#survivalherbs

~ Submitted by: Cheyenne Caza, AHA Student Member

 Taking a page from the book of primitive living, with enough preparation your winter eating can be a breeze, even in survival situations. Gathering nuts throughout the summer and fall (TIP: watching where squirrels bring their nuts, could award you with finding their cache, which is often a higher pay off than simply hunting the singular squirrel), drying seeds, leaves, roots, and fruits for winter use, drying or curing meat/fish, and if you have the resources, canning, and preparing flours; will all help your chances at surviving the winter with relative ease. Simple things can be done to prolong the life of such food, like root cellar set-ups, salts and sugars (preparation would be key here), dehydration, adding dried herbs like Labrador Tea (Ledum latifolium) to your flour supply to deter pests and rodents, and more. You also need to know how to harvest tree barks, and that is to simply mimic nature. Animals eat barks regularly and they do so by digging their teeth in and tearing a strip of bark down the tree. So do that, except maybe with a knife and not your teeth. Never take a strip from around the tree trunk – that will kill the tree; only strip the bark down the trunk, in small sections, and take very little from a singular tree. Better yet, strip the larger branches, and leave the trunk alone completely.