Lovely piece! It's a mast year here in Virginia, as well, and I have been putting all my nature school students to work gathering walnuts. Thanks for the tip about paint-mixing drill bit.
In the hulling process you can also produce a natural dye… I haven't explored this too much because I'm pretty busy and my clothes are pretty stained already, but it might prove useful for your school!
I was just thinking about how people hear the perma part and immediately think of making the agriculture part permanent instead of the culture part. Not that an ecological culture would be static but it would ideally keep humans around longer than our present arrangements seem likely too.
Foraging is an interesting case in regards to provisioning calories. In terms of return given that harvesting and processing are the only steps it's quite good, but in terms of area you're liable to quickly run into issues with our current ideas about property rights.
For sure, that's part of the relationship between area and yield as aside from mast years a field of wheat probably out yields a stand of oaks calories wise. (Though the oaks require no inputs aside from maybe a fire every so often)
However, this is all just academic at some point. I live in a sparsely populated flyover state with little public land nearby and only corn and soy for miles that mostly just feeds the maw of industry. So to me the degradation of the landscape and lack of access to for instance riparian areas, is a more a problem than lack of land per capita. And I do grow root crops and staples in the garden too, it's just much more satisfying to find wild foods.
Every time we go out on a walk we fill a single pocket with English walnuts, it's the smallest harvest in nine years of living here. Apples, this year were also none, but plums there were aplenty. So we preserved about 50 jars of those. Sometimes you just have to forage/take what comes your way.
Lovely piece! It's a mast year here in Virginia, as well, and I have been putting all my nature school students to work gathering walnuts. Thanks for the tip about paint-mixing drill bit.
In the hulling process you can also produce a natural dye… I haven't explored this too much because I'm pretty busy and my clothes are pretty stained already, but it might prove useful for your school!
Yes, we definitely do dyeing with walnut every year (and making ink). We just haven't gotten the process down pat for processing the nut meat.
I was just thinking about how people hear the perma part and immediately think of making the agriculture part permanent instead of the culture part. Not that an ecological culture would be static but it would ideally keep humans around longer than our present arrangements seem likely too.
Foraging is an interesting case in regards to provisioning calories. In terms of return given that harvesting and processing are the only steps it's quite good, but in terms of area you're liable to quickly run into issues with our current ideas about property rights.
I would also think that foraging only works below certain population densities as well.
For sure, that's part of the relationship between area and yield as aside from mast years a field of wheat probably out yields a stand of oaks calories wise. (Though the oaks require no inputs aside from maybe a fire every so often)
However, this is all just academic at some point. I live in a sparsely populated flyover state with little public land nearby and only corn and soy for miles that mostly just feeds the maw of industry. So to me the degradation of the landscape and lack of access to for instance riparian areas, is a more a problem than lack of land per capita. And I do grow root crops and staples in the garden too, it's just much more satisfying to find wild foods.
Every time we go out on a walk we fill a single pocket with English walnuts, it's the smallest harvest in nine years of living here. Apples, this year were also none, but plums there were aplenty. So we preserved about 50 jars of those. Sometimes you just have to forage/take what comes your way.