FORAGING FOR FOOD... 1-15-18

MORE OLD TIMEY STUFF

FORAGING FOR FOOD... 1-15-18

When I was small on our farm my family foraged a lot for wild foods to supplement the table.

We liked dandelions in the yard.. we dug them and cooked them into greens and we walked the pastures and gathered wild milkweed, just the top sprigs on the one without the red vein in the leaf. We picked wild raspberries and blackberries and blueberries and currents. We had crab-apples, they made the best jelly, and we gathered chokecherries, small wild clustered cherries that made a great jelly too.

We had wild butternuts, hard to crack but inside resembled walnuts. They are covered with a sticky husk that made them nasty to harvest. I was taught to watch the squirrels carefully and not frighten them to see where they found the nuts, and then mark the tree with a colorful piece of hay twine.

We gathered Pine cones to harvest pine nuts.. I am amazed to see them selling as high as $12/lb now. Here is how to harvest them...

(Pine nuts are ready to harvest about 10 days before the green cone begins to open. The cones are dried in a burlap bag in the sun for 20 days, to speed up the process of drying and opening. The cones are then smashed (as a way to quickly release the seeds) and the seeds are separated by hand from the cone fragments.Mar 10, 2014)

Back in the days of the early 1950s it was quite possible to subsist on a farm like ours of around 100 acres. taxes were low and we had no mortgage or utility bills. We grew, made, harvested and sold enough different things to make our annual budget and in winter we mostly hunkered-down.

I have been posting OLD TIMEY STORIES in the group BUT NOW they are in a FILE called MORE OLD TIMEY STUFF in sequence. I am adding more stories to the bottom and will continue. Hope you ENJOY them.

© Copyright 2018 by Daniel Blankley. All rights reserved.

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