No matter how much food I have stored up I never feel completely safe that we will be able to survive a SHTF event. But thanks to folks like Southern Wood Elf and others I have been learning about foraging for weeds and wild plants for eating and making medicinal medicines.
But I have been dragging my feet and doing it slowly. Yesterday I decided to jumped in with both feet and really step up my learning. I scoured my yard yesterday looking for weeds that were still in good enough shape to get some decent pictures of. Winter is on its way and we expect snow flurries this week so it was now or wait until spring and I didn't want to wait. Thanks to Southern Wood Elf I now know at least 6 weeds in my yard.
But I knew there were many more that grow in my yard but they are dying back because of the time of year so I went looking online for weeds that commonly grow in my area. I simply typed in the Yahoo search box "weeds that grow in (my area)" and a bunch of sites popped up. I decided to go with the one that belongs to a university in my state. By the time I was done going through all the weeds they had pictures of and info on I found a total 16 weeds that I know for sure grow in my yard and I found another 12 that I am pretty sure grows in my yard but I will have to wait until spring to find out for sure.
I printed out all the pictures and info they had on each weed and I am going to spend this winter finding out all I can on each one. I know for sure some of them are edible thanks to Southern Wood Elf and that some are good for making herbal remendies, again thanks to SWE.
All this infomation and pictures I have printed out are going into my herbal remendy and foraging 3 ring binder for future use. Next spring I will be looking for each of these plants, digging some of them up and replanting in pots to keep my husband and son from spraying them with weed killer and then I will have another food source that I can use to feed my family and the makings of herbal medicines that I can use when store bought meds are no longer to be found when SHTF.
Besides I think I would much rather have something God made in my system then the man made chemicals that come for big companies. Something that was made by God or Mother Nature (which ever one you prefer to say) feels safer for use to me.