Re: What Preps are you doing this week
Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2014 10:01 am
Whilst I was waiting for the dentist to open yesterday I went for a walk around the local park to see if I could identify any wild plants. Its amazing how you lose your skills over time. i used to know so many of them when I was a kid. I used the time to try and get my head around what I would do, how I would do it if I was collecting plants, the locations I would go to, how I would apportion my time at various locations. Evidently the action of collecting enough wild plants to survive on or indeed to have one vegetable portion of a square meal could be rather a lot and it would be time consuming to do the gathering.
The plants under the foot bridge were mucky, some of the other plant areas I wouldn't trust because they seemed to be likely places for dog walkers and the like. Some of the hedgerows and ditches seemed ok, but some of them seemed to be used as fly tips by some antisocial types and therefore selecting the areas to forage in might be difficult.
Then its a question of what I should be going for. Nettles and dandelions are obvious solutions, but then what about plantain? Its a plant I would have to study more to workout how much my body could handle and whether it would be easy to prepare. The rest are more simple. Soak in water and vinegar for 30 minutes and then hand wash each individual leaf. I read that this can help to kill off parasites and parasite eggs in the leafs and make it less likely that you get worms from them if you were to eat them raw. The nettles and dandelions you could probably just rinse off and then steam cook them right down and eat them. But soaking and hand washing might be a good way of keeping down any bad bacterias and unicellular and multicellular negatives that you want to keep out of your body.
Still looking out for a good natural patch of chickweed which looks relatively easy to successfully identify.
I was thinking of buying the "free food and medicine worldwide" by Marcus Rothkranz the american health guru and the DVDs that go with it so that I can get my identifying skills up to scratch, but that would be even more money going out, so one step at a time.
The plants under the foot bridge were mucky, some of the other plant areas I wouldn't trust because they seemed to be likely places for dog walkers and the like. Some of the hedgerows and ditches seemed ok, but some of them seemed to be used as fly tips by some antisocial types and therefore selecting the areas to forage in might be difficult.
Then its a question of what I should be going for. Nettles and dandelions are obvious solutions, but then what about plantain? Its a plant I would have to study more to workout how much my body could handle and whether it would be easy to prepare. The rest are more simple. Soak in water and vinegar for 30 minutes and then hand wash each individual leaf. I read that this can help to kill off parasites and parasite eggs in the leafs and make it less likely that you get worms from them if you were to eat them raw. The nettles and dandelions you could probably just rinse off and then steam cook them right down and eat them. But soaking and hand washing might be a good way of keeping down any bad bacterias and unicellular and multicellular negatives that you want to keep out of your body.
Still looking out for a good natural patch of chickweed which looks relatively easy to successfully identify.
I was thinking of buying the "free food and medicine worldwide" by Marcus Rothkranz the american health guru and the DVDs that go with it so that I can get my identifying skills up to scratch, but that would be even more money going out, so one step at a time.
