Food From The Wild
As the credit crunch gets worse I have looked at how as a family we can reduce the cost of our weekly food bills with food we can get for free.
Over the coming months I hope to show how we have gathered and prepared food from the wild.
Mussels section coming soon
We are working our way through a list of wild foods we want to try and catch.
So far we have collected mussels, hand caught edible crab at very low tide ( watch those fingers), caught mackerel using rod and line from the shore and tried crab pots at very low tide using the remaining mackerel as bait (they are now too old to eat) Went back to get the pots the following day, two of the three had been swept down the cost some 500 meters, I was very tempted to put on the wet suit and swim out to get them, the sea was huge so annoyingly I left them
While shore fishing can be productive there is still a fair bit of travelling involved to get to the place.
Part of being as self-sufficient as we can is
to be cost effective with resources, so if we are going to have to burn fuel to catch fish we decided to invest in a small fishing boat as it offers a greater opportunity to catch a larger amount and variety of species. We will motor 5 or 6 miles at sea instead of 60 or 70 by road. A sailing boat would have been better, but with a young family and the unpredictability of the weather and the difficultly of sailing while fishing, so for now motoring is better. We have caught a few bass and some small pollack but nothing in quatity (yet).
