City Mouse, Country Mouse

I’m often amused by a particular attitude that runs through much of the prepper/survival community. Usually held by those in a rural setting, there is an assumption that farm and rural folk are better prepared, better positioned, and better skilled than those living in an urban setting, and thus more likely to survive a major crisis. Indeed, attitudes often border on contempt when the country mouse considers his city cousin. But how true is it that farm trumps city?

Much will depend on the type of crisis that occurs. In a pandemic, being isolated from the hundreds of human contacts that a city dweller experiences in a day will likely be an advantage. That’s not a certainty, as rural children are often bussed to large schools which are likely vectors for disease. If a food crisis, having the ability to grow food, or having food on hand will likely be an advantage as well.

In other forms of crisis, the advantage is less well defined. In an EMP scenario, whether natural or manmade, or a severe fuel shortage, the rural advantage is smaller. Unless Mr. Farmer is one of the few hobbyists that maintain a working team of horses and the equipment sized for them, he’s out of luck. Modern tractors, combines, trucks and so on depend on electronics in their systems nearly as much as do newer cars. A farm without modern machinery is unlikely to prosper.

Indeed, if we look at modern farming, it is nearly as dependent on the present supply network and infrastructure as are cities. Fuel, parts, fertilizer, seed, herbicides and pesticides are all inputs produced off the farm. In some extreme cases, farms don’t even have their own water, as some rural areas have municipal water systems, with farms depending on water piped out to them rather than wells. Many farms would be in as much trouble without power as any city dweller, as few farm homes have alternate heating or lighting sources anymore. Manitoba Hydro has been too darn dependable.

Even livestock operations are often dependent on electrically lit and heated barns to produce livestock, get feed from off farm, or need inputs like antibiotics and supplements in order to produce on the scale that they presently do. Sometimes, in the case of feedlots, or chicken or turkey operations, the animals being raised are born elsewhere than the farm that ‘finishes’ them for market.

Surely, though, the average farmer has skills that will give him an edge in survival? Possibly true. Many farmers I know are damn good amateur mechanics, can weld with the best of them, and a few are even decent machinists. Sadly, all of these skills depend to an extent on society staying whole. A talented mechanic can do nothing without parts, and without power to run a lathe or welder, the machining and welding skills are useless..

Without modern machinery, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer, it is likely most farmers would be little farther ahead than the urbanites. Neither group now knows how to cut grain with a scythe, tie a sheaf, or stook those sheaves. Few now remember how to make harness, shoe a horse, or smith a tool from raw stock. Nor can these skills be acquired in without practice and experience, in many cases, years of it.

Then what about the farm wife? There must be a repository of skills there that give an advantage to rural folk? There will at least be a kitchen garden to fall back on, won’t there? There might well be, but Ms. Farmer is buying her hybrid varieties from the same few companies as the city folk, her seedling tomatoes from the same greenhouses. She is dependent on the same weed killers and pesticides, and without a gas tiller, she is turning the earth with the same sort of garden fork. It won’t much matter how much land she has if she has to dig it by hand. Gardening after a collapse will be little different wherever you are.

And perhaps she doesn’t garden at all. Many farm wives work full time off the farm, often from financial necessity. That full time job likely means that the farm pantry looks little different from the city one, and has as few reserves. Processed, ready to eat is the norm on the farm now. It is likely that Ms. Farmer is as dependent on a well stocked supermarket as anyone else.

Some farms I know of do produce their own food to an extent. There is often a side of beef in the freezer, or chickens or pigs that were raised on the farm. In most cases, these animals are slaughtered and processed off the farm. Few people have the skills or facilities to butcher their own stock. I hardly need to mention that even if you have a freezer (or two) stuffed with meat, it doesn’t last long without power.

The traditional domestic skills have suffered as well. Fewer and fewer people can or preserve food, do their own sewing, or can create a warm quilt from little more than scraps. Even cooking from scratch is becoming a rarer talent, with so many families being pressed for time.

Being situated in a rural area might even be a disadvantage. There is the possibility that in the city, you may find, along with or instead of disorder and violence that people organize, and share the burden of raising food, obtaining water and maintaining a defense. The farm dweller has likely a far smaller labor pool to draw on to do what is necessary. It is often miles from the nearest neighbor, a poor arrangement when mutual aid and defense is considered.

