Anyone harvesting wild nuts, seeds, or grain?

Details?

Thanks.

Is anyone harvesting even domesticated nuts, seeds or grains?

Sue

Okay, the thread is hereby broadened to include domesticated stuff.

We took the seeds out of our tomatoes does that count
*Grin*

Other than that nope

Todd, with all the downed pinecones, is it worth trying to harvest pine nuts?

Walnuts, we picked up and shucked about a 1/4 bushel this year. Had to fight the squirrels for them. Various flower seeds. Saved some sunflowers for the wildlife this winter. dug up some bulbs.

I was in the hardware store around august and they were giving away seed packs (the cheap ones) rather than throw them away. I commented to the clerk that I was happy to see this and she said that they were going to throw away the box, no one was taking them. I offered to liberate the seeds, she agreed, so i have around 100 or so packs of mostly flowers with some veggies. Does that count?

The pine cones with the larger nuts are okay, but the little ones aren't really worth the effort for the calories gained.

Sue

Our growing season is long enough for lots of berries, but not for most nuts and protein-type beans.

Didn't get out for bush Saskatoon berries (serviceberry to some) this year. Our plantation of tame ones gave us all we could handle.

Every year I notice hazelnuts forming in the bush and plan to get back when they're ripe; but in a week the squirrels have them all and laugh at me when I return. Ratfinks.

I harvested a few heads off of sunflowers. I could have dried them for seed/food, but I didn't have time to fuss with them. So I cut the fleshy stuff off the back and put them in the bird feeders.

I dry a lot of seeds for scarlet runner beans to plant next year, as well as squash varieties that thrived, and scatter seeds from flowers that bring in the pollinators.

There's a spot in the farmer's field outside my property where he swerved around the wheat because of a downed tree. I think I'll saunter out there and collect the wheat, including stalks and roots, for my DW's class. Here's where your bread comes from, kids; what's the next step? It's always more real when they see it and touch it.

Re the wheat: how intend to harvest, winnow out chaff, clean, etcetera?

from the banks of the Mississippi river---



wild grapes--



from abandon farms--



gone wild apples--



for my sort of wild,wine making hobby--

Awesome!

I did manage to get some chokecherries, apples, blueberries and raspberries this year.

For some reason I didn't see any grapes and the few nuts we get didn't do well. The peas were pretty thin too.
It was not a great year for most of the berries either.
From the landscape plants the Nanking cherries did OK.

If I had to rely on wild foods this would be a lean year.

It's not a large amount; I doubt there'll be more than a couple of pints of cleaned wheat.

I'll just pick off the heads that I want to experiment with. They have to be really dry for the hulls to come off easily; so they'll sit in a tin can either by the woodstove or on the dash of a car.

I'll hull them by rubbing between my hands to break everything apart, dropping the works into a big shallow bowl. Then I'll just agitate and blow to get rid of the chaff (compressed air if I'm lazy). The wheat kernels are much heavier and will sink as I shake the bowl.

I'll do a crude grind with the back of a hatchet, and boil the result up as porridge with salt (okay, with brown sugar and milk on top). You can eat the stuff raw, but you don't get all the food value; heat cracks the starch molecules and makes them digestible to humans.

I'll leave the school kids to figure out their own solution. That's where the fun is.

I collected some filberts (hazelnuts), but it's hard to fine good ones. The birds seem to know how to tell the difference between one with a meat in it and an empty one. I seem to get the empty ones. Anyway, I collect a bunch and then dump them by double handfuls into a half-bucket of water. The floater are empty, the ones with meats sink, so no wasting time cracking the bad ones.

There are a lot of random apple trees around here. The easiest to harvest are on people's mowed lawns. Just just let them rot there, so they are often pleased to have people stop and ask to collect them.

For grains like wheat, you can put them in a bag or pillowcase and beat them with a bat or back of a garden rake, then do the winnowing as described above. A sunny day with a decent breeze makes it easy.

I collected some vegetable seeds for planting next year, but this year's garden wasn't too good for me, as I got a late start.

When I collected blackberries, I separated the pulp from the seeds to make jam, and fed the seeds to the chickens. I had previosly hesitated to do this, thinking about how rampant blackberries are around here, obviously deposited by birds. Then I read that chickens have a more thorough digestive system, so I fed them some and kept them caged. I couldn't find any seeds in their droppings, so I figured it was safe.

Sue

How did you separate the blackberry pulp from the seeds?

I have a manual Foley Food Mill like this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Food_Mill.jpg

It's only good for soft or cooked materials. I found mine at a thrift shop, and see them at Goodwill occasionally.

Sue