Hey welcome to UK Wildcrafts, I'm in the Cotswolds
and I'm just taking a walk down some country lanes and maybe into some fields checking out the
hedgerows to see what wild edibles I can find. In the UK we're pretty lucky because
we've got miles and miles of these hedgerows which are filled with wild
foods, so I've got my basket and a bag. I'm mostly looking for nettle seeds, once a
year I'll come out and collect a years worth of nettle seeds. But I'm also going to be keeping
an eye out for whatever wild foods I can find. As I'm walking down the lane I'm just keeping
my eye out but there's masses of these nettles and in the summer you can harvest the
seeds from the female plant like this here, so these are the seeds, you don't want to
harvest the male flowers which are these here. They won't do you any harm they just
don't have the nutritional value of the seeds. I've done a video in more
detail about how to tell the difference. so I'll just collect clusters like this by hand and then Chuck them into my bag You do get the odd sting doing it this way but this time of year I find the stings
aren't quite as bad as in the spring so just from five minutes picking I've
already got quite a nice amount here but I'll keep moving on and add into this as I go. but yeah look absolutely masses of these seeds. and what I like to do with these is I'll take
them home and sort of lay them out to let them dry out a bit and then give them a good shake
up and then you can easily remove the stems, so then you've just got the seeds and some of the
chaff which is fine to eat as well, and I'll just dry them and use them for sprinkling into yogurts
or onto muesli, into porridge that sort of thing. There's a lot of uses for these. I find it's
best to have these in the morning because they can give you quite a lot of energy, so it's
best not to eat them before you go to bed. All along the edge of the grass
here we've got this plantain, this is broadleaf plantain. This time of
year we're after the flower stems like this as long as they're nice and
green, I like to eat these. The ones that have started to flower and open
are not quite so tasty, but this is perfect. and some smaller ones there If you haven't tried these before you
might be quite surprised by their flavour, they taste almost exactly like mushrooms, as
in the shop bought sort of agaricus mushrooms. So what I like to do with these is steam them
just for 30 seconds or so and then pan fry them in butter and just serve them like asparagus
basically, with scrambled eggs or poached eggs, and it's quite a nice breakfast. Or
I'll just chuck them in with a load of other greens if I'm doing like
a stir fry or something like that. There's also dock seeds everywhere,
I'm not planning on making a flour with these this year so I'm not going
to pick any, but they are edible. There's another huge patch of
nettles here, with loads of seeds on. While I'm out on a foraging walk as well
as looking to see what I can forage now I'm also keeping an eye out for what's nearly
ready, and I'm noticing there's lots of Elder and the elderberries are starting to ripen so a
few more weeks and I'll be picking elderberry. I could have easily walked straight past
these but as I knelt down to pick some of these plantain I just saw here some lovely
dewberries which are just perfectly ripe now. They look very similar to blackberries
but these are more of a low growing plant, so you'll find them just a
few feet off the ground. Normally the fruits have fewer segments than
Blackberry but the segments are larger and they have a bluish tinge to them
and a whitish bloom on the berries. And actually I'm noticing there's
quite a lot of these dewberries here. One thing with dewberries is it's very difficult to pick them without bursting them
so usually get quite stained hands. So these taste fairly similar to blackberries
but with a bit of a sharper flavour I really like these berries though. I've not
quite got enough here to make anything with but I'll probably just keep these for snacking on. The general rule when I'm picking berries is
for everyone that goes in the tub I eat two. Here we've got common hogweed seeds. They've got a taste a little bit similar
to cardamom but a little bit sweeter. These are great for flavouring curries, you don't need many because they
have quite a strong flavour. But what I like to do is pickle them, just in white wine vinegar maybe a few other
spices and then keep them throughout the year. It takes a bit of the harshness out of
the flavour as well when you pickle them. I know I say it a lot on this channel but
this is part of the carrot or apiaceae family so be very careful, this isn't
one for beginner foragers. I'm going to pick some of these
Meadowsweet flower heads for making tea. now this plant you can smell from quite a distance
