Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Sometimes you just need a little bit of sweet, but you could do without the extra calories. Artificial sweeteners contain some pretty scary stuff, and they taste downright horrible. Stevia is different. It’s a simple plant that you can grow right in your backyard, just like I did. It’s hard to imagine a green leaf tasting that sweet, but take one nibble of a stevia leaf and it’ll blow your mind.
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There aren’t that many mushrooms you can forage year round, but orange witches butter will pop out of softwood logs any day of the year. That includes -20 days right in the middle of our zone 4 Vermont winter. While it may not taste like much, it is edible, and it’s a year-round survival food. Witches butter mushrooms are also medicinal, and they’ve been shown to have anti-tumor properties, as well as potential to treat certain respiratory conditions.
A large orange jelly fungus (Dacrymyces palmatus) growing out of the cut end of a downed hemlock log.
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Few houseplants can match Tulsi for both beauty and fragrance. Tulsi, also known as holy basil or sacred basil, is a perennial in tropical and subtropical regions, but it can be grown indoors year round regardless of your climate.
Each year we plant a large patch in our vegetable garden and harvest well before harvest first frost to dry for winter teas. Unlike other annual basils which bloom and then become bitter, tulsi is known to bloom and keep blooming, providing forage for the bees and fragrance for your garden.
If brought indoors for the winter, tulsi will keep right on blooming and liven up any room with its sweet fragrance.
Tulsi beginning to flower mid-summer in our Vermont garden.
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Elderberries have a very short season, and they barely have time to ripen before they’re gobbled up and carried away by the birds. If you have a keen eye and watch closely, elderberry bushes produce huge harvests of medicinal berries each year. Those berries make a quick and easy elderberry jelly that preserves their goodness all year long.
We often preserve them as elderberry oxymel, which is a honey-based probiotic cough syrup for winter colds. Elderberry mead is another one of our favorites. Both of those aren’t the best for young children, so this year I made a special batch of elderberry jelly for my jam loving babies.
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Every fall the hedgerows are filled with color in my neighborhood. Thimbleberries and wild plums dot the roadside, and the clusters of bright red highbush cranberry are visible from a distance. I’ve seen those bushes every fall for the past 6 years and never gotten around to harvesting. In early September there are so many wild edibles, and they never made it to the top of my list.
This year, I learned that the bark of highbush cranberry is a potent medicinal, and that got me out foraging the very next day.
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You don’t have to be a herbalist to know about the immune-boosting powers of echinacea. It’s one of the better-known herbs, and for good reason. Echinacea tea has been used for centuries to help fend off winter illnesses, and there are countless studies that show it’s an effective immune system stimulant.
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Most herbs are better fresh from the garden, but we sprinkle them dried from spice jars for convenience. You’ll rarely see dried chives in the store, and it’s always tiny mince of fresh chives topping baked potatoes at restaurants. There’s something about fresh chives that just isn’t the same dried and bottled.
It’s simple to grow your own fresh chives year round, indoors or outside. Chive plants grow readily in sunny spots and pot up quickly for winter use.
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Herbalists know that burdock root is powerful medicine, but most would be surprised to learn that the burdock is edible as well. Burdock leaves, stalks and roots are edible and can be downright tasty if you know how to prepare them.
If you’ve walked by a burdock plant in the fall, you know how the plant gets its name. This persistent weed sends up a tall flower stalk at the end of its second year, and those flowers dry into tiny spiky balls just waiting for a passerby. Most people hate them, and for good reason. The barbed spikes on the seed pods are hard to remove, and they stick to just about everything. Hopefully, once you learn that burdock both edible and medicinal, you may learn to appreciate this much-hated herb.
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Elecampane (Inula helenium) is a perennial herb that grows wild around the world. It’d been used for generations as a flavoring and condiment, and it’s still used to make absinthe in Europe. Herbalists know it as a powerful expectorant, and harvest the roots to make herbal cough remedies.
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As the opioid epidemic worsens, people are desperate for natural pain relief options. Wild lettuce has been used for millennia as a natural herbal pain reliever, and now survivalists are touting it as a form of morphine that grows in your backyard. I’ve seen that catchy, click-bait headline a dozen times at least. “Wild Lettuce Works Like Opium!” Come on, can that possibly be true?
Trust me, I’d be all for a natural herbal pain reliever without nasty side effects or addiction. None the less, I’m skeptical. How does wild lettuce stand up to modern scientific testing? Time for a little research, and then I’ll try it out myself…for science.
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