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Wild Foods Around The Homestead

© Debra Eversole

After realizing that the monthly mortgage payments of our first farm would empty our checking account on a regular basis, I wondered how on earth we would heat our home let alone eat. Being that 3/4 of our 120 acres was covered in hardwoods, an add-on (to the existing furnace), used wood burner was bartered for. We traded the use of our 30-plus tillable acres for one year in exchange for the wood burner and its installation. Thus, we had a heating source. But what about food? After all, we were both city kids and the country was something we had only visited but had never actually lived in. Food came only from the grocery store or from farm stands as far as we were concerned.

Stories told to me as a youngster filtered through my worried brain. My maternal grandparents pretty much lived off their land and that property was less than an hour away. My husband at that time hunted and we both fished. Okay, there's our protein source. But we needed vegetables, fruits and nuts. I then recalled having picked wild blueberries while visiting my paternal relatives in the northern part of Michigan. I figured that if fruit grew wild up there, it must also do so down here in the cuff portion of the state.

My next step was to invest our meager checking account balance in a few good books on wild foods. My selections included a couple of Euell Gibbons' books (Stalking The Wild Asparagus and Stalking The Healthful Herbs) along with Bradford Angier's Field Guide To Edible Wild Plants. Next came the entire Foxfire book series, purchased with birthday gift monies in April, just in time to begin spring harvesting of information and of wild foods.

Those few books afforded me the opportunity to not only put free food on the table for well over 3 lean financial years but to also fill our freezer and endless canning jars. Since then I've learned far more about the world of wild foods growing within our midst and take full advantage of them as time allows.

If you'd like further information on the wild foods that surround you, please do a search on the subject, Wild Foods, through Storey Books http://www.storey.com or through http://www.amazon.com I'm sure you'll be pleased to find a nearly endless selection of books on the subject. Happy harvesting!

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