@noogy … i really like grilled smallmouth bass filets with morels. The smallies are usually bighting well when morels are up.
It is a spring tradition for me.
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Up north here in april is giant puffball mushrooms, brown trout and leeks along the rivers:)
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I don’t think we can even get morels here, sigh!
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I’m kind of embarrassed that I forage a lot, target all sorts of mushrooms, can get king boletes by the bucket full day in and day out, and yet while living in Alaska I can’t seem to find morels.
Actually to add insult to injury three years ago I found two, under one of my cherry bushes. They haven’t come back :\
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us either. soils to acidic for them here.
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lots of boletes here as well. also get chantarelles, hedgehogs, lobsters, oysters and fall blewits. you guys ever get oysters on cottonwood there? they love quaking aspen here. very similar.
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I have found oysters, they have an amazing licorice smell to them. Hedgehogs are my favorite, along with gypsies.
Down by Girdwood is the tail end of the northernmost rain forest in North America, the variety of mushrooms is beyond belief. During the last year fungus fair there were 187 species found, plus many others that have been seen in previous years.
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cool!
I’ve always thought it would just be easier to live off the land in a tropical climate. Seems like you could have fruit ripen any month of the year==i suppose you’d have to grow a large variety of crops and have access to water (since some tropical locations have a distinct dry season). I tend to prefer tropical fruits and im addicted to dark chocolate.
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temperate climate forces food storage for winter. A tropical climate permits growing perennials such as sweet potato that can be harvested at a slow but continuous rate. As for dark chocolate, you would have to figure out how to grow cacao trees, harvest the fruit, dry the beans, roast them, grind them, then combine with sugar and turn it into “dark chocolate”.
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I like growing a lot of my food, foraging and semi-hunting (crabs and clams). There is something exciting and intrinsic in the human spirit to go wander in nature and find food. Wild food, whether plant, fungus, or animal, is said to be healthier by most doctors. It makes me feel connected to nature. I am definitely not trying to get 100% of my food from growing and foraging. It doesn’t bother me to buy some stuff. Some people are much better at growing specific things than I am and you can’t grow tropical fruit here.
John S
PDX OR
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Agree on that.
(But today so many prefer to 'live off the land" by employing a cardboard sign at a major intersection.)
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I forage for fun and profit. Technically my foraging earnings exceed my grocery budget. Does that count?
I do spend about a hundred hours a year on my for profit foraging endeavors.
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In the temperate climate I grow Potatoes, kohl rabi, Rutabaga, apples and eat them daily. (I hope to make dried persimmons and fruit juice and berry jam a staple also)
In the tropics I grow Bananas, Jackfruit and papayas, pineapple and eat them daily. ( I buy veggies and potatoes often and hope to make breadfruit, sapotes and durian more frequent staples)
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Interesting. please elaborate.
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Fascinating video they wanted the banana flower for food more than the bananas. The chickens and ducks loved the stock. The bananas were not used in the way i expected.
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it hit me when Darryl calls @BlueBerry “crusty” that’s a meaning of friendship right there. Where he said that, I don’t know… that’s for possible reasoning of only 6-likes in however many years.
He’s got a different approach man.
I was minding my own business somewhere off in the house when your comment just automatically “showed up” in my mind. I had read your comment a few ago, and now it just hit me why? He/Darryl values conversation on the human level and intellectual conversation on a stimulating basis that has his mind ‘quivering’ from joy is I’ll bet the only time he’s ever hit the button. That feeling of information passing thru your body and thru your head thru the ceiling you’re so excited to be feeling that way; " intellectual stimulation ". I disobeyed one of my own rules and that is to write about another man perceptions; I think I am correct however. It doesn’t matter cause we may never know… will we Darryl? 
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Good to see you alive and chipper, Bark.
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(‘crusty old fart in the wind’) I believe it was!
Nice to hear from you, as-well, Blueberry!
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If you want to read a great example of people living with the land find the stuff Farley Mowat wrote about living among northern peoples in the arctic. He spent part of a winter with one family and at first declined to eat whale blubber. Pure fat, just tons of calories. He stuck to the provisions he had brought and got very sick. Once he tried the blubber he felt much better. In that environment all the calories are necessary, and now modern travelers often substitute olive oil in quantity. Another custom was to have a caribou carcass for visitors to snack on.
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