Backyard Foraging For Wild Edibles with Sergei Boutenko

good morning in this video I want to try something different I want to take you foraging in my backyard most people think that harvesting wild edibles is a cumbersome process one that gets you in your car forces you to drive very far away and requires a lot of time and effort and in this video I want to disprove that and show you that it's as easy as going into your yard and collecting some plants I would argue it's even more convenient than going to the grocery store because like I already mentioned all you have to do is walk out your front door and boom it's abundant with things that you can eat there's nothing special about my backyard my backyard is perhaps like the most run-of-the-mill typical backyard that exists I didn't plant any specific wild edibles there the only thing I did was I let my weeds grow I didn't trim them I didn't cut my lawn and that's what you're gonna see today I'm confident that regardless of where you live whether it's in Europe or North America or South America if you go into your own backyard you'll be able to find at least a a couple of the plants that we discussed today in your neck of the woods if you're just sitting on the couch right now with some time to kill watching this video I might make a suggestion I recommend that you take this video to your mobile device like your phone or your tablet go outside in your own front yard or backyard and forage along with me it's sort of like a virtual wild edibles tour that doesn't require you to go very far I've traveled around the globe extensively I've been to over 66 countries I've been to every single state in the United States and my experience has taught me that there's a huge overlap in the wild edibles sector so dandelions for example grow in every single country that I've been to it doesn't matter if you're in Southeast Asia or in North America there's generally some type of dandelion growing and I can personally attest to this the human species isn't the only species that likes to travel wild plants like to travel to and they accomplish this by spreading their seeds in the wind so that same dandelion for example can throw its seeds in the wind and eventually over time those seeds can travel thousands of miles and end up in places where dandelions have no business being or maybe they do another way that plants travel is through animals so if a bird lands on a specific plant eat some of its seeds then makes its voyage somewhere else for the winter and poops out those seeds guess what that plant is going to be growing in a different location so who am i and why the heck am i credible to talk about this wild edibles are often a controversial subject we all remember the story of the guy in into the wild he went out he was unprepared he ate stuff he wasn't supposed to and it didn't work out so well for him to that I say I'm credible to talk about this subject because I'm a guy on the internet with the camera no I'm just kidding I actually know what I'm talking about I've been studying wild plants for over 20 years I'm 33 years old right now and I started very young when I was just 13 and I haven't you know I haven't just been like casually researching the subject I've been very thorough about it it's something that I'm very interested in and so I do my due diligence and I study plants meticulously and I also test everything on myself before I recommend it to others along the way I've published a book this is a very good book this is also a shameless plug of my very good book it's called wild edibles a practical guide to foraging with easy identification of 60 edible plants and 67 recipes it's available everywhere Amazon bookstores you name it it's a very good book it's a great way to start foraging what sets me apart from other foragers is I come out wild edibles from a nutritional standpoint and as far as I can tell I might be one of the first people to recommend blending wild edibles in green smoothies so that's kind of my niche because a lot of wild edibles tend to be bitter to the taste but you can mask that bitterness by blending them in a green smoothie and then it's a win-win-win all around in fact one of the comments on this book take it or leave it some guy at Amazon row I didn't realize how much this dude likes movies and he apparently went through my book and counted that I used the word smoothie like 150 times that's kind of comical but it's in there nonetheless I also have movies about wild edibles all over YouTube I'm gonna put links to everything in this video I have a video I recently published called common weeds and wild edibles of the world it's free to watch and I highly recommend that you do so and then lastly I have over 10 bucks about wild edibles on my website Sergey Boutin cocom and the premise of the ebooks the reason for the ebooks is really so that you can save them to your mobile device and take them wherever you go with you because we don't always have a field guide with us often we leave the house and we don't think to bring a book with us but we always have a cell phone with us so put the e-book on your cell phone and take it wherever you go and then you'll know how to identify