Do you have a calendar that plots the approximate times for best harvest, as well as any legal seasons for harvest, of wild plants and wild animals in your area?

Do you think such a calendar, or the exercise of its creation, has a part in survival preparation?

Thoughts?

Thanks.

I had mentioned this in another thread, that I have a book call Foraging New England. It has many common plants indigenous to my area-nothing obscure, things you find every day. The book is broken down into regions such as oceanfronts, wasteland, woodland, etc. They only list a few of the available plants in any given area-they go by ease of recognition & local availability. They also list certain animals (freshwater clams, snails, etc). They outline harvesting season, preparation, nutritional value, and color plates to help identify them. The nice thing about the book is that it doesnt inundate you with 200 different plants in the area-only a few easily recognized ones. All in all, its a fantastic little field guide. They likely have them for other regions as well.

If you are starting to learn about wild plants and the seasonal cycles a calender is useful.
After you have a bit of time in you quit going by calendar dates as much and start going with the seasonal signs instead. This happens because the seasons are different depending on where you are and they are not the same from one year to the next either. Spring may be early or late according to the calendar but you still go morel hunting when the basswoods are just starting to leaf out.

Making the calendar will also help you get the idea of what grows when into your mind,so that helps too.
It also helps you to plan your outings.

Edited to add: By what grows when I was thinking about nut and berry crops as well as mushrooms. You might not nail them to a day or even a certain week but you can get close enough that you know what you will look for during the Easter holidays or around Thanksgiving for example. Some of your crops have fairly long periods to gather them in as well. You might be looking at a month or two for picking some of the berry crops instead of a week or two for most of the commercial ones.


For animals you are a bit stuck with legal hunting seasons. These are directly calendar events.

If you hunted according to the animal's cycles you would likely end up out of season half of the time and be getting arrested.

I think it still helps to understand when the animals make their shifts in activities though. An early fall can start the deer moving to their yarding areas up to a month ahead of the normal time for that. A late fall may delay that move for a month.
It is the same for the shift from forage to browse feeding or for the rutting season for the deer.

With other animals you see the same sort of shifts to match the real season instead of just the calendar season. Early cold with a good crop year might force early hibernation, late crops might force animals to still be fattening up for hibernation late into the season.

Creating a "calendar" and checking it against the real world gives you the opportunity to note which plant or animal stages synchronize with each other to tell you the "true" seasons. for example, whatever I think about the cold weather I am experiencing, when the purple blossoms appear on that bush it is Spring and the big bass are spawning!

It is certainly useful to learn about the native food resources in your area, but the bottom line for survival preparations - not a very big or dependable factor.

You need to look at natural indicators rather than a calendar - in the areas with which I am familiar (California and the Southwest), the amount and distribution of rain has much more to do with plant productivity than a calendar.

There are native walnuts growing in riparian areas near my home. I can go out and collect the nuts, shell, and store them, acquiring a useful and nutritious food. (Right now is the time to do this.) For a fraction of the effort, time, and expense, I can hit the local big box and get as many bags of processed, ready to eat walnuts as I desire. I make regular trips to the BB and I am comfortable with the amount of food I have laid by.

Still, it is worth learning about the natural products - miners lettuce, collected at lunch time, has improved my crusty sandwiches. I have spent a lot of time on the Channel Islands and I have thought how easy survival would be in that situation. Do like the Chumash did for many millennia - hit the tide pools and get your fill of limpets, mussels, abalone (currently on the wane), and other crustaceans - just look out for the red tide during the summer months. Seals and sea lions are easy to harvest on land - all you need is a club.

Gotta go out and pick up a few avocados and oranges from the backyard. The blackberries have just about finished for the year. I love nature's bounty but I am not about to abandon Trader Joe's - Mormon tea is not really a good substitute for a good Earl Grey.

A real good guide for SoCal environments is "Chumash Ethnobotany" by Jan Timbrook. It also covers nonfood applications of the local flora - a good many of these could be quite useful - weaving baskets, cordage, etc.

If you do come to depend on native foods, you will put in some real long days, spending a lot of time and effort collecting, processing, and storing the fruits of your labor. It is really remarkable how much of a typical prehistoric site is devoted to storage.

The question for each of us is whether it is worth the time to build your knowledge base so if the "big or dependable" sources are exhausted or become unavailable, then you have a better chance at long term survival.

Thank you for the book reference!

Going berry picking, nutting or mushrooming can give you an excuse to be out exploring the country side around you.
Sometimes the economics of the food gathering is secondary.

hikermor,
I agree with you that wild plants harvesting has very little return.
I have done it and there are many problems.
Positive id, look-alike poisonous, particular "edibles"
that happen to be poison ( genetics mutation, environmental
factors like soil composition etc.), low yield.

If you are having fun, then do it and use more than one reference.
If I had a friend that was interested,
I might do it again, just for fun.

For sharpening your eye, it is quite incredible; one will be able
to make a tentative id of plants from an amazing
distance. Visit any garden or greenbelt to sharpen skills.

Take notes as to locations.
Some plants are more easily identified before harvest time.
Some urban greenbelts have many native species,
I suspect some are purposely planted.

