Outdoor Life - Survive & Thrive Off The Grid: 50 Essential Skills You Need, Self-Sufficiency, Food Preservation, Living In The Wild, At-Home Butchering, Canning 101, Freeze-Drying, Make Your Own Tools

MOST OF US DREAM OF BECOMING A LITTLE more self-sufficient. That might mean something as simple as growing basil in the kitchen window or as complicated as canning all of the vegetables you’ll eat for the year. For my family, it means building 4’ x 8’ raised garden beds on our small backyard in southeast Wyoming and learning how to grow heat-loving plants like tomatoes and peppers at 7,220 feet. It means spending April and May chasing turkeys through the woods and raising seedlings that we’ll move outdoors when the frosts are gone. It also means thoughtfully eating what wild game remains in our freezer from the fall before. But after a dozen or more years eating almost exclusively wild game, we found ourselves in a rut.

My husband and I skillfully slice, package and freeze roasts, stew meat, steaks and hamburger, and most years we make our own sausage. It wasn’t until I interviewed California wild game chef and wild food forager Hank Shaw that I truly considered the many ways I could expand our wild game repertoire. I never thought about salvaging and eating the kidneys, for example, or shanks as something other than a hassle that ends in the grinder.

We use the pages of this magazine to go through the best ways to preserve the meats and vegetables you’ll eat throughout the year. We also offer some ingenious, albeit labor- intensive, ways to make your own tools for harvesting wild foods. Think of this issue as your guide for beginning a more sustainable life, or continuing your journey to sustainability. I know I will be following many of these ideas for years to come.