What are some good wild nuts and berries that one can substain themselves off of in the wilderness?
Mine! That depends. 
Berries I can snatch in my neck of the woods include blueberries, salmonberries, crowberries, raspberries, and highbush cranberries. Mmm. Of course they don’t come out 'til late summer.
Walnuts/Butternuts, Hickories, and Oak (for acorns) are all pretty widely distributed in NA. Depending on area, pine nuts may also be an option.
Don’t forget roots & tubers tho’, cattails are darn useful for instance.
And somehow I managed to forget Beech nuts. Chestnuts and Gingko nuts may also be options, tho’ the Gingko more likely only in more urban settings. Then there’s also Hazelnuts, also widely distributed in NA.
wildman steve brill indicates that ginko nuts can’t be eaten raw and that they’re pretty much only found in urban settings.
in my neck of the woods, you have a majority of oaks and hickories, plus black walnut, pecans. blackberries and dewberries are abundant. sumac are also common.
for tubers, you can find jerusalem artichoke and cattail pretty readily. cattail are great for getting food throughout different seasons as well as getting weaving material (leaves) hand-drill spindles (flower stalk), plus insualtion and tinder (mature flowerheads).
Now that you mention it, that does sound familiar.
But, as you say, it’s not really all that common in NA anyway.
Jerusalem artichokes rock! I’ve got a huge stand of them going in my backyard.
i forgot to mention that ginko nuts smell horrible too–kind of like vomit.
but if i happened to be in an area where i could make use of them and roast them, i might put up with the smell.
U have to get used to the small I saw a whole bunch of gatherers once collecting them, Wilderix, and I walk over to them with a soft approach and ask what part do they eat. I didn’t understand a word they said, underbody language felt so foriegn that it didn’t even help much, so I ended up testing the flesh with an unexperience bite thinking by their language they meant for me to do so, so I did, and when I did, they all started to laugh at me and I did too. The flesh tasted like something repelling and caked my throat with its smell. I thought the taste of the flesh wouldn’t taste as bad as it smelt. When I got home later that day with a bunch of the ginko fruits in a plastic bag i found in a bush I learned from one of my medicinal/edible plant identification books the palatable part, the inside nut part not the flesh.
I gathered a huge shirt-hem full of local chestnuts, but they tasted terrrible. a friend said the one who fathers her, who tends sheep and lives in trees in the basque country, calls them pilongos (spelling?). i looked for more info online and found out that in some countries, people use that word as an insult. hm.
their skin shone smooth & almost glossy instead of slightly hairy–that’s where I went wrong. otherwise they looked the same as chestnuts. disappointing, that tree drops zillions of them and they look so tasty. . .
those were horse chestnuts i bet, they were planted all over the place where i live as well, raining inedible nuts everywhere in the fall - a cruel joke by those who planted them.
“will hunt and gather for food”
i want a t-shirt that says that!
black and green distro on myspcae sells shirts that say that on them!
I have some experience gathering “American Chestnuts.” To remove the spines from the outer shell I role them against the ground with my foot in shoe, with just enough downward pressure to break away the spines. I do the same to crack the nut sometimes or I use hard woods or rocks by crushing the nut open. I’ve had few that tasted unpalatable but for the most part I love’em and find respect them as a worthwhile food sourse.
acorns have begun to fall already here–still green. i gathered a bunch, shelled 'em pretty quickly with a brick, and set them to soaking. as a kid in new hampshire, we gathered tons of them but i think my mom didn’t soak them long enough, or change the water enough times, or something. . . after one failed experiment she pronounced them inedible. i have her copy of euell gibbons Stalking the Wild Asparagus–I assume she went by that, which says to boil them, with several changes of boiling water. i hope to find a way that works–will update.
the exciting bonus–acorn grubs! i found a few. they actually tasted pretty good, almost sweet, and buttery.
mods–eprimed.
Oh dont forget Salal Berries! And in fact the entire Salal plant is edible… Good for burns as well I belive. I also like oregon grape and huckleberries…
hmmm, wild strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries, all up in the high mountains here…
down lower in the montane areas (6,000 feet here) we have acorns, pine nuts, oregon grape berries, wild grapes, mulberries, currants, gooseberries, saskatoons, rosehips, walnuts (some years), sumach, elderberries, and there’s probably more I don’t know about yet.