Of course this is not the situation with every country dweller, but it is more common than not these days. I think many of us that live in rural Manitoba would do well to reassess how prepared we actually are, and be honest with ourselves as to how self sufficient most of us are not.

Like anyone, the country mouse needs to look at the range of possible emergencies, and to actively prepare for them. We’ll look at farm preparedness in a future post.

Originally posted February 12, 2011 @ MPN

Studying to Survive

I’ve just come across several articles on the net that list the ten or fifteen or umpteen essential survival skills. Everyone has a different take on what is essential, depending on their personal preparedness planning. Someone planning an ‘urban’ hunker down is likely to need a different skill set than someone planning to get way back in the bush away from everything and everybody. There is also the issue of looking at what level of skill in each area you need to acquire, since some advanced skills require an advanced infrastructure to support them. So let’s look at a few of these skills with an eye to what is ‘essential’.

Medical - Traditionally, this is rated as one of the highest, if not the highest priority skill by many authors. I agree that you should get advanced First Aid training and whatever other medical training is available, but remember that there will be a limit to what you can accomplish in a severe crisis. Supplies will likely be limited, and equipment as well. I think that abundant manuals or not, most individuals cannot develop the sort of skill required for even moderately complex surgery. Remember as well that the infrastructure for caring for someone after a complex procedure or over the long term may not exist.

I believe that a good knowledge of basic modern techniques would be better complemented by adding traditional and alternative medicine, rather than knowledge of advanced medical techniques that you cannot support. You might be better off having learned some useful herbal lore for the long term rather than attempting to memorize the entire contents of an advanced surgery manual.

Martial - This covers a lot of ground, from personal self defense to knowledge of military weapons and tactics. I think a course of study in a personal self-defense martial art is worthwhile, as it provides physical and mental benefits beyond fighting skills. It really doesn’t matter what you study, as long as it has practical applications. Which is my way of saying choose to learn Krav Maga over fencing, or karate over Tai Chi (Yes, I do know that Tai Chi has a combat form. Never seen it taught in Manitoba).

As far as other military skills go, I think many authors over-emphasize the level you need. While it might be lots of fun to be roaring around in the bush learning small unit tactics with your buddies, is it a level of skill you really need to obtain? This is something you have to answer for yourself, but I believe knowledge of and practicing stealth, evasion, and camouflage techniques are to be preferred over knowing how to lead a squad in combat. My feeling is that if you are involved in a firefight, you’ve already screwed up. Not that you shouldn’t know how to extract yourself if it happens, but better you should not get into the situation in the first place.

Weapons - This is separate from martial skills because it isn’t necessarily military in focus. As far as firearms go, I believe you need a decent level of skill, but don’t get hung up if you can’t snipe someone at a mile range. Practice, but don’t obsess, there are a lot of skills to acquire besides pulling a trigger. Learn to handle everything you own, and how to care for each firearm.

It is also worthwhile to learn to use something that does not make a lot of noise or require hard to get ammunition. Skill with slingshots, bows, and other ‘primitive’ weapons can be a valuable addition to your talents.

Don’t waste your time with learning skills such as throwing knives or using a katana, unless of course you have an interest as a hobby. Knowledge of exotic weapons might qualify you as a top ranked mall ninja, but is unlikely to add much to your practical skill base.

Wilderness Survival - I have a hard time saying you can know too much in this area, as almost all of the skills and techniques can be transferred to almost any setting or scenario. Fire-making, navigation, water purification, plant identification, small animal trapping, learning to avoid things like hypothermia…well, the list just goes on and on. The beauty of this is that using most of these skills don’t require anything beyond very basic equipment, if any. Of course like anything, you can overdo. Knowing how to make a fire bow and having experience using it is fine, learning to make a mirror from a pop can using chocolate as a polishing compound is likely going too far.

Trades - almost any practical and traditional trade is valuable. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical or mechanical knowledge are good for you to know. You can save yourself money now, have a skill to barter later, and can provide you with an entertaining hobby. Don’t restrict yourself to ‘modern’ trades. Knowing how to weave, blacksmith, drive a team, or a hundred other ‘obsolete’ trades likely will be in high demand after a breakdown. Again, competence is required, not absolute mastery.

