How people are really living off the land

General Gardening
#68

People have a lot of false faith in their super markets.
-3000 deaths a year in US from contaminated supermarkets foods

Imagine the amount of damage and death caused by pesticides and herbicides on food found in supermarkets…

-200k die a year globally, although most is from application i assume.

Too often do i hear such fear porn advice and bias for a supermarket solution, but imo this is just a lazy bias for a supermarket solution you are expressing. Actual advice for mushroom pickers is that they should identify a few reliable mushrooms and be aware of any toxic look alike species and not eat them if unsure at all, even better yet go to classes, tours etc. for which city people should have some access to.

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#69

Contaminated is a different issue, I’m talking about picking the right varieties of mushroom, some are deadly. Some people think death cap mushroom looks similar to something they eat in their own countries but they are not.

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#70

What hurt them was not the mushroom but ignorance. There are mushrooms that with a smidgen of familiarization are 100% safe and easy to distinguish. Heck it took me a few years of foraging before I felt confident to target my first gilled mushrooms, Cortinarius caperatus AKA Gypsy Mushroom. Funny enough the cortinarius family has plenty of poisonous and downright deadly cousins.

The other thing is that if I’m not on my regular stumping grounds I deem my mushroom identification skills suspect. Other parts of the country may have lookalike mushrooms that are not present in my area.

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#71

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Morels… oh so good.

There is a false morel look-alike… but it is easy to tell the difference. True morel has a hollow stem… False has a solid stem.

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Something about them… how they grow and blend in with the forrest floor… quite a thing of beauty.

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#72

Currently my favorite mushroom are hedgehogs. They are not as common in the rain forest I go hunting for them but then again, the area is full of an incredible variety of other fungi; king boletes, admirable boletes, small chanterelles popping through moss, oysters, milk caps, gypsies, and the list goes on and on.

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#73

@TNHunter

Found a huge flush of them on my property 3 years ago. Sometimes they show up here but most of the time they dont. Have places i hunt that always have morels Morels will be popping soon

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#74

@clarkinks … not sure if this works everywhere…but here when redbuds have bloomed and dogwoods are just starting to open a few blossoms… better be out there looking.

Usually about the first week in April here.

I have a few hot spots on my place that… like you said… when they are here… they are almost always there.

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#75

@TNHunter

The season here is all about heat and moisture. Sometimes the rains are late and we cant see them because the grass is already up.

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#76

I garden on about 1/2 acre and have had over an acre. I can produce well over 5000 pounds of food on 1/2 acre of ground. This is not a boast, it is a simple fact and easily proven. Potatoes, given appropriate culture, will produce up to 50,000 pounds per acre (average is closer to 34,000 pounds/acre), I worked for a local potato farmer as a teenager and can well remember harvesting an acre of potatoes and watching to see how many trucks (5 tons at a time) we could haul off an acre. Corn will produce 8000 pounds per acre (about 140 bushels) with commercial fertilizer when using hybrid seed. I can produce 5000 pounds/acre of most brassicas such as turnips, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Beans are relatively low producing at about 2000 pounds per acre, but make up for it with a lot of protein. Tomatoes will produce 20,000 pounds/acre though they are a lot of work to stake and train.

Somebody will argue that I’m using commercial seed. I have enough open pollinated seed in my freezer to last 5 years and can grow more seed every year that I garden. I do this as a normal routine, producing seed is part and parcel of my gardening work.

I grow things to eat and to produce seed with a diversity of plants. My typical garden is: beans, lima beans, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, feed corn, sweet corn, cantaloupes, carrots, cowpeas, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, onions, peanuts, peas, radishes, squash, turnips, watermelons, and don’t forget cotton which I grow for seed but also know how to turn it into thread to make clothes.

What about wild foraging? Blueberries, blackberries, pokeweed, dandelions, persimmons, walnuts, hickory nuts, and a bunch of other edibles are part of my diet. I fish and hunt though not as much as when I was younger. Deer, rabbits, squirrel, wild turkeys, geese, ducks, and other game are readily available in this area. I also have chickens and turkeys. I have 3 young roosters in a cage to be slaughtered tomorrow. How would I manage if the economy collapsed and I had to feed myself? I’d have to work at it, but I would have an abundance to eat and could provide food to others. For reference, an average person needs about a pound of food per day. I can grow 365 pounds of high quality edibles. With 1/2 acre garden, I could feed about 5 people at that rate.

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#77

Well said. I have admired a permaculture guy in Oregon who grows a lot of cannabis. He also grows 10 acres of food for organic home deliveries. Anyway, his biggest tip is to always keep a planting of potatoes. He always keeps a whole acre for just potatoes for his family and friends. Like if the world ends at least you have that to fall back on. Or a hiccup like a volcano big earthquake.

My potato stash is quite large now. And my kids love them.

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#78

I watched the video of the woman foraging for food and growing her own. I’m impressed. Tropical gardening is different than what we do here in the U.S. I’m willing to bet that nobody can name the beans that she grew. Sweet potatoes in the tropics are perennials. They dig a few to eat and leave the plants to produce more. Did you notice that 90% of the food she grew and foraged was to feed animals? She had pigs, ducks, and chickens not to mention feeding the fish in her “pond”.

Here is a good one for you. I cut poke stalks early in the spring when they are about 18 to 24 inches tall and peel the purple skin off of them, then slice them and fry like okra. They are delicious. The core of the stalk should still be solid, not chambered. Cherokee used them this way for thousands of years.

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#79

@Fusion_power

I’m glad to hear you watched that I suspect many have not seen it yet and it is worth seeing. It takes experience to recognize just how good her choices are. Have seen many youtube talents over the years but that one is the real thing.

