild strawberries, pawpaw's, black currant and of course blackberries and raspberries.

Another thought for you is till up and plant deer/wildlife food plots that include New Zealand radish and plant daikon radish and turnips in with them.

Wild rice will grow if you have a constant water flow and mud flats with a water depth of 6 to 12 inches in the summer. Good mudflats work great. I lived and worked a National Wildlife Refuge in northern MN that had lots of rice and was harvested by the local tribe. If you don't have a consistent water depth in your pond/lake I wouldn't waste my money on planting rice. The lakes on the NWR that produced the best rice also seemed to have lots of leeches. How's your leech population. People harvested them in MN and sold them as fish bait. Do they do that in MI?

In MI have you considered planting oats. Many people just think it's a type of grass and it would give you another harvest item.

Dale

 

There is a wonderful type of oats called "Hulless Oats" which is a LOT easier to process than the regular kind. I've never tried it, but the hulls on regular oats are said to be incredibly difficult to remove without special equipment.


.

 

well i gotta be honest...i have tried over and over and over to do guerilla gardening...not one thing has ever been harvested.i once got a batch of potatoes up about waste high and thought this might work. only to find a few days later them browsed to the ground.theres very few things that live unbrowsed by whitetail deer.i hear people say they wont eat this and that...all bull in my book. i even put jalapenos out and they not only ate the peppers they came back and ate the leaves off...lol...i do plant stuff in my forest to harvest and some things thrive like ramps. but its not high volume calories.my cattails were decimated by 3 muskrats and that was the end of that. theres calories in a forest from various nuts and some fruits like apple and pear but theres a reason most..not all...indians had agriculture plots. also the high calorie items are only seasonal so if you miss gathering them.well its going to be a very long year. survival is a calories game period...i tried some theories out and found out theres items you cant eat enough to live on.its physically impossible to digest enough to extract the calories and i witnessed this myself 30 years ago from certain people i was around on west coast.

certain items were boiled down to concentrate calories too. like apple butter..today its really applesauce..back in the day it was made very different..hence the name apple butter..it was thick like a cube of butter not this apple sauce stuff of today. if you wanna learn more about it look up skillcult/steven edholm on utube and he ferreted out some very old info about it in some very old writing back in the day.i posted his info on a survival forum once...dam crickets mostly. real world info...fell by the wayside.

i am going ahead and say it..no agriculture ...no life...mostly..not in all situation but mostly...other wise its going to take alot of fats/oils from big game and fish.

 

Good morning Elkhound,

You clarified something that had me baffled / confounded / confused for years. Apple butter of some time ago was made differently and was "thick like a cube of butter".

Merci !

 

real apple butter is good, my wife has made it a few times. Some of y'all may have seen a apple butter pot and not realized that it is a apple butter pot, surely it was used for other things too. A apple butter pot was typically made from copper with a heavy iron rim and bail. It was made like a cauldron. Now days folks use apple butter pots for décor.

Thanks for all the replies. I have often wondered about different things. For example I have read that harvesting wild rice will help the rice beds propagate. That got me to wondering about other things like camas, some natives utilized camas. Did the harvesting improve the beds? Also I have read that the natives nurtured flocks of turkeys, not really domesticated but not really wild either.

 

I practice guerrilla gardening anywhere I plan to be for awhile or in places I go back to alot. People just do not seem to recognize food in it's natural form so no one usually bothers what I have planted.

 

Elkhound, sounds like your deer herd is at the over populated state. They were like that here at home about 10 years ago. Then winter kill and disease did what the state wouldn't and dropped the population. If the property is yours, have you considered a wildlife management plan and controlling the wildlife populations? Just a thought.

My family has been making applebutter for generations. As a little kid (4-5) I can remember the family getting together at my grannies (large family) and working up applebutter for days. That large copper kettle with the fire under it was a thing of beauty. I LOVE applebutter, but processing it the old way just wasn't a possibility for me. So we found out that we can make it in a crock pot. Takes a full day and sometimes longer if you have hard apples and it reduces the apples about 4 to 1 ratio. We canned 25 quarts of applebutter this summer and froze another 20 gallons of peeled and cut up apples for fried apples. Apples and homemade biscuits are impossible to beat.

Dale