tasty nutritious plants wherever you want and finally because I don't want to just promote my own products there's lots of great books on foraging I just want to give you a little sample of my absolute favorite books and after that I promise we're gonna hop outside and start the walk so one of my good friends and fellow foragers John Kahless he wrote an awesome book it's called wild edible plants wild foods from dirt to plate this is one of my foraging Bibles I know this man personally he puts out great stuff the queen of wild edibles wrote a book called discovering wild plants this is Janice Sheffield and this book says Alaska Western Canada and the Northwest but pay no mind this book is good for pretty much everybody especially if you live in Europe and North America and as you can see by all my sticky notes this book has been used abused and loved so check this book out again links will be in the description below and I can't possibly make a wild edibles video without mentioning Samuel Thayer Samuel Thayer is a super rad dude all his books are awesome I read and reread them all the time they have a lot of great info he's very thorough speaking of if you want to learn the real story of what happened to the dude and into the wild you should check out one of his books because he has a great account of it and I believe that is in nature's garden that account is either nature's garden or foragers harvest so I've fulfilled my obligations I gave an intro I told you that I'm credible now let's hop outside and look at some wild edibles okay here's proof that I'm not cheating I'm actually going out my front door let the foraging commence okay so let me check the exposure just to make sure that it's on what we need it to be on because we want it to be nice and crystal clear okay so the very first wild edible that I want to talk about is growing abundantly everywhere and that's known as grass most people probably don't consider grass as a food and rightfully so it's not very delicious but nonetheless it's very nutritious and in my book it's kind of like a survival food so most grass species are edible and you know while you might might not want to throw it in your salad because it's kind of hard to digest you can easily make juice out of it or blend it in your green smoothies yes the topic of smoothies is going to come up a lot and this is probably also a very good point in time to mention that you want to be careful obviously when you go foraging and one of the things that you want to be careful of is chemical sprays so my yard is organic I don't spray it with any kind of chemical fertilizers and I recommend that you do the same if you move to a place and you don't know whether or not it's been sprayed I recommend waiting two years or at least a year and a half before you forage from the property that way you ensure that it's clean and that you stay safe so if I were to harvest grass for food I would literally come over here with a pair of scissors and I would just snip snip snip snip into a little Bowl or straight into my blender container and instead of buying wheatgrass at the store I could get it and get it for free and I think most people whether they're expert foragers or beginners can identify grass with ease and it shouldn't be an issue so Z and this hasn't even been a couple minutes and you already know a wild edible okay let's start over here so as you can see I have like a little planter box which I made in another YouTube video and you should watch that video too because it's pretty good I've planted some things obviously but that's not the time of today today we're gonna talk solely about wild edibles the next plant that I want to discuss is this plant right here and obviously this is a dandelion this is the origin of lettuce so all lettuces were once dandelions and so if that isn't a giveaway that this thing is edible I don't know what is the dandelion is probably the most underappreciated wild plant people think they're a nuisance but they're extremely nutritious in this video I want to kind of keep short and concise I'm not going to go into all of the nutritious benefits of wild edibles because in researching my book I discovered that wild plants are good for almost everything I'm not even exaggerating I actually have lists and charts in my book that cite all those health benefits and then tell you where I got that information so I won't go in great detail about the health benefits because I want to talk about it from a purely free food standpoint so maybe I will just note a couple of the major benefits and then if you're interested you could reference my book or other books and then figure out what they're good for so dandelions are probably the best plant for your internal organs your liver your pancreas your kidneys that kind of thing the only trouble is that they're a little bit bitter right and a great way to combat this bitterness is yep you guessed it green smoothies so when you blend greens with fruits together in a blender it makes a very delicious cocktail and it neutralizes any bitterness or chlorophyll like taste so plop these in a blender and you're going to be eating really good another thing I absolutely love doing with