Early Summer Foraging

hey welcome to UK wall graphs so early summer is the time to be foraging for flowers fruits and seeds and the places to be forward in the areas that get the most sunlight so field edges hedgerows long side rivers and forest clearings this is pineapple weed much of Korea discordia very nice little herb as its name suggests tastes just like pineapple in fact it's key identifier is if you crush the flowers or the leaves and smell them they smell exactly like pineapple the leaves are feather like very similar to come a mile and the flowers look a bit like daisies just without the white petals they're very common on waste grounds and the edges are filled especially on walkways and paths they really like compressed shallow soil so anywhere it's been walked over a little tip when you find in them is if you're in a field look where there is like a style or a gate where a lot of people congregate when they're entering or leaving the field so that soil is a lot more compressed and you're much more likely to find pineapple weird either there or just on on paths like this one here so I usually just collect the flower head and just the top view leaves they're the freshest tastiest part and their good sort of sprinkled into salads or the best use for them is to steep them in hot water and make a nice pineapple flavored tea this is fireweed rose baby will over you spot it quite easy this time of year because if it's spikes of bright pink flowers it likes to grow in open areas and waste grounds and particularly areas that through being fern which is where it gets one of its common names from fire weed this is a useful plant to know for a forager because there are several edible parts and at different times of the year in spring and if you're lucky in summer you can eat the young shoots which are a little bit similar to asparagus and under the ground these shoots are connected by edible rhizomes in early summer we have three main use edible uses of the plant first of all the leaves which are better when they're younger and a darker green although the older ones that are light green are good for making herbal tea leaves are long and narrow and they look similar to willow leaves which is where they get their other common name from willow herb they have a prominent white midrib and you can see that the veins on the leaf don't reach the edge they loop around the flowers are also edible they don't really have much flavor but they add nice color to dishes they bloom progressively from the bottom of the flower head he flowers usually around 3 or 4 centimetres wide and they have four pink or purple petals and they each have four narrower darker purple sepals which your hair they have a protruding style and they each have four stigmas so that's the style that and the stigmas stems grow up right and a green sometimes with a bit kind of racial and in my opinion these contain the best edible part of the plant and that's the pith and to get to that we need to cut the stem near the base and strip off the leaves and you can use those and you can see all the pith in the middle just take the edge of your knife the point of your knife and just scrape it out and this piff tastes just like cucumber this is honesty linaria annua and this time of year what we're after are the little seeds inside these seed pods so the disk-like seed pods will start forming in late spring and now in early summer they're just about ready to take so what you do is just collect up the whole seed pod take it home and just dry it for a few days and then you can peel them open and take out the seeds grind them to a powder and then just add a little bit of cold water and white wine vinegar and that's how you make mustard the leaves look quite similar to garlic mustard there ovate and come to a point and they're serrated the leaves higher up on the plant are sessile so they don't have a stem the lower down ones do have a stand in fact the lower down leaves these stems are channeled so in spring it has purple or white flowers and as it's a member of the Brassica family those flowers are cruciform or four petals forming across the flowers and the leaves are edible as well the younger leaves are better and they have a mild mustard II cabbage flavor but by far the best part of this plant are these seeds the elderflower has to be one of my favorite early summer wild edibles you can use these flowers for making cordial syrups or a nice sparkling elderflower wine usually the first two weeks of June are the best time to collect the elder flowers the outer flowers have five small white petals and they grow in umbels or umbrella-like clusters I've done a much more detailed video on identifying elder flowers in the elder tree I'll leave the link to that in the description of this video this is meadowsweet Philip Angela Maria and this is a nice easy one to identify likes to grow in damp marshy grounds and is common alongside rivers so the leaves are a darker green on top and paler underneath the terminal leaf has free lobes and those leaves are serrated and they have a bit of a crinkly appearance so what makes merry sweet so distinctive is it has first of all a red petiole or leaf stem and it has pairs of opposing leaves which are larger and in between those pairs you'll find groups of much smaller leaves these leaves are edible and they're better when they're younger like this although they do have a bit of a medicinal flavor to them so the best part of meadowsweet the flowers which aren't quite ready yet they're just starting to bud now and I find when elder flowers are going out of season meadowsweet is just coming into season and you can use them in very similar ways to elder flower you can use them for like fritters and flavorings it's often used for flavoring mead which the name meadowsweet derives from it's not nothing to do with Meadows it takes a name from Mead which is used for flavoring it does contain salicylic acid which is similar to aspirin it's like a painkiller so it's best not to consume too much of it and another thing to be aware of is these like to grow in damp marshy grounds and that is the same habitat as this plant here which if you're a forager and you don't know this one I really advise you do get to know it this is hemlock water dropwort and this is a deadly plant it also has white flowers although the flowers don't look anything like meadowsweet it's still a good idea to learn it and say so you've got the most wheat growing here and all of this next to it as far as you can see that's all hemlock water dropwort so just be careful when you're picking it these are linden flowers or the flowers of the lime tree and you can see they've just started to open up now I'm in early June and this tree is absolutely packed full of them every branch it's got the flowers on so you can collect a lot of flowers from these trees without even affecting its pollination rate there are free species of lime in the UK small leave lime large leave lime and