Krisz Berta

It depends on your choices.

As per https://permies.com/wiki/108155/pep-foraging/PEP-Badge-Foraging you need to collect 1-1 item from the lists of:
Fresh list
Dry list
Tea list
Dish list
You also must produce 4lb of seed bombs.

At first. But there is a secondary list that wants you to complete two different items from the following list:
  - catch and prepare at least one pound of fish
  - catch and prepare one wild rabbit or squirrel
  - harvest maple sap and reduce it down to make 1 pint of syrup
  - do 2 more items from the dry list (duplicates from the dry list are okay)  
  - do 4 more items from the dish list (duplicates from the dish list are okay)  
  - do 4 more items from the fresh list (duplicates from the fresh list are okay)

So actually if you choose to, you can satisfy the requirements collecting dry list elements 3 times and the ones from the fresh list 5 times.

All the above are about the sand badge. The straw is more complicated.

Acorns are full of tannic acid. What if you leach them and add a few drops of that acorn water to your teas? Or mix tiny bits among the herbs.

What percentage of a kangaroo is edible? Are there nose to tail cooking tricks? How much meat did you harvest from those 17?

Don't you have any forests in your neighbourhood? Are there any oaks in them? Can't you take a walk there and collect some acorns?

I know it's not exactly what you asked and there might be snow there already, but you might give it a try in the spring.

I'd totally give it a try. It's a rule of thumb that unripe fruit behaves like a vegetable. It's pretty common to pickle or ferment unripe water melon (either in vinegar or in salty brine). I myself had good results with slices of unripe apple and pear added to ferments. So why would your cantaloupe be different?

I think the "don't plant trees to hugel" is referring to large trees and the biggest concern is stability. If you check Paul Wheaton's hugel videos, you can see his beds have an occasional apple or peach tree, you definitely see conifers between the berms.

When you start a new hugelculture bed it's better to concentrate on the layers closest to the soil surface, but as the berm matures, you can totally produce most (if not all) of the layers.

Youtube channel Edible Acres has some great compost heated greenhouse videos if you want to see a working model:

wayne fajkus wrote:10 gallons of kitchen scraps  is a lot to accumulate at 1 time (couple, no kids) without it souring.  Any considerations to lower that?  I would have to freeze it.

One possible solution to address the amount of kitchen scraps is to collect scraps from multiple households. I'm a compost host on Sharewaste, any my donors fill my 2x16litre (2x3.5 gallons) buckets weekly (often twice) that I keep in front of my gate.

It's important to have enough carbon at hand. You can always boost the nitrogen peeing on the pile.