Plant profile - Burdock

Spring has sprung and burdock is popping up all over my property. Even a small yard can host enough "weeds" to make a wild salad. Be careful with identification (do your own research) and never harvest where poisons may be in use.

Slinging stones

A friend at work made me a shepherd sling. I crawled around in the creek for ammo and started launching stones at an old detergent bottle. Fun stuff! He's been making them for a while, but just added them to his ETSY store (hydeandsheik.etsy.com).

Rabbit box trap

Sometimes, you can still find these in old barns. All the old timers used "rabbit boxes" to catch small game animals for the supper table. The design is simple, materials easy to find and they are fun to build.

Opossum

This fellow lives in my yard. Possums are benificial animals to have around. They have a very low body temperature, making them extremely rabies resistant and deadly to ticks and fleas. Included in their diet are various undesirables such as small rodents and snakes. This one eats leftover cat food.

Cooking chicken with a road flare

Mark it off my bucket list. This was a challenging fire lay to complement an unusual cooking method. A small bird was eaten this day and no one succumbed to salmonella.

Trap and Tell - Raccoon

The raccoon is as intelligent and adaptable as it is nutritious. These things are the monkeys of north Georgia and get into enough shenanigans to prove it.

Sunchoke char for firestarting

Charcloth is made from cotton material and carried into the field to help produce embers for firestarting. A common criticism of this practice is that charcloth can not be reliably produced in the field without destroying clothing or gear. In this video, char is created from the pithy inner cores of  Jerusalem artichoke stems (a fairly common wild food source).