Wild Food Gardening: Gathering the Abundance!
What do you do when wild food (sometimes thought of as weeds) show up in your life?
Are you familiar with the local, abundant wild foods that are growing in your area?
Wild food foraging is a very easy skill to learn, just takes a little practice. As is the case with some of the plants I mention in this video, some wild foods show up in many different regions.
Ini made a guest appearance in the vid to talk about a fav plant of his! This plant grows all over the world! Fat hen, lambsquarter, you name it!
Many gardeners go to extreme lengths to eradicate these so called weeds from their gardens, but when I look around in midsummer and see that many of these plants are the only ones thriving, I know that they are amazing and that I want to ally with them!!
In this video I showcase purslane, lambsquarter and some other plants that come up year after year on our homestead- without us doing a thing! I’ll be sharing more in depth profiles of purslane and lambsquarter soon to be sure!
I also highlight some plants we did plant one year that come back now year after year.
While these aren’t wild, they are blessings demonstrating a good kind of tenacity! Tulsi or holy basil is one such plant I mention in the video.
Whether you have a garden or not, allying with local foods that are resilient to your ecosystem is something we can all do to empower ourselves and strengthen our diets (wild foods often lend us their wild vigor!)
Seeds of lambsquarter also coming on. They’re edible.
What are some of your favorites this time of year?
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Wild Food is also our need that we gifted by God. So the gardening of wild food is also a big work.Keep going.
Yes! Do you have any favorite wild foods where you live?
GOD does most of the work, but it is still a lot of effort to secure what he grew! Yummy stuff for sure! Some of it is a lot better than anything we can get in the store.
:DI love lambs quarter! It is one wild weed that I encourage, so maybe that one is tame-crafting! This is the south side of my house, with just a little watering:
Yessss tame-crafting hahah!! Exactly... we tamecraft this one too 😂
Seems a little more efficient, LOL! I like "tame-crafting"; it is very descriptive.
:)LOVE your Basil! That would be fantastic to have that growing in the yard.
yes!! we've been so delighted that that comes back year after year. may do the same for you! :)
You are blessed in that. I look forward to a good bed of Basil, once the move is done! :)
yum, basil... ENJOY
So many oak trees, I will have to fell several to have enough light for a garden. I will plant medicinal and cooking herbs first!
:DSorry you guys... what is Tame-crafting? Apparently it's not descriptive to me 😞
hahah no worries coconut, i inferred that @smithlabs was making a joke around "wildcrafting" -- going out into the wilds to harvest/forage for food/medicines. tame-crafting, juxtaposed, would be things that aren't out in the wild that you're gathering, but in a cultivated (tame) environment, like our homestead, or a garden. these plants are "from the wild" but they've taken a liking to our garden and so are "tamed" ... :)
@mountainjewel Perfect description, because they are still a little wild.
:)@seniorcoconut Sorry, my bad. Just a joke about taming wild plants by semi cultivation.
:)No worries... sometimes things pass right above my head!
Join the crowd! With me it is usually deadlines, LOL!
:)Ooh deadlines... that's exactly why I don't give myself any 😁
It seems like you love gardening!
Just a little bit 😉🙃
I totally love the wild foods in my garden. We had a drought year once and not much that I planted came up or survived but the wild plants did and I was very grateful for their nutritious goodness! I feel there is such an abundance around me here in the forest but you take someone from the inner cities and they would starve out here in the wilderness.
So well said. Exactly.
We are basically having a drought right now and looking around to see what is thriving — it is these wild foods- certainly none of our greens! The corn looks great and the tomatoes and peppers... but so much is struggling.
Another thing I found that often folks will make bare ground and sow their seeds in it but nature doesn't like open ground and usually something will sprout from it. Many of those wild plant (weeds) will provide a ground cover so the earth does not become parched in the heat. I'm also a big into mulching to keep the water in the ground. Your gardening space still looks pretty productive for having a drought.
yes exactly! i have noticed that time and time again. we definitely mulch a lot, but it has still be quite dry this year. we have been watering a lot to help things survive, but it is noteworthy which plants are still thriving.
Good point... I just came out of the city and I have almost no clue what to eat. But I am starting to recognise so many different plants and learnong about them now too... and trees.
As far as the drought, next time this happens save the seeds of whatever survives and plant them again next year. You can actually teach plants to have a stronger will to survive without water, over time. That's what the weeds did!
good tip - thanks!
You're welcome. There's man named Pascal Poot, in a dry and arid part of France who gows 400 types of tomatoes without water or fertilizers. And he produces the same amount of fruit as traditional growers!
love it!!
yes! great point coconut! we are finding that some of our arugula and kale have been self selecting in this way and those are the ones that are re-sowing (we let them go to seed and self sow). curious to see how this will pan out over the years.
Thank you.
I would like to do that when we have a proper garden/food forest design started. I am curious to see that too
I had lamb's quarters for lunch...Yum!
yummm!! we are eating it so often lately. so so so resilient, nutritious and tasty!
I'm so looking forward to going home now though our garden will be freezing! Looking forward to seeing my own wild spaces.
Trip over already? I miss my place too right now... and it's only been 2 weeks!
Nearly... home Friday morning. Cant wait for a fire and a red wine and a stew on. X Funny.. love travelling but when it gets close to coming home yiu look forward to that too...
Mmmmm, well that mood you're returning to sounds just straight up awesome!!
Yay!!!! looking forward to see your garden under the frost!!
Awesome you guys, I live that you have food growing all over the place, it's truely inspiring!
What kind of Kale did you say that was? At home I don't want to cut anything down... it all looks like it has either medicinal properties or nutrinional!!!
All the wild food around us is on the lost of things to learn.
Thanks for the video, I think we have some of what Ini was talking about, the lambsquarter. It seems very familiar!
Till next time
:) that is lacinato kale and it is one of my favorite varieties!
i am sure that you likely have lambsquarter--- i can imagine that it will grow well in your region and will have established! plz let me know if you get a proper id. you may even have purlsane, too :) !! <3
Look at this I found this morning, walking to work in New York City... is that it?
Sorry for the side shit... can't seem to turn it right side up
Thanks for the kale type too
This doesn't look like lamb's quarter to me, well it DOES look a lot like it but I would pin it for something else. Similar shaped leaves, looks like opposite branching, but the leaves or more rounded on this plant. Veining looks alike too. Check for fairy crystal on the underside of the leaves, lambs quarters usually are laden with crystals. The stem is also highly ribbed. Hope this helps. Blessings on your foraging.
Thank you for that. It does help a lot. I'll take a closer look later shen I pass by it again.
I agree with you, often we are sincerely. but tampa we realize that eating is very bermaafaat for the needs of our lives, so marihlah we gardening as well as possible. thank you
yes indeed.