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#80

Its not hard to learn about successful and non successful civilizations.

Most every empire that was able to grow populations enough to wage war and take others lands grew grains and crops. Those civilizations all had farmers that fed soldiers and slaves.

There are still pyramids standing today in the Americas from peoples that farmed. They expanded their empires by feeding soldiers and slaves what the farmers grew.

The peoples that built forts and castles had farmers and storehouses for grains and vegetables in order to survive and thrive.

Currently in the American Prison system… convicts are leased to farms and alot of prisons have gardens.

Hunting is a great hobby and i think its necessary in modern times. Humans have removed most all of natures predators and removed most of the wildlifes habitat. Many creatures starve or get disease or get killed on our roadways.

Deer season is a great thing for hobby hunters. They are allowed to bait the deer and use deer mating scents to kill the males as their brains are fogged with the scent of a doe in heat…

Yellowstone is a great example… where humans have tried to let nature take its course. However nearly 100 animals are killed by drivers on the roads in the park each year…

I know that alot of folks like the taste of red meat but in reality cows are similar to dogs… they are creatures that have intelligence and emotions…and are able to learn and communicate…which i think all living creatures do. We are too young in our current status of civilization to overcome the old ways of our ancestors.

Not too long ago we killed animals simply for their furs, their tusks, their feathers or the oil from their body to provide a better status in our vanity. It took many thousands of years for those creatures to populate and thrive and evolve themselves… and a small amount of time to make them almost extinct… Eating fish eggs such as caviar…or eating the fin of a shark to make you more manly are both great status symbols.

Thank goodness we have evolved enough so that science has provided us with more productive grains, vegetables and fruits… with disease resistances and better yields. Thanks to modern agricultural practices we no longer have to enslave people to do manual labor to feed the higher status peoples.

The next step in our evolution will be the removal of the enslavement of animals i think. Lots of enslaved animals and fishes are dying of diseases today…its current news. Farmed Fish, Beef and Poultry are having record deaths of diseased animals happening right now.

Someday i think we will be able to Live With The Land…not Live Off the Land.

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#81

There is a right way to do things. For instance in Alaska our idea of farming salmon is to run nurseries where millions of salmons are released into the wild. Years later they simply return to where they started.

Australia has vast expanses of grass land with little water resources. The least environmentally taxing way to extract calories from the land is cattle, where they get constantly moved to different areas to feed. The plants get a chance to recover, the cattle enriches the soil, and the damage caused by industrial farming is avoided.

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#82

Likely why civilizations that eat calories from cattle are the most obese and have health concerns and need the most hospitals and prescription drugs.

Nothing wrong with that… perhaps it is how we will reduce populations.

Populations with 5X the US thrive on grains such as rice and eat vegetables. Whole religions dont eat cattle…or pork. Perhaps they are all wrong.

I think coldwater fish are very healthy. I have a friend that is an eye surgeon and he prescribes fish oil or asks his patients to eat coldwater fish for the ocular nutrition. He said that eating animals with oil that are hard at room temperature clogs those tiny veins that are in our eyes, feet and private parts… while eating fish with oils that are not hard at room temperature along with cold pressed oils like olive oils are actually quite healthy. I had to get lasik eye surgery years ago… i think the fish oils and eating coldwater fish helped my recovery. Perhaps the oils that were hard at room temperature caused me to need the surgery that i ate in the past?

Hard to know.

#83

Civilizations that are obese are not from eating meat. It is from eating an excess of sugar. The average in America is over 150 pounds of sugar per year where 75 pounds of that is fructose of which roughly 1/2 is turned into fat by your liver. Don’t complain about eating beef making people fat. Complain about the farmers who grow crops - mostly corn these days - that are turned into various sweeteners.

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#84

" protein in meat is directly contributing to obesity"

“our over-consumption of meat is creating a caloric surplus we’re not burning off.”

Red meat kills you faster.

Its easy to deduct that people that eat more meat are less healthy and live shorter lives.

Im not complaining at all. I think everyone should live their lives the way that they want to. Some will be healthier and live longer… some will not. Its always been that way and probably always will.

Not long ago the Earth was flat… Not long ago we burned witches at the stake.

It takes a long time to move onward from the old ways.

#85

Since Jamestown was mentioned at the beginning of this thread, I would like to clarify a few reasons why they struggled so badly in their early years. First of all they had to spend a lot of time and effort constructing homes and store houses with every wave of new people that arrived. They also spent a lot of time cutting cedar lumber and digging sassafras roots to ship back to England to make some money because Jamestown was an incredibly expensive venture.

Thing is, most of the people that died didn’t starve to death, at least early on. In the warm months the river had elevated levels of salt in the water and many of the people became severly ill or died from salt poisoning. On top of that, fruits of their labors went into a store of food that was divided between everyone. The lazy bones got as much as the go getter. Even facing starvation a few years in, this knowledge made the majority of workers do the bare minimum to avoid punishment. One early year, I can’t remember which, they got a decent crop and a boy playing around burned down their main store house. John Smith saved them all for a few years by his trading with the local natives. Fish were plentiful, but very seasonal. For the natives, and by extension the settlers, their food world revolved around corn.

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#86

Probably the Psophocrpus tetrogonolobus (pea or bean)

#87

Also commonly grown in Asian tropical climates is Canavalia gladiata aka the sword bean. I couldn’t see what she planted well enough to tell, but the plants suggest they were not Phaseolus vulgaris. I’ve grown sword beans and partridge peas. Very few people in the U.S. have.

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