Gardening and animal husbandry - This should be part of everyone’s skill suite. Get good at growing at least a few things. You don’t need to be able grow prize winning cantaloupes, but if you can reliably get a crop of tomatoes, potatoes or beans, you’re ahead of the game. As for the animal husbandry, make it your business to raise something. Rabbits, chickens, goats, whatever you can do where you are. Raise something you like. You don’t have to duplicate Noah’s Ark, but having expertise with
at least one species is again getting you ahead of most folk.

Hunting and fishing - I have a bit of trouble with this, as the traditional methods in North American hunting often are energy intensive. Pushing deer out of thick brush is exhausting, for example. I believe you are better to use more passive methods like traps or snares (or nets). Otherwise, if you must pull the trigger or bowstring, do it with as little energy as possible.

Those are just a few areas, but there are dozens of others to think about. Food preparation and preservation; bartering, sewing…well the list goes on…

The point is, make an attempt to acquire a set of skills that are useful both now and in the future. Be aware that you likely can’t live long enough to become expert in all of the areas you’d like to be expert in, so don’t stress about it. Get to levels of skill that are practicable and practiced. Aim for competence in as many fields as you feel necessary, but remember it’s not necessary to be expert in all fields. And since learning should be enjoyable, try to have a little fun as you do so….

Let me know what skills you plan to learn...

Originally posted February 3. 2011 @ MPN

Hordes!!

As the briefest survey of survival websites will show, guns are a big deal in preparedness circles. You will find endless discussions on the best make and best caliber of MBR (Main Battle Rifle); the number of MBRs required, how much ammunition to store and so on. And that’s not even considering the ongoing handgun debates.

What is the reason for all of this intense discussion? It is the so-called ‘Golden Horde’ or ‘Mutant Zombie Bikers’, the concept that in a post-apocalyptic scenario, tens of thousands of the unprepared will spill out of the cities to ravage the countryside like locusts. Survival writers from Saxon to Rawles and everyone in between have warned of the likelihood of a “killer caravan” coming to your house SOON! But just how likely are bands of starving looters after a major collapse? The honest answer is that no one knows.

We know that banditry, looting, and other lawlessness will rise sharply after a major crisis. We have only to look at the human misery surrounding hurricane Katrina, or the ongoing chaos in Haiti to see how bad it can get even with major outside aid available. In a situation where there were no outside agencies mitigating the situation, the deterioration of the social order would be orders of magnitude greater. So why wouldn’t the ‘Golden horde’ scenarios come to pass? They might still happen, but I can see a few reasons why they might not in Manitoba, at least not even close to the scale envisioned:

The first of these reasons is the time of year. A major factor in how a society might break down is the weather, especially in northern latitudes. While things like hurricanes and earthquakes are devastating, they last a relatively brief time. Seasons like winter have a little more staying power here on the prairies. Consider an event on the scale of the recent earthquake in Haiti, then add in below zero temperatures and snow for three months during and following the earthquake. What would the death toll be then? How easy is it for the populace of a city to “scatter like… cockroaches”, to quote the late Mr. Saxon, when there is no gas, no one to operate the snowplows, and several feet of snow covering the highways?

Additionally, the vast majority of heating in Manitoba is either electric or natural gas. If the supplies of those commodities vanish in mid-winter, the potential for a horde to occur is pretty small. People will freeze at home or freeze on the road, but they will freeze in significant numbers. Think about the consequences of no power and the four storms in two weeks that have hit the northeastern US and Canadian Maritimes recently. It won’t take much to immobilize a lot of people.

The second reason a horde might not occur is disease. In a major collapse that compromises infrastructure you will probably run out of clean water. If it occurs in winter, you might be limited to what diseases can occur when large numbers of people huddle together to stay warm. Come spring, all of the bodies, the untreated sewage and who knows what else will all unfreeze and one way or another make their way into the environment.

