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