Foraging 200,000 Calories from 10 Different Species

I'm thinking about tackling this bigger PEP BB: https://permies.com/wiki/150764/pep-foraging/Forage-Calories-Species-foraging-wood but I'm kind of a soft-core forager and so this'll take some planning. This thread is where I'll do my planning out loud and also document my actual forage so that if I meet the BB's criteria, I can just point back here.

I need to acquire 200,000+ Calories from 10+ species. 10%+ of those need to be canned. 50%+ of those need to be dehydrated to a shelf-stable point. (I can maybe satisfy this food-preservation BB at the same time: https://permies.com/wiki/150148)

For each thing that rolls up into this, I need to provide photo evidence of:
- [me] foraging each type of food
- the weight of each food on a scale (and written description of the number of calories it represents)
- [me] preparing the food to be dried or canned (if that's happening)
- [the food] dried or canned in storage

To make things more complicated, I don't eat meat, so I'm playing on hard-mode.

Now I/m wondering what I can do for this.

Maple syrup -- 10K Calories is easy -- I already have that from this season, so I just need to document it.
Birch syrup is harder -- I have more birch trees, but it takes 200 gallons of sap to make a gallon of finished syrup, so that's a lot of hauling and boiling. But it's another species, so I may need to exploit that.

Sheep sorrel -- my back-of-envelope math says any wild greens are about 30 Cals/cup, so I'd need 334 cups of leaves to hit 10K. That's clearly not possible in one year from my property so I'd have to travel or span seasons, either of which is possible.
Dandelions -- see above
Lambs Quarters -- see above
Nettle -- see above

Random seeds like dock and mustard -- these are about 346 Cals per 100g, so 2900g would hit 10k. (I think that's less than a half-gallon of seeds, so this might be possible.)

Blackberries -- I'd need ten gallons to hit 10k. That might take four or five years if I stick to my property.
Other bramble -- there are raspberries and thimbleberries all over this area and I could take a bag with me when I go hiking. I don't think I can reasonably hit 10K from one of them any short period of time, but maybe they add up or just fill in the gaps.
Apples -- there's an apple tree on a lot where they demolished the house four years ago and it was unlivable for a decade or more before that. That counts as an abandoned homestead for this BB. I'm not sure what 42 apples looks like and whether that's possible from one tree and one year. Plus, I sort of know the owners and they might not want them to all disappear. I need to keep my eyes open for others.
Tiny wild fruit -- we have serviceberries and sand cherries and pin cherries and other things like that. They're not great out of hand, but make a fine jam. Again, not sure it's reasonable to hit 10K, but maybe over time.

Hazel nuts -- I have a million wild hazel bushes. I've seen young nuts but I've never found a mature ready-to-harvest one. I have to assume the squirrels get them all. Maybe I could learn to fight them for it. Seems like I'd only need 56 oz. of hazel nut meats for 10k Cals.

I've never foraged a mushroom but that would be something to learn that would make this easier.

Seems like I need to figure out a few more sources for this to be reasonable or just be happy taking several years to reach the mark.

Ooh, 3.57 kg of sumac makes 10k Calories. That's another avenue.
Wild lowbush blueberries grow on the rocks by the St. Louis River and there are tons of trails. It's another source where hitting 10k in a year sounds crazy, but it might add up and they're super-delicious.

I don't eat meat, but I do feed it to my cats. If I could get over myself and learn to kill and butcher, I could feed my cats venison and save some industrial chickens and cows while easily marking off one more source of 10k Calories. This is probably something I'm not really going to pursue, but it's an idea. These damned deer keep eating my garden so it's stacking functions.

Do you have oak trees around or is it too cold for that?

What about wild parsnips? Caraway root?

Oh, oak...duh! Good idea. I've shelled and eaten one or two acorns fresh and they were just incredibly tannic. I'm aware that you're supposed to soak them repeatedly and whatnot, but it has always sounded like a lot of work. But this would be a great excuse to dig into that. I have three red oaks that I can see from the house and a couple more that I know of in the woods. On a good year, many, many acorns drop.

I don't know about the others. I've read you write about wild parsnips and been intrigued, but I haven't figured out if they're a thing here. And don't know about caraway -- I'll do some research.

Hello,
Are there any chestnut or walnut trees around you ?
Almonds ?
Other nuts ?
One or two adult trees might yield lots of calories.
Have a nice evening,
Oliver

More things to think about:
- Milkweed pods
- Fiddleheads
- Spruce tips
- Ramps, if I could find a patch
- Gobo/Burdock
- Ditch-lillies
- Linden (seeds and leaves)
- Black Nightshade
- Campion
- Thistles
- Cedar cones

Hi Oliver! I'm north of natural ranges of those nuts, but I brought black walnuts from my previous house and they're about five years old, and I'm planting chestnuts, which I started last year, but the squirrels dug them all up. I consider them worthy of planting and tending, but not forage. It's only an hour or two south to get into black walnut range, so I could drive somewhere to forage if I needed to.

I haven't read exactly what the rules are, but I understand that the flowers and unripe seed pods of Maple trees are also edible?