Consider cholera running through a moderate horde of 1,000 people, and for the sake of argument let us say everyone gets it. With treatment by oral or intravenous re-hydration and antibiotics, the death toll will be approximately 10 people. A loss easily sustained by the average horde, but what if there is no treatment available? Then the fatality rate approaches 60%! That’s 600 dead, and a much reduced horde. Now scale that up to the size of a city. Breathtaking, isn’t it? And remember that many of those that catch the disease and survive will be in a weakened state for some time, requiring someone to care for them. In a collapse that may drive the death toll even higher.

And that’s just one disease that is quite likely to make a re-appearance. Typhoid fever has up to a 30% fatality rate when left untreated and is likely to show up as well when sanitation fails. Other diseases like influenzas are nearly certain to appear as clean water and medical services disappear, ravaging a weakened population. Our horde might not feel well enough to be locust-like.

Starvation is often stated as the reason the ‘Golden Horde’ comes pouring out of the cities to ravage the rural retreater’s humble abode. The strange thing is, no one seems to think that one through. In the first place, although it is possible, it is unlikely that food will be available and abundant one day and not available at all after that. Unless there is a complete and instant breakdown of infrastructure, some food will likely be available, although supplies will likely diminish fairly quickly over a period of days, weeks or months. Thus we have a population that is already weakened by chronic hunger before everything is gone.

In that already weakened state, death can occur from further starvation in as little as two weeks. Before that occurs, there is increasing fatigue and apathy, even a reduced ability to feel thirst. A hungry horde might be a horde too dehydrated, oo weak and too apathetic to despoil the countryside. And did I mention the increased susceptibility to disease that goes along with starvation?

Another factor is three things about human nature, two bad and one good. First, there is the very human fear of the unknown and of change, plus our modern reliance on government action to fix things. In a crisis, many people will not leave their homes, their neighbourhoods, or their towns. For them it will be a case of better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. They will be too afraid of the unknown to leave, and many will die waiting for help that never comes. That’s the bad.

The good is the flip side of the fear of change, which is that humans like stability and order, and we readily follow someone that will attempt to maintain that stability. It takes very little common sense to see what needs to be done in a major collapse, from rationing to defense and everything else. The likelihood of people with that small amount of common sense stepping up and getting people organized for long term survival is very high, at least here and there. While that won’t happen every time and place, it will likely happen often enough to both reduce the number of people on the road, and provide an attraction for those on the road, keeping them out of your area.

But let’s say we do have a diaspora of the desperate. This too is self limiting, as the leading wave will clean out the easily available supplies. Every gas station between here and there will be quickly emptied of everything usable, and those following will find nothing to sustain their travels.

This isn’t to say that you won’t someday find yourself confronted by a half a dozen grim strangers looking to take what is yours, but the likelihood of facing human waves of emaciated looters is pretty slim. In a major collapse, you will very quickly see the population crash and adjust in a very short period. Certainly that is a dangerous time, but in my opinion it will be a short time.

The best protection in those times is being difficult if not impossible to find, self sufficient as possible to avoid having to leave your area and expose yourself, and most importantly, constantly vigilant. The fanciest weapon in the world does you no good if a starving looter sneaks up and bashes your head in with a rock.

But hordes? I doubt it, but you might disagree…feel free to say why.

Originally posted January 27, 2011 @ MPN

Food Storage

If you are new to putting back a little food storage, you’ll likely do what I did many years ago, and read books (or these days surf the net) looking for how-to articles, which usually have some sort of list of what to store. I have a couple I’ve seen over the years that I like, although I’m a big fan of developing your own list that essentially comes out of your day to day grocery consumption. It will of course require common sense modifications (powdered milk vs. fresh is an easy example), but it will be things that:

1. You WILL actually eat.
2. Since you will eat it, there is a better chance that you WILL rotate your storage in a timely manner.

That said there are some seriously BAD storage plans out there as well. The faults are many, including but not limited to:

1. Being nutritionally unsound. Deficiency diseases are not fun.
2. Far too bulky. Having a few hundred cans of beans and weenies is all well and good, but have you tried getting them in your car? What if you need to go somewhere else?
3. Require too much preparation. If at least part of your supplies cannot be eaten cold as is, you’re not thinking through your possible scenarios properly. What do you cook with when you’re off grid and out of propane? If it’s dehydrated, where is the water coming from to re-hydrate?
4. And the greatest sin, being too expensive. You can assemble your own food reserves far cheaper than buying a pre-packaged ‘kit’, or buying individual freeze dried meals.

