Gleaning is when you collect excess food or usable items/plants from neighbors, nature, etc. I have gleaned a bit here and there at various times in my life, got comfortable talking with neighbors and other's when I'm curious to see how flexible they are with their goods. Now that we have our own home and I can experiment a little more, I think gleaning and trading will come in great use, especially since we live in a semi-rural area and most of our neighbors have livestock and farms. Some of our neighbors have already brought us corn on the cob, peaches, apples, and cantaloupe.
During some of our neighborhood walks I noticed a few houses that had tradeable foods, excess on the ground, and things in their yards that perhaps they might be willing to let go of. One such is a lovely lady who has a couple of walnut trees in her front yard. The walnuts were littering the ground; hundreds of them, all over the sidewalk, in the road, scattered in the pockets of the grass lawn. It took a few visits to finally knock and get her at the door in order to ask properly for the walnuts, but when we did finally get ahold of her she was very kind, mentioned that only her husband eats them once in a while, so we were welcome to bring a back and collect a bunch.
Quinn went to school, Perrin and I played a bit, cooked breakfast, took care of a few things, and then picked Quinn up from school. After lunch Perrin went down for nap and Quinn and I walked to the neighbor's yard, bag in hand. He worked hard and focused well, collecting as many walnuts as he could around the yard. We collected so many of them before bumping into the mail lady. She noticed our walnut gleaning and asked about what we were up to. I mentioned the asking about collecting them and asked if she wanted some. Our mail lady was so happy about the little bag of walnuts we were able to give her. Both of us, the mail lady and myself, have never roasted walnuts and were excited to learn how.
Hopefully she'll figure it out, and hopefully I will too!
Quinn had a good time and I felt like it was an opportunity not wasted to teach my son about how to find an extra food source. Though I'm no homesteader, and we're definitely still pretty close to the city and city ways, but I think of our little half acre as an opportunity to start learning and practicing how to be more self-sufficient, and that includes teaching my children as we go. If I can replace our store bought produce, meat, and eggs, many of our snacks and even some of our juices, I'd be ecstatic! Collecting walnuts and making good connections with our neighbors is how all of those goals begin, because creating those good relationships within our community is vital to self-sufficiency as well I believe. Being able to provide for yourself and family when completely alone is great, but you can really thrive if you have a community ready to share, trade, and help one another.
I plan on making homemade bread for our neighbor with the walnuts in return for their generosity. I don't have a lot more to share yet seeing as we haven't started our own gardens, our chickens, or hunting, but I hope to help other's in the future and get a good community sharing sense going on. We hope to bring to our neighborhood pears, peaches, apples, grapes, meat from hunting, eggs, chicken, and when our green house is up and running a regular supply of vanilla beans, cacao pods, bananas, and maybe a few other specialty varieties.
Hopefully we'll get to that point, but today started with gleaning walnuts with my son. In the end we had 5lbs of walnuts, shells on still, so there's plenty of work to do with them. Guess it's time to buy a nut cracker!
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