FREE Coffee Replacement From the Forest

Description

In my quest for self reliance, foraging for food in the forest is a major step, and a free coffee replacement is great - chaga mushroom and dandelion root are two wild edibles that can do this for me. While neither contains caffeine, they have a remotely similar taste and color and are actually much healthier. I can't say that I'll replace coffee completely with chaga mushroom, but I do drink it almost every day, along with other herbal teas and coffee replacements. What you saw is all I do. Break it up, throw it in a kettle of water and simmer as long as you want. That kettle has a rough strainer in the spout to keep chunks out of my cup. "Earthy" is the only way I can describe it.

This spring, brewing chaga tea in maple sap has been eye opening - not only does it taste great, the pair seems to provide an immediate energy boost similar to caffeine. Free, natural wild edibles like this make off grid living in the wilderness that much more enjoyable, and the more I add them to my diet, the less I miss modern conveniences and commercial food.

As with all wild edibles, take only what you need and leave enough to keep the host and fungus healthy.

The chaga infection will ultimately kill the host tree, but the tree can survive for decades if not mistreated.

When collecting the chaga, leave some behind (about 15-20%) as this will help keep the chaga healthy and allow the sclerotia to regrow.

If the tree has multiple instances of sclerotia, leave at least one instance completely intact for the benefit of the chaga fungus as a whole.

Avoid harvesting the small specimens, and stick to pieces roughly larger than a grapefruit in size.

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My Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Tags: Self Reliance,wilderness,survival,primitive,bushcraft,forest,woods,My Self Reliance,free,coffee,coffee replacement,from the forest,wild edibles,wild edible,chaga,chaga mushroom,chaga fungus,mushroom,caffeine free,foraging

Video Transcription

(bird squawking)

(fire crackling)

- So I thought I'd take a chance and boil some maple syrup, and as soon as I got it all into the pot, of course, it starts to snow. But I wanted to show you something quickly. I found this chaga on the silver birch here. Now chaga is extremely good for you. It's a fungus that lives on, typically, birch trees especially around here, and it has a lot of medicinal properties, very healthy natural tea. You do have to boil it for a long time to unlock the nutrients, but of course, I can easily do that, again, I put a pot on this wood stove, so I wanted to show you that. But I want to show you what it looked like. Now this one in particular is on a dead tree, so this is actually dead chaga, so it doesn't have any nutritional value any more right now. What you need to do is find a living tree that it's living on, and it's taking all the nutrients from the tree itself, and that's what you're ingesting. But this tree here, I am cutting it down for firewood. Probably get some nice furniture lumber out of that, as well. But that chaga is no good for eating or drinking, but what it is good for is fire starting. That chaga when it's dried and powdered, in particular, holds a spark really well so you can use a fire seal, get a spark into that, and it'll hold the spark for a long time, then you can put that into a bundle, tinder bundle, and blow it into a fire. So I'll show you how I do that in another video. But here's some chaga that I had leftover from last year that I will be drinking for the next two or three days. All right, so this is a good example of a piece of chaga on a tree that's still alive, although the tree's in pretty bad shape. It does eventually kill the tree, so it's a fine line between finding a tree that's healthy enough to support the chaga and have healthy chaga, and a dead tree that the chaga's also died on. So there's a few chunks up further. There's a good size chunk on the north side of the tree in a wound there, but this piece here is right at a level that I can easily harvest it. And it's a small one, I wouldn't take this if the tree was still in good shape and gonna last a number of years because this chaga should actually be a little bit bigger for harvesting so that the chaga survives. But it's going to be, like I said, dead soon anyway, so I'm gonna take this piece. Now the thing is that chaga is at it's most nutrient-rich when the tree is dormant, so 20 days of cold temperatures in the fall will stop the sap from running, all the nutrients build back up into the roots and the, in this case, in the chaga. The nutrients build up in there, so good time to harvest it right now. (fire crackling)