 |
| My pickup containing ~180 gallons of non-toxic, nutritious, free apples harvested from an untended orchard nearby with owner's permission. Me and 2 friends had a blast laughing, climbing, and playing in the orchard. We also ate, threw, and occasionally harvested lots and lots of apples. This was about 3 hours' work (and play). |
Wild and Intentional Food
Years ago, when I lived in suburbia, I felt really frustrated that I constantly learned of poisonous new ingredients, food processing practices, wrapping materials, sprays, farming practices, and so on in processed and raw grocery store foods. It seemed a never-ending battle to learn what to avoid, which brands to trust and for how long, and so on. So now I'm avoiding all that and learning to gather food from the wild, the garden, and trusted organic farms, with an emphasis on foods not tended by people. I love doing it with friends when there's energy, otherwise I like gathering food alone too.
Why wild food? Because I find it much easier and cheaper to accept food that's already present than to buy land and farm. Plus I get to feel grateful for the wild plants that sustain me, rather than feel a need to control and dominate a land space in order to force it to meet my food needs.
I'll share more about this attitude in the post on my gardening this year, but here's an example: native Cherokee tended blueberry patches that spread over whole mountains SE of present-day Asheville, and the plants were so hardy and happy there that they continue to produce abundantly today, centuries after the local human culture stopped giving them much attention - that's where I gathered about 1/2 of my blueberries this year. I felt gratitude to the Cherokee and also the blueberries, and I experienced firsthand that I didn't need a controlling attitude towards land in order to eat well. Rather, I consider what human-edible plants will grow aggressively and abundantly, and I merely encourage them along, and adjust my diet to suit. I'll share more in the post on gardening, because I definitely want to emulate the Cherokee's attitudes and practices as well as I can understand them.
Sauerkraut
 |
| First kraut batch in a crockpot. For many years crocks like this were made with lead (or painted with lead?) so I recommend checking which year your crock was made. I feel more comfortable using food-grade buckets than lead-lined crocks. To keep the vegetables below the liquid level, I weigh the food down with a rock. $9.99 at your local brewery shop (kidding). |
 |
| The same crock covered with a shirt donated by a visitor. It says, "I'm tired of busting my butt. I'm going camping!" Indeed. |
 |
| I had three large kraut-making parties this year with food I got from the farm or wild-crafted. I called them parties, but mostly it was me and a large pile of food, with a little help from some friends on the first 2 batches. I ended up with about 12-13 gallons of all-organic/wild-crafted kimchi/sauerkraut. |
 |
| Another batch of kraut. The bucket wall only gets crusty where the liquid meets the air. This mold did something I'd never seen: it caught the gas emitted during fermentation and formed mold-bubbles on the surface. Cool! |
 |
| The mold scraped into a bowl. I will eat almost anything, and if someone asked me, I'd probably try it out. It doesn't look very appetizing though. |
I made sure to spread the goodness around, sharing a few gallons with a bunch of friends and neighbors, including the folks at the farm, and saving the rest for my winter food use. I don't want to have to buy any food this winter, and this kraut's a big part of that plan!
Apples and Cider
Folks where I live know of several untended orchards or wild fruit trees where the owners are happy for us to come take as many apples as we want... and so we do.
 |
| I'm salivating seeing this again. I averaged eating about 10 apples/day for the next week. |
Two friends and I loaded into my pickup and in a few hours brought home ~160 gallons of prime, non-toxic apples for free. YES. And this was about 1/3 of our total fall harvest. Processing took various forms...
Cider
We took ~1/3 of our apples and made ~110 gallons of cider. We don't have our own cider press, and it's common in this area to take apples to a friend with the press, and the press owner gets 1/3 of the juice.
Drying Apples and other Things
 |
| Picture from uphill, looking down on a few buildings we use for drying - here you see fresh apples cut that day (on grates), apples from previous days on sheets, and other things like chestnuts). |
 |
| A roof full of drying goodies. |
 |
| These grates are mostly scrounged and scavenged. This one on the lower-left is hand-made with 'waste' pallet wood and stainless steel mesh. The right is a thrown-away BBQ grill grate. |
 |
| I scored ~40 free organic bananas and decided to try making banana chips. It didn't work - maybe if I'd dried them on a grate. I just got a big gooey sugary mess that went into some really tasty pancake batter. The other trays are wild honey mushrooms I gathered from the woods nearby. |
 |
| I'm cutting up honey mushrooms to dry here. |
 |
| Another picture of our sheet-holding space. Overnight, dew will gather on any sheets left on the floor, undoing previous drying efforts. So we stack our sheets of drying food on our unused stove, benches, chairs... anywhere we can find space! This is an inside picture of a cob structure we call Rathaven. |
Without electricity, sheets-on-the-roof is our main way of drying things. I dried a few gallons of greens this way, folding half the sheet on top and half below the herbs to prevent direct sunlight from destroying volatile oils and other nutrients. Roofs also help dry animal hides.