dandelion is putting the leaves in a pesto because another thing that neutralizes the bitter taste of the greens is fats so if you blend this with some pine nuts some olive oil some cheese if you prefer you can make a really nice dandelion pesto it's gonna incorporate some of the wild food from your yard it's going to be free it's going to be novel and most of all and most importantly it's going to be delicious so just throw some leaves a couple handfuls like you know the same proportion that you would use with basil just throw dandelions into your pesto and it's finger-licking good another part that's very edible and very delicious is the flower and the flower I like to just throw in a salad so I basically come over here you know take any of the stem off not because it's not edible just because it's not as pleasant and if there are the flowers in a salad and it tastes really good another great way to use the flowers is to put them in honey you can literally make like a wild edibles Jam by smashing a bunch of these flowers into a jar of honey letting them sit there indefinitely because the sugar will preserve them and then it makes like a nice vitamin D infused jam and there's a common misconception that the SAP the white SAP that comes from dandelions is bad and that is complete BS it's actually what's really good for your internal organs that's where the bitter taste comes from so you don't have to worry about that at all you can eat the entire plant and there's over 300 different varieties all of which are edible and then the last thing that I want to say about these is that one key way to identify dandelions versus dandelion look-alikes is by their stem so if you flip the leaf over and you run your finger along the main vein you'll notice that dandelion stems are smooth if the stem is not smooth if it's prickly or spiky then it's likely not a true dandelion which doesn't mean that it's not edible but it's definitely not a dandelion so while we're here I want to digress a little bit and show you something that's kind of interesting to notice so these are some nasturtiums that I planted they're domesticated plant and it's been raining a lot this spring in Washington and you can see the plants getting over while watered and it's not doing so hot same thing over here if you come over to the basil you can see that see it's getting kind of yellow and that's the plant saying son please come out we need to dry out a little bit on the flip side when you look at the dandelions they're doing just fine because they're survivors and that's one of the key benefits of wild edibles is that their genetic makeup is the way that it was supposed to be so they're genetically stronger as plants they generally have longer root systems that enable them to draw out more vitamins and minerals from soil and that's a good thing because they're more nutrient rich hence why I'm making this video and advocating more wild edible eating moving along we have some other stuff to look at on the side of the house let's start over here this right here is a type of thistle this right here is a thistle and thistles are a form of sunflowers so you know this looks kind of like an unfriendly angry plant because they have spines all over it but that's a protective mechanism of the plant and it's perfectly edible plant if you know how to eat it so with thistles it helps to have something to cut it with you're gonna cut it at the base and you're gonna do so carefully it actually helps to have a glove I'm gonna have a lot of stuff going on so I can't be bothered and so the part that you eat is the inner stem so you carefully peel away the leaves of this thistle and it's just a baby thistle it's not very tall yet but this inner part right here right here is the part that you eat so you go all all a little bit of work but it's well worth it this tastes kind of like mmm like something between a Jerusalem artichoke and a cucumber and as the thistle gets bigger this part gets bigger so you'll get a more bigger reward once this plant has matured perhaps this is a great point in time to talk about some very common-sense guidelines and these are like soggy boot anko's safety rules there's three main rules that you got to follow rule number one don't eat something if you don't know what it is super common sense so common sense that I'm appalled when people disregard this rule plants can't hurt you unless you put them in your body so as unfortunate as it is when people get hurt you know miss foraging they really have nobody to blame but themselves so don't eat something if you don't know what it is I made a silly rap video about it just to drive the point home and I'm gonna link to that video in this video as well so that's rule number one rule number two is treat all new plants with caution so this thistle for example I tell you that it's edible but you're gonna approach it very cautiously nonetheless because it's a new food to you and you don't know if your body's allergic to it if it's gonna have any negative reactions so start slowly when you try a new food for the first time just try a little bit and make sure that it affects your body positively and rule number three builds on the first two