Recessionproofing one's life with earth skills

[Feralhuman]

Years ago Sun Bear wrote, "The price of acorns hasn't changed in 10,000 years. You just go and pick them up." It being spring and the wild weeds are wantonly springing upward full of nutritious vigor it's a great time to make a start on recessionproofing one's life by incorporating more and more wild delictables into one's daily life.
A number of years ago I was living in a community in which my housing situation wasn't too stable. While I had a variety of biointensive gardening beds, fruit trees, and other such projects on our land in the back of my mind I knew I could loose it all at any day. Thus I expanded my caretaking throughout the township. I learned where the oak trees and cattail stands were, I spread wild edibles I knew into areas where they weren't. A few years later after having been away I found myself gainfully employent in that same town but with shall we say, a nontraditional housing situation (or lack there of!). You know how there is a gap between the time when you start working a job and you receive a paycheck? During that time I fed myself off the bounty of the land reaping the rewards of the good karma I had put in at the earlier time.
Here in Maine traditionally folks collected dandelion greens. Unfortunately, they frequently then proceeded to boil them for hours with salt pork. How many nutrients does that leave? Might as well be eating canned spinach. Dandelion and many other wild foods do have a bitter flavor but guess what? Bitter is good for us. The body produces certain enzymes only when it encounters the bitter flavor, when we don't get that we don't get those specific digestive enzymes. By deleting bitter and staying with only stale sweet hollow food devitalized and processed we miss a big part of healthy eating.
From a yogic perspective fresh wild greens have prana, life energy, that the boxed stuff doesn't. It's sattvic (purity, goodness, leads to health and happiness) as opposed to tamasic (things that lead to lethargy, negativity, and ultimately death, the power of inertia). You have control over the cook times and what additives are or aren't added.
During the depression rural people ate a lot of dock greens and poke. A local neihbor in Maine shared what his Dad, who survived the Great Depression, said, "There weren't any deer or fiddleheads between here and the Dixmont Hills, I know this because we shot them all." Thus while we enjoy nature's bounty and share skills with others it is critical that we also share and DO the caretaker ethic. Otherwise we will just be giving another resource for people to exploit and if times get hard there will be competition for evershrinking food sources.
So what can we do to help caretake the local wild edible all-you-can-eat buffet? A big part is helping propagate plant species. Shake burdock seeds over areas where you think burdock might be happy but there isn't any. Plant a bed of day lilys on your lawn, while grass is edible you'll get a lot more calories from the day lilys. When a neihbor oohs and ahhs over the flowers offer to give them some starters so they'll have a patch too. Guerilla gardening is an interesting concept in itself, the stealthy planting of gardens all over the place in ways few people can detect them.
Encouraging native species is a service along with watching the invasive ones. I love using purple loosestrife in healing salves, it's a great plant medicinally but seems to be a threat to the local wetlands. I have no qualms over harvesting large quantites of that species and I never transplant it elsewhere. Nettle on the other hand, even though it's not native to Maine I love to spread. It's very useful and it's unlikely to take over an area completely. Other people might have different opinions on this (Arthur is a great resource for this!) and what is important isn't so much the details as is where our intention is and the amount of awareness one applies to the task. A large skills school on the east coast has entire week long classes devoited to caretaking an area and learning/training to use one's intuition to guide one.
This leads into sustainable community concepts, many areas I've trained in and caretaked were taken out by either development (greed) or ignorance. A healthy tree stand that receives decades of care can be taken out in a day by an idiot with a chainsaw. Does that person see beauty or dollar signs? Thus teaching is also part of caretaking. Especially important today as we see the start of the development of the north woods.
There are lots of angles to this. Like was said, the most important part is intent and awareness, with those the other gaps get filled in. There are lots of things we can do everyday to help break us and our communities from the strangle hold of global consumer based industrial society.

[Feralhuman]

Gave up an overgrown biointensive bed for use as a blackberry patch. Last fall we dug up several clumps of roots from my aunt's house. Those particular blackberrries come from a patch I had as a child planted by a great grandmother, so there's family history there. Planted the clumps and mulched around them. This spring they are popping out in leaves. Should be awesome to have a concentrated patch of berries rather than having to search the clearcuts for random bushes. It's part of a concept of changing from intensive agricultural methods redoing the crops and soil every spring to more permament plantings.