Small scale farming and gardening is hard, but it is a
cornucopia compared to scavenging wild edibles.

Planting domesticated plants in wild areas: stealth gardening.
From reading the internet, one would think that this is not very
productive. but
I have seen it done, and have done it myself.
I do not mean to minimize the problems, however. It is more
productive that eating only wild edibles, why not do some of
both.

If you live in the city, think of exploring and planting
in the sand right next to creek beds. If the creek is
polluted, you can still do an experiment; you do not have
to eat your harvest.

There are several books available about harvesting wild plants for food. however, it seems most of them are oriented to the East or South. I've found relatively little published about the Southwest or West. One resource is the Old Farmer's Almanac, Western Edition, which has planting and harvesting times for domestic crops as well as articles about wild plants. Domestic crops often coincide with wild plants in times of harvest.

Thanks for the reference!

It does take time, and maybe luck, to find significant stands of wild edibles. If you do not spend such time before you need these resources, then trying to rely on finding wild edibles would be a truly desperate act. Most Native Americans depended heavily on a very few staples, like acorn, to get them through, supplemented by game and other plant foods in season.

Only a few references for the west? Try "Western Edible Wild Plants" by H D Harrington. It is probably out of print, being published in 1972, but I am sure there are hordes of later publications. Try looking under "Ethnobotany." You really only need to know one word for western edibles - pinyon. They are not only fairly abundant, in a good year, but tasty as well. And then there is yucca, prickly pear, mesquite, and cattail. These are mentioned in lots of references.

Actually the high desert mountain areas have fewer plant sources than the surrounding lowlands, esp the pinyon-juniper belt, but at higher elevations, you can encounter wild strawberries, tasty, if not useful for long term sustenance.

While I will agree that dependence upon wild foods could become crucial in a very unlikely scenario, I really don't put a lot of faith in that strategy. However, there is a much more significant benefit. Learning about your local food sources will inevitably acquaint you with your local area on a very intimate scale.

In the country where I have spent most of my time, the most important thing you learn in this process is the location and seasonality of water - where a pothole in an arroyo will retain water in the dry season, which springs are reliable, etc. Water is crucial for your own immediate survival, and it also attracts critters and in most ecosystems will support a unique flora, including edible goodies. Nothing beat local, intimate knowledge.

You are going to scope out the good camping spots, the usable rock shelters, good lookout points, the easy travel routes, and all kinds of useful things if you indeed are living off the land.

Even when I know all this, I am still keeping my canned peas handy...

For those of us who have limited time outdoors, a calendar-type project can form a needed auxiliary memory of lessons learned and observations made.

"For those of us who have limited time outdoors, a calendar-type project can form a needed auxiliary memory of lessons learned and observations made."

You might check around and see if there are any booklets produced locally for this information. As others have mentioned, dates can only be very general. Local conditions, the frequency of rainfall, recent fires, and esp ELEVATION all can alter dates because they aren't set in stone. For instance, many plants can live at various elevations, but when they produce can vary according to elevation. If you are mid-elevation and the berries are drying up there, go a thousand feet higher, and they may well still be producing where it's cooler. If the berries aren't ripe yet at your elevation, go a thousand feet lower, and they may be ready.

I am assuming that your original question about this is for personal survival (run out of unemployment), not disaster survival, when the competition would be fierce and the supply limited for the desperate population. In times of extreme famine, people have crawled over the ground on their knees, pulling up single blades of grass for consumption, all the trees and shrubs having long been stripped of fruits, nuts and leaves.

Let's hope it never comes to that!

Sue

dweste,hikermor

Being occasional desert travelers, you might be interested in this.
Yuca or Yucca is it safe?
I happened to be in a Mexican produce store the other day
and they had a brown root that was described as Yuca or Yucca,
I cannot remember which.

I had always thought that Yucca root was used as SOAP so
I was very surprised to see it in the store. I have not resolved
this in my mind, but here are some links.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_yucca_edible

http://www.recipetips.com/glossary-term/t--35498/yuca-root.asp

Two other plants that grow in a wide range of climates are
Amaranth and Jerusalem Artichoke. The latter is a long lasting
root plant that I have planted in the Great Plains and it lasted
years with no attention. It would have multiplied with very
little effort on my part.

A dated but impressive bibliography of wild edible plants:

http://users.rcn.com/eatwild/RC-full-ewpbiblio1999.pdf

I include that data on my plant page. Ohio-area members should check out this schedule of when to eat wild edibles. Non-Ohio members can check that link and adjust for their seasons.

-Blast

You might want to start by noting the order in which fresh crops start showing up at your local farmer's market, talking with the vendors about those crops and how they are doing this year, etcetera. Many wild foods in your area are in the same genetic families as the domesticated cultivars.

This gives you an ongoing baseline even when you are not spending time exploring your wilder environs.

Over time you can begin to note that when a certain certain fruit, flower, herb,or vegetable shows up at the farmer's market, it is likely the harvestable wild cousins you found nearby are also nearing their peak.

Edit: Do check out Blast's website. Good stuff, especially excellent multiple pictures of many plants.