rules and says you don't want to combine too many different plants into one recipe when you're just learning so for example if I'm a new forager I don't want to make a salad with 15 different wild edibles because if I do experience a negative reaction I won't be able to weed out what caused the reaction so don't eat something if you don't know what it is try all new foods and small quantities and don't mix wild edibles when you're learning new plants from the Thistle we literally only have to walk three steps to the next plant this is called pepper cress I'd like to introduce you to pepper cress and this is kind of small unassuming plant it's a very delicate and let's see if we can't learn to identify it okay so it's got tiny little flowers and little leaves that look a little bit like arugula leaves pepper cress is in the mustard family and the easiest way to identify mustards is by the smell because all mustards smell like mustard so if you see something that you think is pepper cress one sure way to figure out if it really is is to crush up the leaves give it a smell and if it has a slightly peppery mustard like flavor then its edible because mustards are edible john Kahless the guy that I mentioned one of the books that I showed you at the beginning he believes that mustard greens are some of the most nutritious greens on the planet they should be eaten every which way you can so this stuff is really good in sandwiches and wraps you can use it as a potter but you can throw it in soups it's very delicious and it has a little bit of kick to it but like mustard the kick doesn't last so if you don't like super spicy cayenne pepper but you like a little bit of spice that kind of passes quickly this is for you it's kind of like wasabi let's keep going boom boom boom boom boom into the backyard so I guess and we were in the front yard to start all right lots of stuff to look at here okay check this out and this is gonna be cool so this right here is clover and clover is a pea relative so essentially clovers are like pea sprouts which means that they're really good in salads and soups and they're very tender now generally speaking clovers have three leaves and the leaves are oval this is a common misconception in fact when you google clovers often you get images that are heart-shaped and that's not clover that's wood sorrel which I think we have on the property as well so remember that clover has 3 oval shaped leaves often clovers also have this tiny little crescent shape and a discoloration on the leaves so that's the good identifying characteristic and then I don't know if the camera will get this but if you look really closely at the leaf of a clover at the edges if you look really closely you'll notice that they're serrated that's also a good identifying characteristic question did you know that four-leaf clovers are more nutritious than three leaf clovers it's true they're 25% more nutritious I get it so these are great like I already mentioned in salads oops wraps definitely in smoothies why buy sprouts or even grow sprouts when they're already grown on your property so there you go wild peas essentially and look right next to the clovers we have more dandelions young okay so there were our clovers and if we just literally move a couple feet and we have another plant that's worth mentioning this is called south this all south esel I'd like to introduce you to it this is sort of like a dandelion it's a little bit bitter to the taste therefore it's good in pesto smoothies this one is exquisite in soups because it gets very tender and you can see there's a lot of it you know if I were to buy this at the store this is at least five bucks worth of greens right here I also want to teach you guys about merry stems or meristematic bits Samuel Thayer has a great chapter about merry stems in his book as do I but meristematic parts are the tender young growing parts of plants so you have the mature leaves which tend to be more bitter and then you have the meristematic or young parts that tend to be a lot sweeter think of like sweet snow peas versus mature green peas that can be kind of tough and fibrous so one strategy as a forager if you want to eat really good is to pick out more of the baby greens because they're gonna have more sugars more carbohydrates the good kind people these days are trained to think that carbohydrates are awful but they give you energy they're essential don't forget to eat the good carbs so you know these leaves are great but these are going to be more nutritious and tastes a lot better so if you want to make a salad maybe use those in a salad and then use those in a super smoothie okay so a few minutes ago we talked about clovers and how they have three round leaves there's a little refresher clovers three round leaves and a tiny little plant right here is wood sorrel this is what clover often gets confused for and unfortunately today they're not full-grown they're tiny babies which I shouldn't say unfortunately because these are really delicious when they're in their baby green stage but for camera purposes you won't get to see that they're roughly when they're fully grown the same size as clovers maybe a little bit bigger and