I collected a bunch of grapes this fall too...
I initially wanted to make wine, but I struggled to separate the grape pulp from the juice (again, no electricity and limited tool and work space). Here's what I got:
 |
| This is how I begin wild alcohol fermentations - instead of adding store-bought yeast, I let it yeast in the air land on the food through a cloth that keeps flies and other bugs out. |
Cool side story on the grapes: I found a rich chestnut grove on some strangers' land a few miles away. I went up to their home and asked if I could gather chestnuts. Not only did they say yes, but they came out and helped me! And afterwards, one of them asked if I'd like some grapes. Sure, I said, and so they took me to a grape patch maybe 1/2 an acre big and three of us picked and filled a bucket for a long time, munching here and there too.
They were adamant about not spraying any poisons on their plants or putting any chemicals in their cows. I spent an hour with two grandparents and their kid who herself was a mother. This mother, perhaps in her late 30s, told me her daughter of 12 looks about 17 years old, and she attributes it to her eating so much meat from animals fed huge amounts of growth hormones. I never met the daughter, but the family felt really strongly about having untainted food - good neighbors to know! I felt very grateful for the nuts, grapes, and personal stories.
Seaweed!
In July I went to California to visit family. I decided to see how much seaweed I could gather in a week at Morro Bay with no special equipment, including no boat. I lucked out and found a rocky spot where I could gather seaweed that wasn't full of sand from washing ashore.The most common kind by far was giant kelp. Each morning, I'd go down to the rocky shore and fill 1 or 2 five-gallon buckets. Then I set them up to dry:
I kept gathering and gathering, and the seaweed multiplied:
Eventually I had about 15 different drying spaces behind the house! Unfortunately, it stayed foggy much of the day at Morro Bay, so my seaweed never fully dried there. I packed it up and when I returned to Bakersfield with my grandmother, I put it all out to dry in her retirement community. It completely dried in about 3 hours, thanks to the baking sun and no moisture.
 |
| Seaweed shrinks a LOT as it dries. This was about 7-8 gallons dry, and maybe... 35-50 gallons wet? |
A little about seaweed cleanliness: the oceans are pretty polluted indeed. The water off the west coast tends to flow south, so it gets more polluted the further south you are. Morro Bay, where I harvested, lies half way between LA and San Francisco, so not great, but here's the thing: I don't want to be cleaner than the environment I live in. I'd have to live in a bubble to do that. I just don't want any more toxins than average in the environment in my diet and dwelling. My rough goals are a) to clean up the environment as much as I can and b) learn to live with toxins, including learning how to purge or neutralize them in various ways.
The seaweed grew protected from the main ocean inside a bay and sandbar with minimal industrial activity nearby. It's as clean as I can imagine anything growing off the west coast of the US being, so I feel grateful for it and comfortable sharing it with friends.
Other side note: while I stayed with my grandmother in California, she tried both seaweed and prickly pear cactus fruit! Super cool. I was totally unprepared for how mucilaginous the pears were, so that was about the stickiest meal I've had in a long time. I mean like Winnie the Pooh sticky. Maybe if I learn to prepare it better, she'll give it another try...
Food Experiments
Often, I want to learn to process/store food in ways that I can't find books to learn from, so I end up experimenting. One of my favorite foods is chestnuts, and processing them to remove / kill the grubs is key so they don't eat the nuts over the winter. Normally I've pounded the nuts to bits, then dried them on sheets on hot days and removed grubs+shells by hand.Here I'm trying something different....
 |
| I'm heating chestnuts in water not to boiling, but just hot enough to kill the grubs. |
 |
| That light sliver-looking thing is a chestnut grub! Super tasty, full of fat and protein, and sadly not welcome in my winter chestnut store. |
Wood Nettle Experiments
Sometimes delicious food's abundant nearby, but none of my friends or books have info on how to gather, process, store, or cook it well. European-descended culture didn't take much interest in preserving knowledge of native practices until 100-150 years ago, so many native practices weren't studied or recorded before Euro-descended people wiped out natives in this region. And so we experiment. Interesting aside: for all I learned about the year 1776 in grade school, I never learned that was a major year in the war against the Cherokee in this region, and rebel Americans were fighting a multi-front war.
