In Buffalo Bird Woman's Footsteps

In the Footsteps of Buffalo Bird Woman

Buffalo Bird Woman was a Hidatsa Native American and anyone interested can get her book at Bountiful Gardens at http://www.bountifulgardens.org/

As told to Gilbert Wilson, 1917, 129 pp.
Diverse Gardens and Gardeners,

Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa, was born in 1839. She was an expert gardener who shared her traditional Native American ways in this book, first published in 1917. Includes planting and harvest traditions, ceremonies, songs, and recipes, focusing on the traditional crops; corn, squash, beans, sunflowers, and tobacco.

It is a very interesting book and like her I am preparing to dry food for the winter months. I really wanted a solar dehydrator and found a wonderful book with plans and everything but just haven’t gotten around to getting the dehydrator made. I do right now have an electric dehydrator with five trays and instead of being held back by not having the solar one I originally wanted went ahead and used the electric one.

It’s harvest time and although we didn’t grow a large garden this year (we were investigating many types of gardens to see which worked best).We did have 200 square feet of biointensive beds and two forest gardens. We have finished drying one load of bell peppers and 10 of them fit in a quart ball glass canning container.

I enjoyed reading Buffalo Bird Woman’s book. It let me know how self sufficient Native American’s were. I like the idea of drying food in a solar dehydrator so no need of using a lot of energy would go into drying the food. I also like having my food dehydrated because it saves on storage space as well as energy.

Shaman Metaphysical Store