Saskatoons and Elderberries are probably my favorite berries… and Acorns my favorite nuts of all time!
[quote=“yarrow dreamer, post:10, topic:238”]I gathered a huge shirt-hem full of local chestnuts, but they tasted terrrible. a friend said the one who fathers her, who tends sheep and lives in trees in the basque country, calls them pilongos (spelling?). i looked for more info online and found out that in some countries, people use that word as an insult. hm.
their skin shone smooth & almost glossy instead of slightly hairy–that’s where I went wrong. otherwise they looked the same as chestnuts. disappointing, that tree drops zillions of them and they look so tasty. . .[/quote]
The Horse Chestnut, and the Ohio Buckeye are both inedible, so be careful when thinking this may be the edible chestnut. It’s easy to tell them apart when you know what to look for. The main difference, I think (let me know if wrong) is that the Buckeyes are shiny and larger, rounder, and with a larger “tan” bottom, while the edible chestnuts are smaller, pointier on top, and more dull brown, and sometimes flat on a side due to having two in a pod… that’s what I remember being told at least…
[quote=“Dream of Stars, post:18, topic:238”][quote author=yarrow dreamer link=topic=241.msg2559#msg2559 date=1182895550]
I gathered a huge shirt-hem full of local chestnuts, but they tasted terrrible. a friend said the one who fathers her, who tends sheep and lives in trees in the basque country, calls them pilongos (spelling?). i looked for more info online and found out that in some countries, people use that word as an insult. hm.
their skin shone smooth & almost glossy instead of slightly hairy–that’s where I went wrong. otherwise they looked the same as chestnuts. disappointing, that tree drops zillions of them and they look so tasty. . .
[/quote]
The Horse Chestnut, and the Ohio Buckeye are both inedible, so be careful when thinking this may be the edible chestnut. It’s easy to tell them apart when you know what to look for. The main difference, I think (let me know if wrong) is that the Buckeyes are shiny and larger, rounder, and with a larger “tan” bottom, while the edible chestnuts are smaller, pointier on top, and more dull brown, and sometimes flat on a side due to having two in a pod… that’s what I remember being told at least…[/quote]
This reminds me. 
I roasted sweet chestnuts for the first time this fall-summer in my oven by following and combining 6 recipes I research online. The finished dish reminded me of lil baked sweet potatoes…delicious and I must say probably my favorite nut next to hazel.
A quote from EDIBLE AND USEFUL WILD PLANTS Of the United States and Canada, by Charles Francis Saunders page 81 “There is a beautiful little tree called the California Buckeye (Aesculus Californicus, Nutt.) which whitens with its fine thyres of bloom the hillsides of spring near streams in central and northern California. In summer and autumn it acquires another conspicuousness due to early dropping of its foliage, baring the limbs even in August. It then becomes a very skeleton of a tree upon which the fruits, hanging thick, look like so many dry, plump figs. The leathery rind of the latter encloses one or two thin shelled nuts, shiny and reddish brown like those of the tree’s cousins, the Buckeyes of the Middle West. To the white folk these nuts, attractive as they appear, seem nevertheless devoid of food possibilities; indeed, in their raw state, they are known to be poisonous. That the Indian should have discovered how to turn them into fuel for the human machine seems, therefore, even more remarkable than the conversion of the acorn into an edible ration. Yet that is what the Indian did, by a method that consists of essentially roasting the nuts and then washing out the poison. One wonders how many prehistoric Californians died martyrs in the perfection of this process. Mr. Chestnut, in his treatise already quoted on California Indian uses of plants, records in detail how the transformation into edibility is accomplished: The Buckeyes are placed in the conventional stone lined baking pit which has first been made hot with a fire; they are then covered over with earth and allowed to steam for several hours,until the nuts have acquired the consistency of boiled potatoes. They may then either be sliced placed in a basket and soaked in running water for from two to five days ( depending on the thinness of the slices), or mashed and rubbed up with water into a paste (the thin skin being incidentally separated by this process) and afterwards soaked from one two ten hours in a sand filter, the water as it drains away conveying with it the noxious principle. It was customary to eat the resultant mass cold and without salt.”