again I just want to point out that clover leaves are oval and wood sorrel leaves are heart-shaped so you have 3 oval leaves for the clover 3 heart-shaped leaves for the wood sorrel this is a really nice plant it's lemony to the taste I make a delicious trailside lemonade with this stuff which is to say I just throw handfuls of this in my water if I have ice handy I throw some ice in it and it's just kind of like a nice refreshing lemon water when there's no lemon water around actually here look I didn't look far enough here's a bigger wood sorrel and you can kind of see from this and that it's easy to it would be easy to confuse these but that's why we have eyes and that's why we have other senses right so these are the things that make you progress as a forager is just by very carefully slowly studying plants and noticing their differences and I always recommend that you don't try and tackle foraging all at once just learn one plant at a time maybe in this video you just learn one new plant every time you watch it so today you're gonna learn clover then you're gonna learn wood sorrel just think about it this way if you learn one plant a week for a year you'll know 52 new plants by the end of the year and one plant a week is very doable look at this abundance this is an overgrown flowerbed and here you have 2 different types of dandelions you have round leaf dandelions and you have more jagged leaf Tindall ends two different varieties there micronutrients will differ so when we talk about rotating your greens I have another video about that the importance of rotating your greens which is what you're doing when you're eating different wild edibles but you're getting your filling your body with different micronutrients just while staying within the same species in addition to the dandelions we have this plant and I'm not quite sure I know what this is I'm gonna have to reference this later so I'm not going to talk about it because I don't eat anything that I don't know what it is we have more pepper crests right there this is a bigger plant and you can see it you can just pull it up with the roots because this is a weed I'm not overly concerned with wiping it out so I literally take this home just a few steps away clean it and eat the entire thing another plant that's growing right here that's worth mentioning is a plant that's called cat's ears and it looks very similar to dandelion but wait when you flip it over and you run your finger down the main vein you feel that it's slightly fuzzy so that's a good way to tell that it's a dandelion look at and look alike but it's not a true dandelion that being said cat's ears are edible though I tend to not like them as much because they are fuzzy no it's not really a texture that I like but that being said you can still throw them in a soup in a pinch in a survival situation cat's ears totally edible and then again you have sow thistle right here so just in this one little spot there's tons of different food tons of different food and I almost missed this one this is in the adjacent flowerbed to the one that where I just was this right here is wild radish and wild radish is another mustard see there's actually like a little reap that is the radish but the greens are very nutritious and because it's a mustard when you crush this up it'll smell like mustard yep that's true smells like mustard so mustards are edible and wild radish is definitely edible and it's delicious man I tell you what as soon as I hit the record button planes start flying people start sweet the street sweeping it's it's a real deal dogs start barking look at this we found some other stuff right here thanks tada this is a type of wild mint it has a very ominous name it's called purple dead metal which makes it sound like maybe you shouldn't eat it that's the trouble with common names is they're not always favorable or accurate we know it's a mint because mints all have square stems and if you look at the stem very closely you'll notice that it's just that it's square this doesn't really smell like mint so you can't use your nose wherever it goes on all plants but nonetheless using your eyes and your touch you can identify it by its square stem and know that it is indeed edible I'll be honest I'm not as big of a fan of this purple dead nettle I just don't think it tastes as good as the other plants so I don't often eat this but nonetheless it's growing on my property and we're here so I thought why not talk about it doo doo doo here we go keep going oh look we have common mallow yeah this is a real treat right hamp common mallow or malva is in the okra family and it's very delicious this is back in the day David Wolfe actually taught me about this plant so years ago in 1997 I spent a week living with David Wolfe and one of the things we did is we forage together and we rolled pieces of avocado in mallow leaves and they're absolutely delicious so you can eat this plant raw or put it in cooked food or or whatever roll it in a burrito put it on your pizza and this is a sprawling plant so it'll go across the ground you know come to think of it maybe I should do a follow-up on this as these plants mature so that you can see them when they're