Anyways, here is one of my ‘bad’ lists from the internet. This list is an older one, but still pops up on different forums from time to time. The idea is to buy five dollars of food per week, and at the end of a year, you have:
• 500 lbs of wheat
• 180 lbs of sugar
• 40 lbs of powdered milk
• 12 lbs of salt
• 10 lbs of honey
• 5 lbs of peanut butter
• 45 cans of tomato soup
• 15 cans of cream of mushroom soup
• 15 cans of cream of chicken soup
• 24 cans of tuna
• 21 boxes of macaroni & cheese
• 500 aspirin
• 1000 multi-vitamins
• 6 lbs of yeast
• 6 lbs of shortening
• 12 lbs of macaroni

Supposedly, this will give you “1,249,329 calories which based on a 2000 calorie a day diet will provide enough food for two people for 312 days!” It might, but let’s go through this line by line to see what faults (if any) there are in this plan.

a) 500 lbs of wheat – ok as far as it goes, but there are basically only three ways to use it: Eating it hot or cold as ‘wheat berries’ requires water and fuel. Processing it to flour and then using it requires both of the above plus special equipment. Not quite as cheap when you look at the big picture, since it requires other inputs.
b) 180 lbs of sugar – Sugar is a necessary ingredient in many things such as bread, as well as being a sweetener, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have. You need to think about whether you need 180 pounds of it, and if substituting some other foods might not be a bad idea. By the way, just under 25% of the roughly 1.25 million calories that this list gives you are from the sugar!
c) 40 lbs of powdered milk – Fine, but remember it requires water as an input to use it.
d) 12 lbs of salt – Fine, except I think there is too little of it. You’ll need it as a vital component of food preservation, not just as a spice.
e) 10 lbs of honey – Its ok, but again, not a real stand alone food. About 16,000 calories here.
f) 5 lbs of peanut butter – Better, but not enough of it. If you look at the whole list, there aren’t a lot of fats/oils on it other than the peanut butter. And at nearly 2700 calories to the pound, a very nice calorie/weight ratio.
g) 45 cans of tomato soup and …
h) 15 cans of cream of mushroom soup and…
i) 15 cans of cream of chicken soup – Seriously?? Nearly fifty pounds weight in those 75 cans of soup, giving you only 14,700 calories or about a week of calories for one person. And that’s without looking at the water and fuel inputs required for best results. Dried soup base is a far better option here.
j) 24 cans of tuna – good, just not enough of it. If this list is supposed to feed two people for 312 days (10 months), then you each get a half can of tuna every two weeks. Pretty sparse, protein wise.
k) 21 boxes of macaroni & cheese – bulky, but high in calories. Water and heat inputs required. It would be a bad choice for me personally, as I hate this stuff!!! But since you only have enough to eat one box every two weeks, you won’t get sick of it, I guess.
l) 500 aspirin – It’s not food, so why is this on here? To keep your arteries from clogging from all the crap? This should be in a different category of preps altogether.
m) 1000 multi-vitamins – you’ll need them, since there aren’t any vegetable or fruits being stored on this list.
n) 6 lbs of yeast – I assume so you can bake bread. Nice to have but not strictly necessary, as you can make unleavened bread, or make sourdough starter if you must have raised bread.
o) 6 lbs of shortening – baking and cooking. Again an ok thing, but not stand alone food.
p) 12 lbs of macaroni – At last, a good choice! This is your wheat processed and condensed. It stores as well as most foods, if not as long as wheat in pails, is no worse to prepare than anything else on this list, but has a pretty high calorie to weight ratio. Still requires water and heat inputs.

There you have it, my critique of what I see as a “bad” list. It is of course better than no storage at all, but a little forethought will give you a better balanced, higher calorie list for your money. Which beings me to the one thing I DO like about this list: The idea of a regular weekly allotment of a small amount of money to food storage purchases. It’s an older list, so I suggest that five dollars per week is a bit small. I’m currently conducting an experiment on what you can amass on one dollar a day (i.e. $7/week) and it seems to be working well.

