In my quest to find foods locally or produce them myself, I've been wondering about things like spices. Most spices are fairly easy to grow, some a bit harder, and a few you really wonder about. The one that I've been thinking about the most is salt. I know you can evaporate and re-evaporate salt water, but my access to salt water is around the port. Not exactly the cleanest place in the world to get salt. So I looked around to see if we didn't have naturally occurring salt flats around here. We don't.

So then I started wondering about other sources off and on, but it wasn't really percolating in my mind too much. However, yesterday while DS and I were doing literature, we're reading My Side of the Mountain, the boy in it talked about using hickory limbs to make salt. So I did some research and it seems there are two methods of using hickory to make salt. In one you burn the limbs and use the ashes for salt and in the other you boil the roots and the salt crystalizes on the side of your bowl. I think I'd definitely prefer the second method.

It's not like I'm going to stop buying salt, but I do want to see if I can make it. Of course we don't have a hickory tree, but I am going to start looking around for one and see if I can't get a bit of root or branches to try it with. It seems like a nice exercise in frugality.