How to Forage in the Woods for Wild Edible Plants (with Video)

Reader Contribution by Alyssa Craft
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YouTube video

It’s been an amazing journey towards self sufficiency since Jesse and I moved to our off grid property in Idaho a year ago. We’ve made big gains towards self sufficiency by producing our own electricity with solar panels and starting our own garden from scratch. Along the way, we’ve been searching for ways to stretch our definition of living sustainably and fending for ourselves. One of the things we have tried to focus our attention on is learning the ways that nature can provide food resources for us without us having anything to tend to.

We’ve found that foraging in the woods has been a great way to increase our sustainability, improve our survival skills, and provide food for ourselves without having to rely as much on grocery stores. It’s been an adventure in experiential learning. Once we started to realize just how much food was available in the forest around us, we dropped everything we were doing to gather as many gallons of free fruit from the surrounding woods as we could cart home with us.

Not only have become more intimately familiar with our own region of the world, gathering berries has been a great crash-course for us in learning how to can and preserve our own food. I’m happy to say we now have delicious jams stockpiled away for the colder months.

Whether you live in the Rockies like us or somewhere else entirely, there are bound to be edible plants near you. I hope that our experience inspires you to start seeking out what nature has abundantly provided.

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