Actual Farmer Thread - Also Gathering and similar stuff, just nothing related to hunting

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ICametoLurk

SCREW YOUR OPTICS, I'M GOING IN
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Mar 14, 2014
Since we call us Farmers we might as well have a Farming/Gathering thread.

I live in an area that is full of Blackberry vines so I harvest them. No need for me to buy them to make smoothies (I freeze them to get all the fruit fly larvae to climb out of them before I make smoothies with them).

I also have a bunch of Vaccinium parvifolium (red huckleberries, not the purple kind that you see in Ice Cream), and they're really acidic in nature but they're a damn good snack.

There's a breeder of Lagotto Romagnolos in my area and have one and trained it to truffle hunt but while I live close to the Cascade mountains it's still out of my way so I don't do it a lot.

I also pick and harvest Dandelions cause when my family came here after WW1 that's all that could eat cause no monies and they're actually really damn good.

More would come to mind when Summer comes and I can actually get shit but this is just to start the thread.
 
I live in an area that is full of Blackberry vines so I harvest them. No need for me to buy them to make smoothies (I freeze them to get all the fruit fly larvae to climb out of them before I make smoothies with them).
If you prune one back in the fall to about 5-6' and dig it up, you can put it in a pot and water it. It'll grow it's vines in spring, and then put out berries the next year.

Check around for wild strawberries too, and look for wild blueberries in the fall.

Potatoes are a bitch to grow, but if you plant them at the right time and keep covering the stem with dirt and compost, it eventually will be enough to produce a bag, which is almost nearly 20 potatoes off one plant. Harvest them when the flowers die, or you'll be left with green nightshade tubers, and those aren't fun.

I want to start an orchard, but fruit trees take so damn long to grow, and there isn't any way to quicken the process. I really don't want to keep buying oranges from the store.
 
I actually have a kiwi tree though it's pretty small and hasn't borne any fruit yet. My strawberries are starting to fruit again as are some of my other berry plants. The blueberry bushes are doing really well so I might be able to make a pie this year.
I've also got a lot of tomatoes planted, plus a lot of tomatillos and jalapenos in the greenhouse. Between those and the corn plants I'll have a glorious Mexican feast.
 
Mulberries. Although they are pretty bland. Orange honeysuckle. I was eating the henbit in the yard until some fungus killed it all. I really liked it too. But it still hasn't grown back. It all just turned white and suddenly died.

I've heard you can eat the seeds of osage oranges. But the smell of those things are revolting. How do people find it pleasant? It's like you opened a bottle of cheap citrus scented cleaner from the dollar store. I've never tried ginkgo seeds. How can a fruit look like an apricot and smell like raw sewage? How is that possible?

I've eaten yew berries. It's the seed and needles that are toxic. In small amounts the berry is ok.
 
This year has been a really good year for berry picking where I am. Being that I live in the swamps of the frozen north I have access to as many cranberries and blueberries, along with some more esoteric and less tasty berries like crowberries and bunch berries, as anyone could ever want. They're damn sour, but I like them that way. Lately I've been noticing raspberry patches popping up everywhere in the past few years, and I have several stalks spreading that I pick from. All my attempts to propagate wild strawberries from seed have failed though, and I need to find a place where I can take some runners.
 
Tomatoes, some peppers, mint, thyme and rosmary. Especially the tomatoes and peppers are very, very good if you grow them yourself!
 
I'm a redneck and miss the country. I grew lots of tomatoes, watermelons, etc. Nothing but concrete here.
 
We've had cooler temperatures and a lot of rain this year, so our tomatoes are growing a bit slowly. The Italian parsley spread everywhere (at least it makes amazing tabouleh), same thing for the thyme. Mint is also getting annoyingly invasive. Earwigs were eating our basil so we had to move it inside. Cucumbers, rhubarb and raspberries are doing fine. Green beans, common beans and field beans had begun to strangle each other and had to be entangled. We also trimmed the grapevine last weekend so that its branches won't get too heavy when its fruits ripen. As for the amelanchier, it produced a lot of berries earlier during springtime, but the robins and squirrels only left us some handfuls - still, we were able to bake a batch of muffins.
 
My front room window is now fucking covered in tomato plant. My house looks like a cross between a greengrocer's and something from a Tarzan movie. Next time I'm planting the buggers in the back yard.

(chilli plants are doing well, though. Bog roll in the fridge soon!)
 
I found a wild mushroom called chicken of the woods. It has a mild flavor similar to chicken. Put it in some beef stew, was delicious. IMG_1486.JPG IMG_1491.JPG IMG_1492.JPG
 
My area runs on weird weather logic so my tomato hervest JUST came to an end. A glorious end, as I made some really good pasta dishes with fresh tomatoes and mozzarella. There was seriously a jungle of tomatoes in the backyard, it was insane trying to pick them all as they ripened. I haven't had to buy tomatoes in ages and it's a good thing, too. Once you've grown your own and have fresh happy ones from the garden, store tomatoes taste like soggy butthole.
 
At some point over the summer, someone discarded a bunch of half-eaten tomatoes next to the watercooled AC tower, so the regular leakage of water from the tower combined with the unobstructed west facing sunlight exposure resulted in an overgrowth of these tomato plants. The resulting fruits are cherry sized and taste pretty good, though they're not big enough to be much more than a once daily snack. I can collect maybe 20-30 in a single go, and the tomato patch just keeps expanding.
 
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