easier to identify because this is just early spring and so some of these things are just now sprouting for the first time up a couple feet from the mallow we have this guy and this guy right here this is yellow doc and yellow doc is very rich in iron so if your iron deficient you want to eat this plant but another thing this thing is good for is bug bites and stings so if you if you ever get stung by a bee or an ant and it hurts what you do is you chew this plant up or blend it up and then apply that poultice to your sting and it'll help remedy it instantly and take the paint off and the swelling off this is also good for Nettles rash so if you get stung by nettles hiking around look for doc big broad leaves kind of looks a little bit like maybe like spinach leaves but has a little bit more creases I think we're getting close we're just about there I think check it out I have a bed with lettuce here some peas in the corner so this is my intentional crop and then littered all over my property I have unintentional food like this guy in the front yard back to the front yard we have another green that's worth mentioning this guy right here look there's there's another green worth mentioning this is called chick weed and chick weed every gardener should be familiar with chick weed it's a tiny little tender green that has very very little flowers and at first glance it looks like each flower has ten pedals but they actually have five petals that are deeply cleft so that's a key identifying characteristic of chickweed check this out I'm not kidding that's a big military jet I'm sitting here recording and I could you not things just start flying noise starts happening as soon as the camera rolls get back to the chickweed so another key identifying characteristic of chickweed is that it has an alternating hairline on its stem so if you look really closely between each set of leaves there's gonna be a hairline and then further on down that hairline will jump 180 degrees to the opposite side of the stem and so unfortunately I don't think the camera with this lens will be able to pick it up but maybe that's your homework you got to go find some chickweed tiny white flowers with five petals that are deeply cleft and study it and look for a hairline on its stem this is a great green it's very tender I'm good for salads it's like a sprout and you can eat the entire plant flowers and all okay so here's another rule generally you don't want to harvest plants near a roadway because there could be runoff from the roadway so my kinda safety rule about roads because roads are becoming more and more prevalent you can't avoid them altogether is that you want to distance yourself from the road you want to create as much distance from a busy intersection as you can I live on a residential street so for me I'm not as much concerned but still I prefer to harvest up there versus down here on the curb that being said I'm going to show you a plant that I found growing on the curb and nowhere else on the property so I won't eat this one but I want to talk about it check it this is called sheep sorrel right here and this is another end type of sorrel you know that based off the other orl we talked about the wood sorrel that it's lemony to the taste so this plant has leaves that look like a sword I don't know if you can see that or not because it's bright out and my LCD screen is not too bright but this plant is very tasty you can use it in lemonade's that kind of thing use it in salads and wraps this is a very good fancy cuisine type of green that rhymes it doesn't it sheep sorrel and then the seeds are rich in omega-3s so when I make crackers from time to time I'll just sprinkle the seeds in like I would chia seeds or flax seeds or that kind of thing so this is called sheep sorrel check it out that's what abundance looks like free food and that's very nutritious you can make it delicious that's what I'm all about so there you have it seem just like that it's quite good that's a tour of my backyard a foraging tour I hope you've learned a couple things and found this video to be helpful for more videos just like this that are totally different remember to subscribe to my channel Buteyko films subscribing these days doesn't really mean much so if you want to be notified of a new video hit the little bell and you'll get a notification alright who's

Channel: BoutenkoFilms

Views: 332,506

Keywords: wild edibles, wild, edible, forage, foraging, survival, weeds, eat the weeds, plants, plant, garden, yard, urban, backyard, harvest, dandelion, chickweed, clover, thistle, sow thistke, wood sorrel, sheep sorrel, outside, outdoor, how-to, how to, healthy, health

Id: 809Tf7RK95M

Length: 37min 31sec (2251 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/GoLightLady]

And where you live. I used to think dandelion was such a cur. I remember getting so annoyed at its presence. At the very end of living in my hoa neighborhood I began to read about foraging and wild edibles.

We moved to a house with a few acres. Now I grow all the dandelion I can plus a few more wilds I had never heard of before. Amazing what a difference it makes.

[u/YYYY]

Foraging is like printing your own money.