Foraging For 3 Overlooked Wild Edible Fruits

[Music] everyone I'm Adam Harrison spending some time outside today and I thought I'd introduce you to three wild edible fruits that were all very likely to overlook this time of year I think these fruits are delicious they've got medicinal properties and they can be found in abundance depending on where you live so which three wild edible fruits am I talking about let's go find out here we have an edible dogwood tree now when many people hear the word dogwood they don't necessarily think of edible trees or edible plants but this one right here does produce an edible fruit you can see it right here this one right here there's one up here as well and so this one is cornelian cherry dogwood so it has the word cherry in it but it's not related to cherry although it kind of tastes like a cherry and it kind of looks like a cherry but it's related to the dogwoods cornice moss and this one is not native to the United States so it's native to southern Europe and it's native to southwestern Asia but it has become naturalized here in the United States primarily in the northeastern United States that's where you're very likely to find it but before we get into the deliciousness of this fruit right here and how to properly harvest it let's talk about some key identifying characteristics of this shrub so the cornelian cherry dogwood grows to be between 15 to 20 feet tall and this one typically inhabits disturbed area so you won't necessarily find it an intact forest or in the understory but you want to look along the edges of trails and you might even see it in community parks perhaps some people have planted the cornelian cherry dogwood and like most dogwood plants this one has oppositely arranged leaves and each leaf has between three to five lateral veins running the length of the leaf now this plant produces yellow flowers in the early spring before the leaves appear and then these flowers give rise to greenish fruits that eventually turn red and each fruit is between three quarters of an inch to an inch long and inside each fruit is a pit so this is a stone fruit botanically known as a drupe and that's why I kind of looks like a cherry because there's that stone or that pit inside each fruit so here I am underneath the cornelian dogwood tree and the reason I'm underneath the tree and not up there is because I want to harvest some of the fruits that have already fallen whenever they're ripe they fall if I would harvest some of those red fruits in the tree right now they would be very tart very sour and various stringent they're not fully ripe yet once they ripen they fall and so what I want to do is look for some of these red fruits that are still intact not the ones that are really beat up the ones that are smashed but the ones that are intact so you could see some of the red fruits around me here's a nice one right here and whenever they fall and they're ripe they tend to wrinkle ever so slightly and they darken in color so they're very dark red right here compared to some of the red colorings that you see on the tree and they're ever so slightly wrinkly and this is how they know that it's right and so if I eat this one you can see the pit right here it's very slimy this is the seed right here you just spit that out almost like an olive pit it's very very good ever so slightly sour ever so slightly astringent but it's sweet and that sweetness will increase with time now another thing that you can do is harvest some of the fresh fruits on the tree itself the ones that are still a stringent and not fully ripe and they will ripen in a brown paper bag on your kitchen counter so you can harvest a bunch don't harvest the green ones harvest the red ones bring those home put them in a brown paper bag let them sit on your counter for a few days and then they will stop and once they get very dark once they get wrinkly you'll know that they are right and you can just taste them with time now you might attract fruit flies and so if you just put on your kitchen counter for a day or two you might want to move it into your refrigerator they will still ripen but it'll take some time so there are two ways that you can harvest it you can harvest it from the ground when they're already ripe or you can harvest it from the tree put it in a brown paper bag at home and then let it ripen that way so how do I like to eat cornelian cherry well I typically just treat it as a snack and I find that it tastes like a cross between sour cherry and a cranberry but it's much sweeter than that especially as it ripens so if you look around the world you see that people have treated this as a snack people have also added this to alcoholic beverages and you can also make jams or jellies or preserves and syrups if you're into those kinds of things by all means try it and let me know what you think interestingly this plan has been using traditional Chinese medicine and speaking of medicine when if you look at the current scientific research I think you'll be very very surprised there's a lot of good modern research on cornelian cherry and I just want to highlight one particular recent study in 2015 showing that this plant improved glycemic control in adults with type 2 diabetes now this is a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial and the anti-diabetic effects were attributed to these plant pigment compound known as anthocyanins which was these reddish bluish purplish pigments antioxidant