Eating. We love to eat. Some of us live to eat, while others eat to live. Because of the time and effort involved with eating wild edibles (or even having a garden), most people prefer going to the store or restaurant for their food. For most people, wild edibles will be eaten to live. With that in mind, don’t eat anything that you haven’t 100% identified. Now let’s talk about something to eat!
PURSLANE – Portulaca oleracea
This annual succulent plant is a great plant to have in your garden or flowerbed. This is a low-growing plant that lies on the ground and can form mats where there is good soil with little competition. The stems and leaves are thick/fat, and smooth, which helps with identification. Stems are round and reddish or pinkish, sometimes having a little green. The leaves are entire and rounded on the tips. The leaves also are alternate but tend to grow in clusters at the tips of the branches. Flowers are yellow and are only open in the morning (which is why I can’t remember ever seeing one) and produce capsules with tiny black seeds.
These plants grow in disturbed ground in sunny areas like your garden, flowerbeds, roadsides, and agricultural areas. I’ve heard, but haven’t tried that you can break off a branch, plant it, and it will produce roots and grow. This would be a great way to introduce this plant to your area.
Purslane is high in:
Iron
Antioxidants
Omega-3 fatty acids.
You can eat the whole above-ground plant because it hugs the ground; wash it! Eat it raw or as a pot herb. Bad look-alikes are the spurges (Euphorbia), with spotted spurge (Euphorbia maculata) being the closest look-alike I know. These will have thin stems and leaves and white milky sap in the stems. The leaves often have a red spot in the middle, but not always.
Being eaten (or not), that is the question.
Ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, horseflies, gnats. These critters like to eat you and are proficient at 100% identifying you as something to snack on. Besides snacking on you, they can also give you things you don’t want, like West Nile virus, lime, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and alpha-gal, to name a few. Since foraging for wild edibles happens in the wild, your chances of encountering any or all of these pests are good, so let’s talk about some ways to keep from being eaten. Your first layer of defense is your clothes. Wear long pants with high boots or shoes.
Long sleeve shirts are good too. Blue, green, and light colors attract mosquitoes less than darker colors. The same is true for horse flies, except they are attracted to blue. Tuck your pant legs into your shoes/boots and your shirt into your pants, as this will help keep out most ticks and chiggers. The next layer of defense is chemicals. Permethrin is an insecticide that is an excellent defense for ticks and other bugs. You can buy it premixed or buy the concentrate and mix it on your own. This is only applied to your clothing. Spray it on your clothes outside and let it dry.
It should last a long time if kept out of the sun and air-dried after washing. The other product is Deet, usually the active ingredient in OFF. I prefer the Repel 100% Deet. I spray it on my clothes and shoes to keep off the chiggers, ticks and mosquitoes. Some people have adverse reactions when it gets on their skin, so I usually only lightly spray or not at all on my skin. For those of you who don’t like the chemical approach, you can make your own repellant.
A friend of mine makes a tincture from mountain mint (Pycnanthemum) that works well. Making a strong tincture with regular mint may also work. I know other plants are effective as bug repellants, so get to researching. If you can’t find the plants you need, find the essential oils and combine them with another oil as a carrier so you can spray. Essential oils may also irritate your skin if not diluted and adding another oil as a carrier will help.
On the opposite end, fragrant soaps, perfumes, and cologne attract mosquitoes, so be forewarned. Vitamin B1, when taken daily, can also help reduce your attractiveness to biting bugs. It takes about two weeks to start working as a repellant, but I find that I have a lot fewer mosquitoes pestering me (if at all), and any ticks I might find are usually still crawling around and not attached. If you have ticks in your yard, get some guineas. If by some chance you do get a tick embedded, get a tick stick.
This is a tool that removes the tick without causing it to inject more fluid or losing its mouth or head which can cause infection. You can click on the image above to purchase a tick-removal kit at around $8 plus shipping.
Hope all these suggestions keep you from being eaten (it wasn’t really a question was it)!
About Me:
John Miller loves the outdoors and enjoys learning about all the things the Creator has made. He enjoys hunting, fishing, backpacking, and finding new moths. While looking into prepping in 2008, he realized that developing skills such as knowing wild edibles and bushcraft skills were more important than storing food. Ever since then he has been learning and slowly working on the skills of these two disciplines. He currently lives in Cleveland, TN with his wife Rachel and six children.
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