So what about your own experiences with purchasing food for storage? Do you have the ‘ideal’ one-year list? Or a list of don’ts instead of dos? Feel free to share them.

In the meantime, keep putting away food, if only a little every week. Any amount is better than nothing. Given the last crop year and the current prospects, it is worthwhile to do so as an inflation hedge, if for no other reason.

Where's My Magic Eightball?

First, let me wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope you’ve all had a decent holiday season overall. I realize the greeting is a bit late, but it is still the first week of 2011. Seeing that it is so early in the year, though, how do we think it will unfold? I have some areas I’m concerned about.

First, I believe that the Western economy/financial situation will continue to sputter along for another year. That doesn’t mean that things are in any sense healthier in that area, and I also believe there are a few potential ‘bombs’ out there that might result in a worse financial crisis than that of 2008. I recommend that everyone get as squared away financially as possible, reducing or eliminating debt and ensuring that their ability to purchase goods and services is in some way protected.

Second, I’m quite concerned with the weather. It’s been a weird winter that followed a strange spring and summer, weather-wise. I’m not predicting terminal global warming or another ice age, depending on what side of the argument you’re on, but be prepared for strange weather. Implications for agriculture are particularly serious. You might want to plant a wider variety in the garden this year, and double check your preparations for severe weather events. Just an idea….

I’m also concerned with the price of oil. It is above $90/bbl, and I feel it could well be higher by the end of the year, perhaps by as much as $30/bbl. This will affect everything from home heating to the cost of manufactured goods. Make sure you’ve an alternate to petroleum based transportation. Do it now.

And that of course fires into an increase in agricultural inputs, which will push already rising food prices higher. We are already seeing sharply increased prices in some areas, and MUCH higher prices are predicted for items such as chocolate and coffee, among other things. In fact, due to crop losses last year, we are in as much of a food ‘crisis’ as in 2008, and it is only the fact that many Third World countries had very good crops for once, as opposed to critical failures such as wheat in Russia, that has prevented a crisis from becoming full blown. How is your food storage program coming along?

I don’t see warfare, either conventional or asymmetric, as being a significant threat to us here in Manitoba. EMP events are unlikely, and alien invasion even less likely.

However, it may well be a very wet spring here on the prairies, and flooding is almost certain in some areas. If you’re at risk come spring, you might think about some simple preps now, such as getting the family album onto the second floor…..

There you go. Not a very detailed set of predictions, but those are the areas I’m keeping my eyes on. How about you guys? Any particular areas of concern for 2011?

Originally posted January 5, 2011 @ Manitoba Prepper's Network

Review: The Long Emergency

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is an interesting book, for serveral reasons. The first is that the author has tried to take a reasoned approach to peak oil and its consequences. Kunstler is on the pessimistic end of the spectrum in his views, but he presents well reasoned arguments to support them. I agree with some of it, some I don't.

The part I do agree with is that increasingly expensive and scarce oil over the next decade or so is going to force a radical shift in how we organize our society. For example, Kunstler examines how much fossil fuel is required to farm in the form of fuel, fertilizer and pesticide, and paints a dim picture of what happens as it oil runs out. He predicts many more of us will be engaged in food production in the future.

He is also highly dubious about the survival of our large cities and their suburbs in their present form, and goes so far as to make some broad predictions about the prospects for different regions of the US as oil becomes scarcer. It's not a pretty picture.

On the whole, the book is well written and informative, although it suffers from being written only a few years after 9/11, and the general paranoia that gripped Americans after the event is very evident. So are Kunstler's biases toward the region he grew up and lives in. However, these are easily seen and allowances can be made for them.

If nothing else, Kunstler's book makes an excellent starting point for you to investigate the possible consequences facing us here in Canada. Give yourself a present and put this in yoiur Christmas stocking.....

Merry Christmas!

Originally posted December 24, 2010 @ MPN

More Gatherer, Less Hunter

Like you, I’ve watched many a survival show where the instructor-hero walks up to an odd looking plant then slashes it apart with his machete to get the local equivalent of plant filet mignon. Sadly, we do not have a lot of plants in Manitoba that are like that. No coconut trees, no breadfruit, no heart of palm, zippo. We just don’t have any kind of ‘wonder’ plant growing here.

