South-side of my home in the burbs.
It is easy to get so caught up with
learning how to homestead, and all that involves, that it is easy to
overlook the obvious things that can help us. Looking no further than
our own yard for sources of food is one of those things. While
eating wild edible food is not a replacement for growing and
harvesting food, it is a good, nutritious, supplement to our
cultivated foods.
The picture above is the south side of
my house in the burbs. In this picture, are at least nine different
sources of food in the yard. Four of them are in plain sight. The
other five you will need to look close in order to find them. (Hint:
Impatiens are not edible as far as I know.) How many food sources can
you find?
Score Card:
9-8 food sources found: Awesome job!!
Let's do lunch sometime. I'll bring a salad. LOL
7-5 food sources found: Hmmmmm you
might want to brush up on wild edible foods.
4-0 food sources found: Maybe the links
below will help you.
I had thought about just listing the
sources for food in the above picture and then talking about each one, but then I thought,
“Isn't becoming self-sufficient about doing it yourself instead of having
others do your work for you?” I have listed some websites
below that are excellent sites for learning about wild edibles so that you may start to learn about edible plants on your own .
Enjoy!! :-)
WARNING: Please make sure that you know to how to use the universal edibility test before consuming any wild plant.
Many wild plants have poisonous look-a-likes. Or, you may find that
you are allergic to that wild food. An excellent site to learn
about this is at
http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/universal-edibility-test1.htm
Websites about edible wild foods to
help you get started:
How to find wild edible plants
http://www.wikihow.com/Find-Wild-Edible-Plants
Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/tracer-bullets/edibleplantstb.html
The Best of Raw Food
http://www.thebestofrawfood.com/wild-edible-plants.html
Thanks for reading and God's Blessings be with you today.
I came up with a -5. Does that count? Nah, just kidding. Excellent post and great links.
ReplyDeleteThank you! :-)
ReplyDeleteBEAUTIFUL yard!!! It looks like something right out of "Better Homes and Gardens". I couldn't find any food in that picture though. I need food in a can from the store. I will check out your links.
ReplyDelete*blushes* Thank you!! We do very blessed. It didn't look like that though when we bought it a few years ago. While all the shrubs, bushes and trees were there, it was so over grown and weedy that you couldn't see that side of the house at all. But you could tell someone at some point had spent a lot of money and time on that yard and all it needed was some TLC. What you are seeing is the result of four years of very hard work...:-)
ReplyDeleteI'm going to give this a try. Needles from the pine tree for tea, the inner bark of the pine tree, sap from the birch tree, clover for tea and salads, plantain, purslane, violets (violet jelly yum my favorite), dandelions for salads and dandelion coffee, chickory,and wild garlic. (:
ReplyDeleteDing, ding, ding! Good job!!!! We have us a winner here. You named 8 out of the 9. Awesome. :-)
ReplyDeleteI don't know how I could of missed it. The 9th one are the hostas.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct Mary. :-)
ReplyDelete