pigments found all in the plant kingdom and you could see how red this fruit is right here so this plant is very high in these anthocyanins and the people with type 2 diabetes saw a decrease in hemoglobin a1c numbers also they saw a decrease in triglyceride levels now this isn't the only study on cornelian cherry whenever you look through the scientific literature you find that this plant has been shown to have anti-parasitic properties anti-cancer properties anti-inflammatory properties and antimicrobial properties so cornelian cherry a fantastic edible plant now's the time of year to get out and look for it if you have access to it I encourage you to get out there and harvest some of these fruits and see what you think but it's also a medicinal plant so cornelian cherry cornice moss here's a beautiful native plant in the laurel family and whenever we talk about the laurel family especially here in the northeastern United States we don't have very many species if you're familiar with one which is the sassafras tree this one's very similar especially when you crush the foliage and smell it so this one is none other than spice bush or lindara benzoin and so this is a common understory tree in the eastern half of North America and it's a shrub so it grows to be about 15 feet tall and this one has alternately arranged leaves and each lead is attached to the branch to be a little petiole that's lime green so it's lighter in color than the actual leaf and like that cornelian cherry dogwood that we talked about this plant produces yellow flowers in the spring before the leaves appear and this one produces red fruits that kind of look like that cornelian cherry now perhaps the most distinctive feature of spicebush is to smell this plant or the taste of it pretty much any part that's crushed or scratched will emit the citrusy peppery aroma whether it's the leaves the branches or the fruits so yes you can make teas out of the leaves you can make teas out of the branches you can even make chew sticks out of the branches but that's a topic for a different video but what I'm most interested in right now because this is a topic of the video we're gonna be talking about the fruits these red fruits right here so you want to look for the female plants because spicebush produces only fruits and the female plants are separate male plants that won't produce fruits so how do you know which plants are the female they're the ones with the red fruits this time of year so they'll be lighter in color when they're not ripe then they will turn reddish but it's not like the cornelian cherry where you gotta wait till it falls at the ground we're gonna let it ripen at home it's not really gonna change in its flavor profile you just harvest it when it's dark red on the shrub and so there are a couple ways that you can use this plant right here you know a lot of people say it tastes like allspice and well that may be true I tend to find that you know kind of taste like black pepper or citrus mixed together but it's entirely spicebush it's really really potent if you just eat it fresh so I just snack on them fresh as a trailside nibble whenever I'm walking up and down the trails but what you can do is harvest these and then freeze them and then whenever you want to use them you can thaw them accordingly and you can grate them into various dishes whether they're sweet dishes or savory dishes and the reason you might want to freeze these fresh is because this plant is very high in fats especially the fruits and they can oxidize really readily and this plant could spoil if you don't freeze it or if you don't dry it and keep it in the fridge or in the freezer so a lot of people just freeze them fresh another thing that you can do and which is what I did recently is that I harvested a bunch of these fruits I cut them in half and I separated the inner seed because this is botanically a drupe as well so it's a stone fruit as a little seed inside with a little skin around it I separated the pulp from the seed and I dried those separately and I put them in separate jars I'm storing that in my fridge and it's much milder than these fruits when they're fresh or when they're frozen so if you're looking for a milder flavor profile but still that's citrusy peppery flavor you can dry them out you can dry them whole we can dry them separately and I just want to see the differences in the flavor profiles but they're pretty much similar the pulp in the sea but they are much milder and I'm probably going to use those in an acorn pancake recipe that I'm experimenting with and I might also try it in an acorn bread recipe but you can do a lot of things with spicebush but just remember that they are high in fat so they can't oxidize but you want to freeze it or you can dry and just store it in the fridge or the freezer but now's the time of year to get out and look for it so this is spiced bushland air benzo and a fantastic native plant that's edible and it also has medicinal qualities as well here's a plant that some people absolutely hate some people absolutely enjoy it as well some people enjoy it because of these incredibly delicious red fruits that look like red bebés people hate this plant because of its incredibly invasive nature so this is autum all of le Agnes um balada native to Asia brought over to the United States in the 1830s and promoted throughout the 1900s by the US soil conservation service for erosion control as a windbreak and