common line with all three species the leaves and flowers are edible Lynden flowers make a really nice tea and you can collect a nice big batch of them and dry them for making tea all year and it's got properties that help with headaches anxiety and insomnia the flowers are a yellowish green color and they each have five petals and they come of a wing that helps the seed distribute by the wind the leaves of lime trees are roughly heart-shaped they're serrated and have a pointed tip and that asymmetrical so one half of the heart will be a bit bigger than the other these leaves are edible but this time of year they're a bit too tough you want them in spring when they're still a bit translucent they make a very decent substitute for lettuce this is Riblet plantain this time of year or after these flower heads that tastes just like mushroom you see they've got really small white flowers coming out of them and they grow on flower stems that are leafless all the leaves are at the base of the plant and the stems are square I have really fine hairs on them the leaves are lanceolate or long and narrow they have strong veins running the length of the leaf if you turn the leaf over you see them more clearly and if you break a leaf in half gently often those veins will stay intact because they're very strong and it's a good way to identify the leaf they're very nutritious leaves I don't think they have the best flavor they're a bit medicinal but I do use them in smoothies another use for them is they staunch bleeding so if you have a little cup you can chew these up and put them onto the wound and there they help the wound heal these are very common you'll find them in pretty much any patch of grassland or maybe in your garden and there are several types of plantain as Riblet plantain like this broadleaf plantain and Hori they're all edible and all very common these are wild cherry prunus avium there are several species of cherries that grow wild in the UK all of them edible through summer very sour these ones are nice and sweet they're very similar to the cherries you're buying a shop though these are quite a bit smaller and cherries in the shop you can easily pay three or four pounds for a small planet there's no need to spend your money because these are very common in UK woodlands and Parkes cherries need a lot of light to develop and more like they get the sweeter the fruit will be so it's best to try and find trees that are south-facing into an open area cherry has a very distinctive buck the grayish brown color and has striations running horizontally across the buck and these are called lenticels and that is basically the trees way of breathing they help with the exchange of gases between the tree and the atmosphere and they look a little bit like a tiger stripe pattern the leaves are oval tooth and come to a point and if you look where the leaf meets the stem you'll see two red glands the flowers appear in April they're white or pink and have five petals the only thing that you may confuse these wild cherries for are bird cherry a bird cherry are edible but they're very sour and can be mildly toxic if you eat too many of them the main difference to look for is with wild cherry if you look at where the cherries meet the stem they form in clusters and all meet at the same point on the stem on a little protrusion whereas bird cherry they meet the stem on stalks singly now with all cherries the stones are toxic so make sure you spit out the stones [Music] the dog rose rosa canina is a shrub that grows to about one and a half meters although it climbs other plants and trees and can grow to about three meters this time of year or after the flowers they don't smell strong as ornamental roses but they do have that distinctive rose smell and the petals can be used in flavoring syrups and it can make rose water from them dog rose has long arcing stems covered in really sharp thorns that curve backwards those thorns can't be read on younger and newer growth the leaves are compound they usually made up of three pairs of opposing leaves and then one terminal leaf those leaves are oval and two usually a shiny a dark green on the top and the lighter green paler underneath they're very common on woodland edges in parks and in hedgerows and this time of year you'll see these flowers just about everywhere they can be either white or have a pinkish tinge to them early summer is also the perfect time for the young florets of common hogweed her at Liam's fond ileum these florets are just like almost like a world broccoli it's the unopened flower heads and they're really nice salt just steamed and cook of a little bit butter and you can also find the seeds at the same plant coming hogweed and when they're green like this immature they taste just like cardamon so you can use those like dried and then ground up you can use them in curries and that sort of thing I've done a more in-depth video on this plant because it's not a really easy ones who idea it's not for beginners and it's from the unbell afore family and there's some deadly poisonous species in that family say if you do want to learn this bomb check out my other video I'll leave a link to it in the description on how to identify common hogweed alexander's is another on Bela fur so you want to be very careful off but it's seed ready to harvest this time of year if you don't know how to identify this plant then I'll wait to learn it in early spring because now in summer most of its vegetation is died away so you can't see its key identifier but if you do know how to identify this plant then you can harvest the seeds which tastes just like green peppercorns this is honeysuckle the flowers are edible and they make a nice tea when dried so the trumpet like flowers are a creamy color and they go more yellow with age and they've often got a pink or reddish flush to them it's one of those plants that you'll often smell before you say it it's got like a nice strong sweet smell and that smell is often stronger in the evening or at night when it's trying to attract nocturnal pollinators but the berries of honeysuckle are poisonous so don't eat the berries honeysuckle is a climber so you'll find it twining around other bushes and trees it's common in woodland edges and in hedgerows the leaves are a dark green lighter green underneath and they're oval and they have an entire margin say no serrations and they grow in opposing pairs thanks for watching UK well grass if you haven't ready you can subscribe

Channel: UK Wildcrafts

Views: 26,462

Keywords: Summer wild foods, foraging UK, UK foraging, foraging, wild foods, wild food, summer foraging, foraging in the summer, foraging in the UK, foraging in the woods, early summer foraging, summer, foraging June, foraging July, June, July, wild edibles, wild cherry, fireweed, rosebay willowherb, dog rose, pineapple weed, honesty seeds, linden flower, flowers, lime tree flower

Id: B0Q_eX-4x1o

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020