Whenever I go on rides around the neighborhood I'm always looking to see what trees are growing around. Recently I came across this hickory tree loaded with large nuts. It's probably a shagbark or shellbark hickory, but since it's in someones yard it might be a grafted variety.
Most of the hickory trees in the area are either butternut or pignut (not sure which), so to find a tree producing nuts so large is uncommon. I'm going to come back in a few weeks and forage for more, then plant them.
#permaculture #permies #homesteading #meshtadel #foraging #hickory #nuts #cycling #bikeride
quotingForaging this season has been good
nevent1q…sjah
Apples (~100lbs), chicken of the woods mushroom, honey mushrooms, and chestnuts all gathered in an afternoon driving around the neighborhood. Social capital paying off, all I had to do was stop while riding my bike, ask questions and talk about the homestead to neighbors. They were happy to know that what would otherwise go to waste would end up as cider, soup, and seedling trees.
The same is true for these pears. I learned that they are a common storage variety not meant to be enjoyed until late winter. The neighbor told me they used to pack the pears in barrels of oats and would pull out wonderfully ripe pears in late winter. I will make a few dozen gallons of cider with these including dehydrated ingredients from throughout the summer thanks to the bitcoin mining dehydrator.
Some of the apples were so good I couldn't stand to make cider with them and instead decided to make some apple chips with the dehydrator.
One of the big reasons we are focusing on foraging so much is to prepare ourselves for the processing necessary once our fruit/nut trees are mature and producing abundantly. It seems like exponential growth going from a seedling tree to mountains of fruit and we will be caught off guard if we don't start figuring out how to deal with 100s of pounds of fruit now. One peach tree which fruited for the second year produced over 80lbs of peaches...
#homesteading #permies #permaculture #meshtadel #selfsovereignty #foraging #plebminer #bitcoinmining #abundance #localfood
nevent1q…rc0n