A very abundant plant here is wood nettle, Laportea canadensis. I found just one scant reference to the seed being edible, but no advice on processing (thanks Sam Thayer). So I watched the nettle every day to learn when it was harvest-ready. Day by day, week after week, not knowing when the seed was ready, what color it would be, what size.
And then it rained and all the seeds dropped to the ground! Bahh.
But two weeks later a new bunch of seeds began to darken at the tops of the plants. In just a few more days, I had my first harvest:
 |
| Wood nettle produces female flowers on top of the plant and male flowers in the middle. I chopped off the female portions when they seemed full of seed. |
 |
| To separate the seed from the plant, I dried them in brown paper bags, but that didn't go fast enough. Then I used these scavenged cooking trays and it went pretty fast. |
I didn't end up eating them, so no report on that. I only wanted to learn how to gather and process them in bulk so I could be ready to gather vast amounts next year. Next August I will be ready!
Meads, Ciders, and Other Alcohol Ferments
I want to learn to make really delicious, nutritious alcoholic drinks, so drinking isn't a poisonous vice, but rather a healthy fun time.
 | |
 |
| When we run out of airlocks, we improvise. Sometimes the yeast are active and make lots of gas, and sometimes they aren't active, and the condom slumps down. What's really great is giving a tour to a visitor as the yeast wake up and start making gas quickly. |
I like to do wild ferments, so I gather yeast in a bucket as I did with the grape project above, stirring the honey+infusion mixture a few times a day. When it starts to bubble, I move the juice to a carboy with an airlock which allows air to escape but not enter. This prevents the alcohol from turning to vinegar. After a few months, you're done: and you get to decide how sweet or dry you like it.
Then I bottle, label, and share with friends over the next year.
 |
| The cider again. Some friends added honey and herbs to some to make ceizers, a major taste improvement in my opinion. |
Wild + Intentional Foods 2017
Here's a list of foods I gathered and preserved this fall (excluding wild/untended foods I gathered and ate right away). It'll form my diet over the winter, as I hope not to buy any food:
- Nuts:
- acorns (pounded, dried w/shell)
- chestnuts (pounded, dried, shelled)
- walnuts (hulled, curing in shell)
- Fruits
- blueberries (dried)
- concord grapes (dried into raisins, some juice fermented to red wine vinegar)
- apples (various: some slice+dried, some pressed to cider, some canned for applesauce)
- pears (slice+dried)
- Mushrooms
- Shiitakes (slice+dry)
- Honey mushrooms (slice+dry)
- Vegetables (roots, leafy greens, etc):
- organic leftover farm produce (squash, radishes, potatoes, etc) (left in airy space above freezing temps)
- homemade kraut (organic bok choi, baby bok, radishes, turnips, daikons, cabbage, fennel, and others from the farm, toothwort, garlic, horseradish, and wild ginger from Wild Roots) (lacto-ferment)
- giant kelp seaweed (dried)
- stinging nettle leaves (dried)
- biden leaves (dried)
- garlic
- horseradish
- Animals:
- bear meat, broth, and fat in large quantities
- Alcohol ferments
- meads (honey+herbal infusion of wildflowers, nettles, etc)
- cider/ceizer
In addition, I have some leftover organic lentils, oats, and brown rice I bulk-purchased last fall, plus a few other foods I've received as gifts or scavenged and saved for the winter.
I wanted to gather stinging nettle seed, but we kept gathering greens too late in the year, and combined with a few long periods of no rain, it didn't go to seed this fall. A few other bulk-wild-food projects didn't work out or I chose to drop/postpone 'til next year: groundbean, deer, and a few others. I'll look forward to them next year.
Damn, I'm water-fasting today as I write this part of the post. I feel hungry!
In coming post(s):
- Wild Roots, where I lived this year and last
- Kamana (Naturalist training) and Healing
- Hide tanning
- Gardening
- Phyplay and Truck Care
- In the News
