The purpose of this newsletter is to help you to simplify your life in order to live life more fully. In these days where rising costs of food and other essentials are challenging our pocketbooks, eating the weeds in your garden can save you money. I am going to regularly (I’m not sure how often) send out this newsletter so that you can learn practical ways to simplify your life with a lot of focus on growing your own food and eating the wild edibles that flourish here in the Ozarks and most of the United States.
List of plants I sold at the Kingston Fair in the Square and Huntsville’s First Friday:
This article will be helpful to those of you who learned so much (and I learned too!) when we conversed at these events. . Each plant has links to articles explaining how to grow use these plants for eating and other purposes. I hope this will inspire you to look deeper into the value of these plants.
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Comos and Daylillies
Both of these flowers are easy to grow. Lots of times, people need to divide their day lilies, and thus you can get them for free.
Cosmos flowers are AMAZING. They attract bees and butterflies, grow all summer and through autumn, and grow well in poor soil. Here’s more info: https://permaculturenoosa.com.au/cosmos/
Daylilies are undervalued. This article describes 8 reasons to grow daylilies.
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Longevity Spinach: Featured Plant
I just discovered a wonderful plant that is easy to grow and propogate, super nutritious, and has medicinal properties. I have these plants for sale. Longevity spinach, otherwise known as Gynura procumbens, is an amazing edible plant for many reasons which I explain in this article. I hope you will explore this information thoroughly because even if you are a beginner gardener, think you can’t grow anything, or you don’t have much space–longevity spinach is something I think you will definitely want to learn about and grow. If you are an experienced gardener, I think you will be excited about adding this to your garden.
Please read this very comprehensive article.
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Wild foods are nutrient dense: Don’t pull the good weeds!
This article describes how wild edibles actually have more nutritional value than the plants we normally grow in the garden. Isn’t it ironic that we pull up plants that we consider weeds, like chickweed, lambsquarters, and dock, yet they are the plants with the most nutritional value! Here is an excerpt from this article:
“Wild edibles tend to contain more beneficial nutrients like vitamins and minerals on a per-weight basis than cultivated foods (Milburn, 2004). This is attributed to a variety of causes. First, cultivated foods like vegetables have been selected for many generations for their size and hardiness rather than their nutritional value. All cultivated foods originated as wild plants, and over the long history of agriculture, likely starting around 12,000 years ago (Uekoetter, 2010), humans have saved seeds and hybridized plants to genetically select larger, easy-to-grow varieties. Such plants make for greater crop yields, but tend to contain fewer nutrients than their wild counterparts (Davis et al., 2004).”
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Foraging as a way of surviving hard times
I have heard stories of people who have been able to survive because of their knowledge of how to forage wild edibles. I find them encouraging and motivating.
Here is one: https://nanaisfrugal.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/wild-food-foraging/
“Grandma Mama lived through the difficulties of WW1, the great depression, and WW2 but still had plenty of food on the table every day. She learned about wild edible foods from her own mother and Grandmother. Grandma Mama used wild edible foods to supplement the foods she grew in her depression era garden and also her WW1 and WW2 victory gardens. Same garden, just different names for it depending on the years.”
Reading this inspires me to want to be like Grandma Mama–and share my knowledge of wild edibles and growing food with my children, and others who want to learn.
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Reviews of books about foraging.
I’m researching the best books for foraging. This book has rave reviews.
The Forager’s Harvest by Samuel Thayer:
A review is found here.
Excerpt:
“The plant focused chapters are excellent. Sam provides useful detail on the foods generated from each plant. Detail he provides is based on experience. He includes an average of five to six photographs per plant with a range of three, like for sheep sorrel, to a maximum of 15, for wapato. This is far more than most other books (the book above is the only one with more) and the benefits are obvious. The photographs range from excellent to poor.
Reading The Forager’s Harvest will make your life as a forager, more successful and more fun. While no book stands alone, Sam’s The Forager’s Harvest is an important part of any serious forager’s wild food library. Highly recommended.”
This video goes over recommended books.
I’ve been using the book Arkansas Wildflowers by Don Kurz. I really like the colored pictures which are helping me to identify plants when they flower. Learn more here.
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Simplified Living Coach Services: Organizing (decluttering, downsizing, moving and systems development) AND plant identification and selling
I am developing a new service: Helping people simplify their lives by harvesting the weeds in their garden and identifying other wild edibles. I can come to your home and help you identify your wild edibles in your yard. I can also supply plants that some consider weeds, like lambsquarters, curly dock, and plantain. In addition, plants like mint, comfrey, bee balm, and mullein are super easy to grow and have a variety of purposes including medicinal uses.
I am a professional organizer with over 2 decades of experience. If your main need is for my organizing skills, we can take a break and take some time to look at your wild edibles.
Check out what people say about me here. Learn about my services here.
Contact me at livablefutureproject@gmail.com or message me on Facebook, or text 479-313-0414
