Texas wild foods abundance on display: Health Ranger reveals wild grapes, herbs, berries and more (PHOTOS)

Sunday, May 17, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: Texas, wild foods, Health Ranger

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(NaturalNews) It's astonishing to learn the wrongheaded notions people hold in their heads in total contradiction to reality. For example, thanks to media disinfo, most Americans think of California as a lush, green environment while Texas is believed to be a dry, desolate, near-desert landscape.

The reality is quite the opposite. California is rapidly reverting to a desert landscape, while many parts of Texas as lush, green and full of abundant wild foods.

To show you this, I snapped a few casual pictures just walking around a local park in Central Texas. What I found, without even trying, was an abundant landscape of amazing wild foods, herbs, nuts, mushrooms, grasses and much more.

Wild Muscadine grapes are overflowing everywhere, climbing bushes and trees with anti-cancer foods you can harvest FOR FREE!

The following photos, taken on May 16, 2015, show some of the abundant clusters of Muscadine grapes that grow wild all across Central Texas.

Here's a close-up of some of the grape clusters:



These grapes are highly medicinal and contain potent anti-cancer medicines and polyphenols, both in their seeds and their skins. Even the grape leave are medicinal and contain natural resveratrol.

Here they are climbing up a tree:



Huge swaths of these grapes, which you can harvest alongside many public roads in Central Texas (bring some buckets!), can often cover entire trees, towering 30 - 50 feet above the ground!



Texas is also a landscape that's rich in medicinal herbs. Here, I spotted just one of many large bunches of horsetail herb growing alongside a small creek. Horsetail is a natural source of silica, which helps strengthen joints and can dramatically increase mobility in some people.

To take horsetail, you can literally just harvest it off the ground, dry it, grind it up, and blend it into a smoothie. Instant silica supplement!



Every May in Central Texas, you can find an abundance of wild dew berries growing in well-shaded areas underneath trees or near creek sides. These berries are a lot like commercial blackberries, but smaller.

They're an important food source for deer and other animals, but locals love to harvest them and make jams or fresh fruit plates:





Wild white yarrow is also hugely abundant across Central Texas. This herb is well known as a "blood stop" herb, and if you dry the herb and grind it into a powder, you can make your own first aid trauma pads that help halt bleeding from acute wounds.

All this medicine is completely free, as Mother Nature doesn't charge you royalties or sales tax. All you have to do is take a walk in nature and start collecting the free food and medicine that's everywhere around you:



Here's a wild nopal cactus fruit plant in partial bloom. Over the next few weeks, it will produce amazing nopal cactus fruits -- called "tuna" in Spanish -- that contain powerful anti-diabetes medicines! The potent red pigment contains this medicine, and it naturally stabilizes blood sugar better than dangerous prescription drugs like Metformin, which is linked to liver damage.

Yes, there's real anti-diabetes medicine growing all over the place, and it's surrounded by beautiful wildflowers and yet more wild grapes covering the trees in the background!

Turmeric roots are sprouting

Speaking of powerful medicine, I'm growing turmeric root using modified Food Rising grow boxes at my ranch. And this weekend, the first turmeric sprout appeared out of the wicking bed coconut coir:



This weekend, we also got our first ripened tomato from our Food Rising grow box systems (available pre-made at SupplySource.com or make your own with DIY videos at FoodRising.org).

Notice the sprouts in the foreground and background? Those are only seven days old!

Turkeys and hogs are easy to find

By the way, while I was taking these edible plant photos, I also encountered three additional potential food sources for those who are hunters: Wild hogs, turkeys and deer.

Although I'm a long-range target shooter, I'm NOT a hunter, so I don't hunt animals for food as part of my current lifestyle (I prefer to grow much of my food in plant form). But if things got bad and food was hard to come by, I would quickly adapt and start adding some wild hog meat to my diet as needed. (I'm talking about a collapse / starvation scenario.) Hence the need for long-range shooting skills, which are always handy to possess.

Wild (feral) hogs are generally considered a huge nuisance across much of the state of Texas, and you can legally hunt these hogs year-round. Some counties even offer rewards for killing them. I once saw a sign at a local feed store that read, "$5 reward for each hog tail." When I saw the sign, I jokingly said to the guy who worked there, "Well that explains why I keep seeing all those tail-less hogs running around!"

Texas rat snake steals eggs, then climbs trees

Because Texas is full of food, it's also home to many predators who are seeking it. On my ranch, one of the frustratingly common sights is a Texas rat snake, which eats rats, field mice, baby chickens and chicken eggs.

Yesterday I spotted this little guy swallowing a fresh chicken egg:



Because rat snakes are beneficial (they do eat a lot of rats and mice, after all), I always relocate these snakes instead of killing them. (I shoot rattlers, however, as they are a threat to dogs and goats.)

Relocating a rat snake means capturing it with a snake grabber (a long pole with an articulated thumb on one end), tossing it into a barrel, then releasing it some distance away.

These rat snakes, it turns out, are incredible tree climbers, so I've made a habit of releasing them near trees to watch how they climb them. Yesterday, I snapped these photos of the snake slithering its way up a large tree trunk:

Texas is a food Mecca

There are many reasons why I love Texas, and the state's amazing array of wild foods is just one of them. Because we have so much abundance and self-reliance, we are more free than people in most other states.

In places like Los Angeles and Chicago, the citizens are more and more like inmates, depending almost entirely on their government to provide water, food and protection. But if you live like a bunch of inmates, there will always be some politician who comes along and adopts the role of the warden, ruling over the citizens while seizing power for themselves, effectively imprisoning the citizens under government control.

In Texas, the citizens are more free because they practice freedom as a way of life. In Texas, you can collect your own rainwater (without even being arrested for it, go figure...), grow your own food, carry your own firearm, raise your own chickens, start your own business and practice real religious freedom. Texas even has its own power grid that can operate independently from the rest of the nation.

As Californians flee their home cities to escape the drought and the medical police state being erected by pharma-controlled bureaucrats there, more and more former Californians will likely end up in places like Texas. We welcome entrepreneurs and innovators in Texas, but we ask that Californians leave their California politics back in California. Big Brother socialism is not welcomed -- nor tolerated -- in Texas. And if you don't respect the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment, you really won't fit in here. (Maybe try Venezuela or Cuba instead.)