as a cover for wildlife but it quickly spread throughout the eastern half of North America especially in disturbed habitats but before we get into health delicious this fruit is let me say a few things about the identifying features of autumn olive autumn olive is a shrub that does obtain small tree status you want to look and disturbed areas along trails and meadows and along the sides of roads the leaves are alternately arranged but what's very unique and characteristic for autumn olive is that on the underside of each leaf that's covered with silvery scales so the top of the leaf is greenish and on the bottom it's silvery it's same thing with the fruits although the fruits are red and they're BB sized and BB shape but they are covered with these silvery scales so you're looking for the silvery scales and the bottoms of the leaves and also on these fruits and these fruits are botanically known as droops which means there's a single seed inside of each fruit so because the theme of the day is edible wild fruits let's talk a little bit more about these fruits so what do they taste like well in my opinion it tastes like a cross between watermelon and sour apple maybe with some tomato thrown in there but it's entirely autumn all once you taste it you will say yeah it tastes like autumn olive doesn't really taste like too many other things but in my opinion is delicious now the key to harvesting these fruits is to know exactly when to harvest them if you harvest them too early let's say late August through early September might be very astringent because it's very high in tannic acids if you wait a little longer those tannins go away the astringent C goes away to some degree and it becomes much sweeter so you might want to wait until late September through October to harvest the majority of your crop but if you wait a little longer you will be competing with wildlife and you might be also competing with some foragers like myself and so just experiment with different shrubs because some shrubs taste really good even right now early September and some might be very astringent it all depends on your personal preferences maybe you like the taste of astringency or maybe you don't you just bring a jar with you pull each one off or kind of rake it with your fingers and you want to pick off the little stalks that attach it to the branch you don't want to get any of that in there because it's just too much fiber you won't want to mix that with your fruits and inside each fruit is a seed and you can't eat it or you can spit it out but if you spit it out you're losing some vitamin E you're also losing some of mega 3 fatty acids so speaking of nutrition and human health what else is so good about this plant what can it do for us well this plant contains many phytonutrients that may have direct physiological effects for the human body including a compound known as lycopene lycopene is a non pro-vitamin a carotenoids so it's a carotenoid that cannot be converted to vitamin A within our bodies but it has been studied for its anti prostate cancer affects its anti breast cancer affects its anti lung cancer effects in the lycopene content in autumn olive can be up to 17 times higher compared to the lycopene content found in your ordinary tomato this plant has other phytonutrients like alpha is anthon and beta crypt is anthon these are carotenoid compounds that have physiological effects within our body specifically antioxidant effects the beta crypt is anthon content found with an autumn all can be up to 10 times higher compared to the levels found in your oranges and in your tangerines so this plant has edible properties it has medicinal properties as well and I like to treat this as a trail side nibble I brought these home and added them to smoothies they freeze really well I've added them to porridges and some people even make fruit leathers so there's a variety of things that you can do with it it is an incredibly invasive plant so a lot of people don't like it but what they don't talk about is that it's actually putting nitrogen back into the soil as well because it hooks up with nitrogen fixing bacteria that can convert some of the nitrogen in the atmosphere to usable nitrogen that gets put back into the soil so it might be benefiting the land in some regards but a lot of people really hate this plant but at least we can probably agree that it does produce edible fruits that are good for human health and that tastes pretty good as well so get out there see if you can find autumn all of Ellie Agnes on balada so there we have it three wild edible fruits that some of us are likely to overlook this time of year but I encourage you to get out there and find these if you live in an area where they grow and bring some of these home incorporate them in your meals and perhaps maybe you'll incorporate some of these in the personal medicine as well thanks for watching this video I'll see you [Music]

Channel: Learn Your Land

Views: 172,619

Keywords: Adam Haritan, Learn Your Land, Foraging, Mushrooms, Fungi, Mushroom Hunting, Hunting, Gardening, Permaculture, Primitive Skills, ReWilding, Land, Nature, Outdoors, Fishing, Trapping, Survival, Prepping, Wild Edibles, Sam Thayer, Arthur Haines, Daniel Vitalis, God, Universe, Autumn Olive, Dogwood, Cornelian Cherry, Spicebush, Medicinal, Medicinal Plants, Hiking, Backpacking, Autumn, Farming, Local, Health

Id: lhAUIYmO6ko

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017