We’re not without excellent plant resources, however. While we may not have the equivalent of bananas in the backyard, we do have a wide variety of local plants that are useful to someone that is willing to get out there and forage in order to supplement and extend their food stores. In order to do that, you need to know what you are looking for out in the woods and fields. A mistake may result in effects ranging from mild stomach upset to serious illness or death.

Which leads us to the subject of today’s post: The forager’s library. I believe that anyone serious about surviving a major crisis needs to be able to recognize wild plants that are safe to eat, and to do that, reference books are an absolute must have item. They are easily obtained and for the most part easily used, if a little common sense is applied. That said, I cannot stress enough that you should NOT eat anything you are not ABSOLUTELY SURE IS SAFE TO EAT. Anything else is digestive Russian roulette.

So let’s start with the easiest and yet most dangerous things out there: mushrooms. Technically, they are fungi, not plants, and for the most part have little nutritional value. So while I do not put a high priority on harvesting them, I do recognize that they will add flavor and variety to what may be a very dreary survival diet, and also that nutritional value or not, starving people will try to eat anything. I feel it is better to know now what I can eat safely, rather than experiment later.

I don’t try to become an expert on mushrooms. It is far better is to focus on several common types that you can always recognize and eat safely. For me, that means I can always recognize morels, shaggy manes and chanterelles. I also know what the few species that resemble them look like (e.g. false morels) and how to differentiate between them. I can recognize several other edible types of fungi, but because of the presence of toxic lookalikes, would hesitate to eat them without consulting my guidebook to ensure I am correct in my identification. Maybe not even then, if I have the least doubt. Always err on the side of safety where mushrooms are concerned. Some of them are so toxic that even with advanced medical care, death is the likely result of ingestion. While there are a number of handy mushroom references, I like:

National Audubon Society Pocket Guide – Familiar Mushrooms.

The next category of green stuff you should get to know is edible weeds. Pretty much everyone knows the dandelion for it’s use as a salad green, but few people know about burdock root or purslane ( the first will give you about 70 calories per 100 g; the second has a large amount of dietary iron available: 3.5 mg per 100 g). Many weeds will supply trace elements, vitamins and minerals required for health, although most are low in calories. There are a lot of them out there, but again, try to learn just a few to start with, and once sure of your identification, give them a try. Learn chicory, if you’re a coffee drinker. You’ll thank me later.

There are a few guides out there of this sort, but I like:

Edible Garden Weeds of Canada by Adam Szczawinski and Nancy Turner. This is the first volume in a four volume series produced by the National Museum of Natural Sciences.

The only downside is that some plants shown in the book don’t have colour plates, making identification harder. I have downloaded my own pictures from the net to supplement the photos and drawings. On the plus side, for most of the plants in the book, recipes and instructions of how to use them are provided.

Another category of edibles are the wild fruits and nuts to be found on the prairies. In Manitoba, one can harvest acorns (with care), hazelnuts, and an astounding variety of berries. While most of us raised here can identify quite a few types, there are a surprising number of edible berries in Manitoba that are little known or used, although some, like those of the mountain ash (or rowan) need to be dealt with very cautiously. My reference is:

Edible Wild Fruits of Canada. This is volume three of the series mentioned above, and by the same authors. It shares the original volumes strength and weaknesses (lots of info and recipes, not enough pictures).

Also in the series is: Wild Green Vegetables of Canada, although I think this reference is more useful for the coastal types rather than us prairie folk, since many of the plants mentioned prefer that climate and ecosystem. Still, there is useful info in the book on plants you will encounter here. There is also a book on coffee and tea substitutes in the series, but I haven’t a copy of this one, so can’t really recommend it or not.

Finally, you might want to round out your beginner’s foraging library with :

Stalking the Healthful Herb by Euell Gibbons.

This book is one of the classics of foraging. It’s kind of all over the place in content, but a decent and informative read nonetheless.

There you are. A few books to get you started. I’ve found the ones mentioned to be great starter books, but please, please be careful. Take it slow, concentrate on learning a few plants really well, and make sure of your identifications before you eat anything.

P.S. Do you know what the plant in the picture is?

Originally posted December 15, 2010 @ MPN