Are Daylilies native or naturalized in your area? (flower pods and roots and maybe shoots are edible)

We have Fawn Lilies. I think they were considered a famine food here because Camas was the bulb of choice. There are different names and subspecies across North America, and I think the edibility may have differed also. I recall doing some research and there was at least one Native Tribe that considered it food.

Ours is Erythronium oregonum. Pictures here: https://ancientforestalliance.org/fawn-lily/
I believe I read that the leaves are also considered edible, but I haven't tried them.

I’ll reiterate my acorn processing method:

1.Harvest and dry the acorns

2. Crack and set shells aside (good for mulch)

3. Bring a large pot of boiling water w/ acorns to a boil, leave heat off & wait 12-24hrs, pour off liquid (may contain fat, so maybe scrape it off if there’s enough?) and then repeat until they taste good. Typically takes a week give or take depending on how frequently it’s changed/boiled.

Sam Thayer sets it on top of a woodstove, which would be good too. Unfortunately there is no such sophisticated wood heat in this house.

This particular method (hot leaching of whole or halved acorns) tends to be used wherever oaks of the red oak group are numerous, and I consider it the method I know of for red oak acorns. I haven’t gotten anything edible from any other method. I tried cold leaching a meal ground from the acorns, but the grinding was more effort and it seemed like the fat in them prevented the tannins from leaving in that case. Even then it seems like more of the fat may be lost.

However, red oaks are amazing in so many ways. The acorns are up to 30% or so fat, for one! Which is one of the hardest nutrients to get from plant foods. Oaks in the white oak group (with rounded tips to their lobes) do not have much fat in them. The acorns also feel very healthy to me. It may seem comically simplistic to say they make you strong like an oak, but it feels that way. Red-oak acorns are some of the largest and least prone to predation, and they tend to be overwhelmingly abundant in the right places. They can also be stored live over the winter, and foraged/cooked and eaten in spring as they sprout. (I haven’t gotten to any this spring—they may be too far along by now.)

Maple

OK, first documentation. Maple Syrup. See https://permies.com/wiki/137946/pep-foraging/gallon-maple-syrup-PEP-BB#3762992 for the BB I just submitted with a bunch of pics from this year's operation. Additionally, this BB requires weighed produce, so I've done that:

I calibrated the scale with an empty 1.5l jar just like the one filled with syrup:


Then I weighted the small jar at 4.5 lbs:


The next thing I did was fudge the calibration for the big jar by just twisting it back about half a pound. That's certainly too much, but I want to make sure everything is above-board. Then I weighed the 5l full jar and got ~11.75 lbs:


So that's 16.25 lbs of maple syrup. Wikipedia says it has 260 Calories per 100g. 16.25 lbs * 454g/lb * 260C/100g = 19,181.5 Calories

Nine more species to go! :-)

Dandelions


(found on the web)

Spring has come a little early to northern Minnesota and I'm eye-balling dandelion greens and thinking about this challenge. The "AI" overview when web searching tells me (and reading actual pages corroborates it):

Dandelion leaves provide approximately 48.70 calories per 100 grams.

100g/48.7C * 1kg/1,000g * 10,000C = 20.53kg

That's a lot of greens to collect, but I was imagining blanching them in salt water, blending them, and dehydrating chunks or cubes or something as a rich green soup base to use all winter.

So I think I need to determine what a kilo looks like...

First harvest seemed like an ass-load but it was only 797g of greens. There are also a few roots and rosettes, I’ll have to figure out what to do with them.

Noting for myself: 13.7kg of elderberries is 10,000 Calories.

Lambsquarters

According to https://foodstruct.com/food/lambsquarters, lambsquarters has 43-47 Cal/100g. I'm not sure what the difference is between regular and "Northern Plains Indians" but it grows here in a context similar to the latter, so I feel OK taking the average of the two values and going with 45.

So for the 307g that I have pictured here (it looks like I failed to weigh the stalks of this small first batch) that's 138 Cals.

I think I'll have to powder this to have room for all of what I want to harvest.

ETA 20260913: I gathered a huge bounty of lamb's quarters 3-4 weeks ago and put them in two buckets of water while I ordered a scale and by the time it got here they were all dried out and gross. So...compost. But it was a great proof of concept and I think I can harvest enough next year to make this a 10K crop...

Milkweed pods

Cathy and I were at Wisconsin point — a spit of sand on the southwest point of Lake Superior and I discovered milkweed was good for harvesting pods. I had a bag in the car so I half filled it up.

I can’t find milkweed pod calories; but searching for the average vegetable seems like 25 Cals/100g, so I’ll use that for now.

I got 697g, so 174 Cals. (It’s going to take a *lot* of milkweed if I want it to be one of the 10k constituents!

Black Walnut

Out camping, far south of home, I have a bounty of black walnuts. Preliminary research — I’m on a limited pipe, says that three gallons of dehulled walnuts, still in the shell, is about 10,000 Calories. So I’m aiming to hit that before we head north. I have just over two gallons put away in the car.

(I’ll add math and sources when I’m home, and pictures as bandwidth permits.)

