Zach Elfers

Staghorn and smooth sumac berries may be dried and then ground into a powder as a seasoning. The taste is reminiscent of paprika but with more of the tangyness associated with sumac. Quite delicious!

Yes, the original posters question is one that be answered with a yes, and it's practice is certainly intriguing. There are some permaculturists in Lancaster, PA who are teaching an advanced PDC on this very subject at the moment -- zone 4 permaculture. Check out a summary Ben Weiss & Wilson Alvarez's work here: http://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/2013/restoring-eden/. They are working on a book. Kyle Chamberlain in Washington state is also working under a very similar permaculture model. See his blog, the Human Habitat Project: https://sites.google.com/site/humanhabitatproject/.

Other good resources on this subject would be M. Kat Anderson's great work Tending the Wild, which describes native american indigenous land management practices, which were large scale and all over, in contrast to the "garden plot." I would also recommend Samuel Thayer's works on foraging, since knowledge of foraging (as well as hunting) opens your perspective to the possibilities of wild food, and once you can reliably identify wild foods it's a much smaller leap to begin cultivation of wild spaces for the purposes of increasing the abundance of the already present wild food species.

Check out Ilex vomitoria "Yaupon holly." The Native Americans brewed it into a tea called black drink. Very tasty, and very healthful. The Yaupon holly grows wild all over the islands. I have found quite a bit of it in Manteo. Depending on how much space you have, it might make a nice addition to a corner somewhere. Of course, you could just wild forage it!

Maybe you could have success with Prunus maritima "Beach plum"? The natural range is Maine-Maryland, but you might have success with it on OBX.

You might have success with Pawpaw and groundnut (Apios americana) as well.

Hi! I'm new here and have a couple questions. Very shortly I will be working at setting up an area anywhere from 4-8 acres with hugelkultur beds for growing vegetables. This will be a section of a 46-acre property. All around the perimeter of the property and in a few divisions, grows hedge apple. Much of this osage orange will get cleared out (at least a few of the hedge rows -- the outer perimeter may stay for awhile). At first I thought I could use all the osage orange trunks for the hugel beds, but now I realize osage orange has anti-rot agents. What advice can you give me on this? Can I get away with using the osage orange anyway? I do not want to compromise the quality of my hugel beds, but I also want to put all this osage to use!

(However, there are surely other types of trees on the property including oak, maple, etc. -- common trees of the northeast -- if all else fails, I could use those, though I do not know how much there would be available of that, nor how much of it I would wish to chop down...)

My second question is in regards to building hugelkultur beds as a buffer to runoff water from a highway. Alongside our property is a fairly busy road, and my intention is to raise earth-berm walls up along the edge of the road and set back about 15 ft or so, and then I will seed the whole area between the road and the walls with native wildflowers so that their roots suck up all the dirty, polluted water. What if I make the earth-berm walls hugelkultur beds? That way they might absorb any water that the wildflower buffer cannot absorb.