I am working on creating some food goals for the new year regarding how much food I need to be gathering and hunting. I wondered if anyone else does this. I have never put these goals on paper before but thought I would start doing that to maybe help keep on track and know how much of my families diet really comes from the land. I will plan on growing a few things, mostly roots and squash but the rest will be wild harvested. I have a large family to feed but that means more hands helping. I am also not too worried about finding the food because of where I am located.
I kept pretty solid journals of hunting success and amounts of food consumed the first fall/winter out here. Since then it’s been less structured. We generally aim for a minimum of 60 dry salmon per person per year, then also put up a couple dozen pint and quart jars of salmon. It’s tricky though, because we can’t completely rely on moose hunting. There are moose around, but the season is so short and happens right before freeze up when everything else is going on so there’s been a lot of figuring it out. I would say to just start doing it and keep track year over year. It’s really hard for me to try to quantify animals to food in the first place, but it sounds like we have more variability aside from salmon.
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Venison and fish will be our main source of meat. I can fish a lot here but probably not as plentiful as your salmon there. Small game will be in there too. We also have wild/feral hogs here. Not on my property but they can be hunted just afew miles from me so that’s in the plans also. Acorns are extremely plentiful here so I plan on harvesting a lot more next year. There are other nuts and berries available here also. I think it’s very doable here if one puts the effort in it.
a good place to start supplementing wild food is all the weeds, which follow humans everywhere we go, dandelion, knotweed, nettles, plantain, clover ect, basically all of the noxious are super foods that can add a huge nutritional powerhouse to your foods especially through winter months and weeds don’t risk being over harvested as do native food plants.
We do and plan on that a lot. I didn’t put them down because to me it seems more difficult to plan goals in amounts and what I am putting on my list are foods we will be storing up for the next winter.
it definitely takes discipline to go out and gather weeds, but the yields are huge. last summer in alaksa my partner and I were broke and needed to put food away for winter and we just went out and started harvesting weeds and put away more than enough. those are the nutrients that you need in the winter that are not available, you can make green powders with them and add them to soups or make teas. roasted dandelion root coffee, or putting dandelion roots in soups and stews adds a healthy and easy to digest carbohydrates to the winter diets. there is a book called the wild wisdom of weeds that is the book of books for 13 universal weeds that are super foods and medicines and there is a huge recipe selection in the book to help integrate them into your diet and a guide on when to harvest for best outputs.
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Very true. There’s a river a couple miles away that has a few places where greens and flowers are in high abundance. This summer the whole family spend the better part of a day harvesting until we were just too tired. When we were done you couldn’t tell we had touched anything.
While this list isn’t everything we would eat for the year it is a list of more main foods we do or would eat. I know it doesn’t include green leaves or flowers. We do eat a lot of them but there are so many to list and its hard to create an actual amount that I would want to harvest for the year so I didn’t include them here.
The eventual goal is to lessen our dependency on the garden. We do also encourage wild foods to grow here and plant native perennials.
Garden:
Onions
Garlic
Turnips
Winter radish
Beets
Winter squash
Tomato
Beans
Foraging:
Acorns
Walnuts
Hickory nuts
Blackberries
Apple’s
Jerusalem artichoke
Cattails
Pine nuts
Pine pollen
Plantain seeds
Meat:
Venison
Squirrel
Rabbit
Raccon
Boar
Fish
Honey
Maple, sycamore and walnut syrups.
why do you want to lessen your dependency on the garden? is that an idealistic choice or a practical one?
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I guess idealistic. I do enjoy gardening. I just want it to be a more natural, more native plants.