Howdy from upstate NY!
I am the Dachsiemama, because my husband and I have 8 miniature dachshunds (the wiener-dogs!) at the present time. I'm the only one on the computer, though, so I'm the one you'll see here, from time to time unless I get REALLY hooked on this site, in which case I'll be visible a LOT of the time...I maintain the website for FlicKennel Dachshunds in Colorado - where most of my doxies came from - which takes a good chunk of my time, but the rest of my life is dedicated to gardening, houseplants, learning about edible & medicinal wild plants and how to use them, learning survival skills, helping my elderly parents and other folks, cooking and baking and other housewifely chores.
My brother is a very active participant/instructor in Primitive Pursuits, a Cornell University Extension project in Ithaca, NY, which educates interested children and adults in every phase of wilderness survival from building fires and shelters to finding foods, trapping animals and tanning hides, plus lots more. He's trying to teach me things like making cordage from various plant fibers (dogbane stems being the primary source right now), making and using a bow-drill to start fires, making various sorts of containers, building rocket stoves, etc. (I say 'trying' because he lives about 50 miles south of us and we don't get together very often.)
During the 32 years Jim and I lived in Colorado after our Navy discharge, I learned a lot about raising my own livestock, then killing and processing it for food - I do the whole thing myself. Right now, we don't have livestock so I'm limited to shooting woodchucks, possums, raccoons, rabbits and squirrels (my deer hunting last fall was fruitless). I skin, clean and cook the chucks for the dogs, which love the meat. I'm leery of feeding them anything else - when the coyotes, foxes, crows and turkey vultures won't even touch a possum or coon carcass, that makes me think there's something dreadfully wrong with it - but they'll gladly take dead cats, bunnies, and chicken scraps. Rabbits and squirrels can carry diseases I don't want to give the dogs, so I'm pretty well stuck with the chucks, which is fine by me! My mother and I and various friends and neighbors have a plentiful supply of them, which we live-trap and I dispatch with my .22 rifle. I even canned some of the meat for winter dog-food, two years ago!
The question I googled that led me to this site was about honeylocust beans (Gleditsia triacanthos) - I have loads of the pods in my yard, my dogs love shredding the pods for something to do, and the dogs don't seem to have any effect on the beans except to make them swell as the seeds go through their digestive tract - they're hard as rocks. The big brown dry pods make fantastic hot fires, so they're excellent kindling. I'm thinking that's probably because of their high sugar content... I can't find any mention of the beans in ANY of my edible-wild-foods books, even ones that tell what the Native Americans ate - just the pulp in the green pods, and this is one of the very few websites I've found that made any mention of anyone actually eating the beans. If they ARE edible, I have a terrific food source! If not, I'll just keep picking them up to burn in the wood-stove. I looked up the source of the 'locust bean gum' that's listed in so many processed foods, and it comes from the Mediterranean carob bean.If you DO use these beans, please let me know!
Must go do something, even if it's wrong! I'm glad I found this website and hope I can give as much value to it as I hope to gain from it!
Becky, the Dachsiemama.
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