away, it's got a beautiful sweet almondy smell or like marzipan. I absolutely love the smell
of this plant, and the flowers kind of have a cottony appearance when they're opening,
they've got a very frothy flower head. And that's when you know they're ready to collect. So this plant has long been used
as a medicinal herb especially for problems with the stomach. It contains salicylic
acid which aspirin is synthesized from, so you should avoid this plant if
you're on blood pressure medication. So I think these flowers are best used infused
into liquids, like I said for making tea, which you shouldn't drink too often because it
has quite strong medicinal values. It also makes a nice sweet aromatic cordial with an almondy flavor
and it's good infused into vinegar or into cream, and traditionally this plant's
been used to flavour Mead. If you see this plant growing go and give the
flowers a good sniff it really is a lovely smell. So this plant generally grows in damp conditions
so this is probably a drainage ditch that floods after a rain. And the
whole of this plant is edible the leaves I generally only eat when they
first come up in Spring they're not one of my favorite greens to be honest. Also the root is
apparently edible I've not tried it yet though. Okay we're making a start on filling the basket. It's too late in the year now for harvesting
thistles for eating apart from maybe the roots later in the year, but for a Bushcraft use these
seed heads are the best fire lighter in nature, just the tiniest spark and these go right up. There's mass is more of the plantain here
as well so I'm going to pick some more, so plantain is a plant that likes to grow on
well trodden ground that's been compressed, so you'll find it all along next to paths.
There's loads of it here so I'll collect more of the flower stems. I'm also going to collect
some of the younger leaves because this plant is a good medicine, and what I'm going to
do is use these leaves to make a poultice because I've got load of tick bites recently
and horse fly bites, so what you can do is just Crush these up with some water or even chew
them up and put them directly onto the wound and they're antimicrobial so they can
help stop infection which is great. And you can eat these leaves too, the young fresh
ones like this make a pretty good salad green. You can even use the bigger
ones like this as a wrap. As long as they're in good enough condition. This is pineapple weed another plant
that I like to make tea from. And just like the name suggests it
really does smell like pineapple, if you crush these flower heads there's a really
strong pineapple smell. They do have a pineapple flavour as well but it's quite mild so if you're
making a tea from it you need to use quite a lot to get a pineapple flavour. But even if
it's not a strong flavour it's still nice and it makes a good cup of tea for in the evening
because it's related to chamomile it has calming effects when you drink pineapple weed tea, so
it's a good one to drink before you go to bed. This is mugwort, this has traditionally been used as a herbal tea to help aid
digestion and to help with anxiety. I just like using it as a herb, I just pick a few
of the flower spikes like this and dry them and I like using them as a dried herb like you would
for Rosemary. What I'll do is I'll save some for the autumn, and what I like doing is making a
stuffing with the dried rosemary (*mugwort) and chestnuts some minced pork and onion, it makes a
really nice stuffing to have for Christmas then. So you can eat these flower spikes and
the leaves, a good indicator for mugwort for me is if you look on the underside of
the leaves they're quite a silvery color. Alright that should do me
for a quick hedgerow forage, so let's just go through what
I've picked there so I've got the mugwort which I'll use dried as a herb
maybe making the occasional tea with that. The Meadowsweet flowers which I'll use for tea
I might pick some more soon and make a cordial with it. I've got the pineapple weed flowers
just enough for one or two cups of tea there. Plantain flower stems I'll just use those
in a similar way to asparagus and I've got the plantain leaves as well the younger ones I'll
use as a salad herb and I'll use a few for making the poultice for my insect bites as well and
I've got some hogweed seeds in there somewhere a few of these stems which I'll use pickled
for using in curries and stews. I've got the dewberries which I'm
just going to eat as a snack, and I've got a nice load of nettle seeds
here so this bag's about half full. That's a good amount in there I might do one more collection this year
but that is quite a good amount in there. So I'll just take these home spread them out on
a rack and let them dry out a bit, pick out the the few leaves and stems that are in there
and then I'll use the seeds for porridges, on muesli and yogurt.