ETA 20260913: 12.5 lbs of husked but not shelled walnuts was my final bounty. There were more to collect but my back and the yellowjackets were giving me pause. My research from actual papers rather than random online calorie guides (which I trust with more common foods in more common form-factors) says there are 500-900 Cals per pound. If I split the difference, I get 700 x 12.5 = 8750 Calories. So it wouldn't take much work to break 10K, but I haven't done it yet. Maybe I can find some walnut trees on a visit to my son's family 120 miles south and knock it out this year, or maybe I'll have to wait a year which is fine for a project of this scale.

Nettles

This batch was 237g x 42 Cal/100g = 100 Calories

(This one's never going to hit 10K, but it's all the vitamins and phytonutrients that nettle brings to the table!)

This is beautiful!

(My city "foraging" is mostly from local shops for the food mutual aid: 1870 calories per large loaf of bread ..).

Nice project! Here's a random idea: does Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) grow anywhere near you? It's fun foraging for the seeds, but a bit challenging since the seed pods explode when touched and fling the seeds all over the place. It feels like it wouldn't be impossible to get to 10.000, although I don't have any data on actual calorific value. They certainly taste like they contain quite some fat, though...

Me and my partner gathered about a cup of (cleaned) seeds between us in about an hour, but I'm sure there are more efficient ways to do it.

Speaking from a more eastern perspective, we don’t have wild Himalayan balsam, but their relative, the jewelweeds, are abundant and have lovely walnut-tasting seeds. They also explode, so can be hard to gather.

Neat! This isn't a plant that I know, but looking through pictures of the various jewelweed / touch-me-nots found in MN, it seems like something I've seen around but not engaged with. I'll try to remember to keep my eye out for it.

Also, the video of the seeds exploding at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens_glandulifera is impressive. :)

Here are the regularly foraged foods that our family has relied on over the years.  Some of these are higher in calories like fruits, nuts and syrups and others are higher in vitamins and nutrients like greens.  Some wild foods do not contribute a lot of calories but still contribute vital nutrients, like pine needles and rose hips for vitamin C even in the dead of winter.  We do not hunt so protein and fat would be the biggest needs for us if we relied entirely on foraged foods, but some of that can come from other wild foods like nuts of course. Foraged foods have supplied a great deal of our food for a lot of years with our big family when all the kids were at home though (we are down to just one at home now). There were some years we foraged up to 400 pounds of wild foods (heavy items like apples and pears helped).

This is only wild foods that our family actually enjoys, not "survival foods" that don't taste good to us like Virginia waterleaf or garlic mustard, which are plentiful here in MN but not something we enjoy. We are in zone 4 SW Minnesota. These are just our commonly gathered standards, that are fairly easy for us to find and gather. There are plenty of other great ones, like we don't happen to  have blueberries, huckleberries or hazelnuts near us but those are very common elsewhere.  Also, a little farther south than us the redbud trees have delicious pink flowers in the spring that taste like fresh garden peas.  :)

I'll break it up by season.

~ Late winter to early spring -- tapping walnut and maple trees for syrup, ramps, nettles, dandelion flowers for fritters, wild asparagus, violets (leaves and flowers), morels, chicken of the woods, pheasant back mushrooms, cattail sprouts/stalks, pine needles, dandelion greens

~ Late spring to summer -- elderflowers for fritters and soda/champagne, nettles, wood sorrel, raspberries, black raspberries, mulberries, wild strawberries, gooseberries, lambsquarters, oyster mushrooms, watermint, wild plums, lots of wild mints (corn mint, catmint, etc.), spruce tips, milkweed blossoms, wild garlic, cattail pollen

~ late summer to fall -- elderberries, acorns, walnuts, dock seeds, oyster mushrooms, lion's mane mushrooms, rose hips, wild grapes, apples, pears, crab apples, sumac, chokecherries, young milkweed pods (delicious battered and fried), hen of the woods mushrooms, maple seeds, grape leaves, roots like burdock, sunchokes

How we preserve our wild foods:  We dry some of our mushrooms (especially tougher ones) and I powder them to use in soups, meatballs, stews and my morning coffee drink. We saute and freeze other mushrooms. We freeze our berries (flash freeze them flat first so you can scoop them out as needed when they're bagged up) and our asparagus. We dry leaves like mints and nettles.  I also dry ramp leaves and mix them into a delicious seasoning salt (salt, dried ramps, pepper, garlic powder). We also can berries and fruits like plums in syrups or in pie filling (less often because of all the sugar). We store our acorns whole (leached and roasted) and grind as needed, because the high fat content can make them go rancid more quickly once they're ground. We can our apples as sauce (often 80 quarts a year from just one of two good trees) and our pears in light syrup. There were a few years when my son Alex would start every morning with a big bowl of applesauce from the root cellar -- free breakfast all fall and winter. I also use the applesauce in baking, to replace half of the oil in recipes. We can it unsweetened and the kids sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top when they eat it.

This doesn't include medicinal plants we forage like mullein, hawthorn, motherwort, plantain, dandelion root, etc. or foods we get for free but are not technically considered foraging like neighbors who let us harvest their rhubarb or the farm that gives away all their extra pumpkins after Halloween.

Here's an image from one of our foraging years when I wrote up an end of the year blog post about that year.