Indian Pipe - Where to find it, what it looks like, how to use it and how it tastes

[Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys welcome back to the woods today is part two of our indian pipe or ghost pipe so we want to cover some more topics about it and then we from our previous video our part one it's been about five and a half weeks almost six weeks so today's the day to go ahead and filter it off and we'll actually have our completed tincture so we're going to take you through the steps of filtering it and we'll talk about making that tincture a little bit more so one of the questions that people are curious about is where to find the indian pipe and how to find it so typically if you go out looking for your indian pipe it's not like molin where you're going to find it in a disturbed soil kind of area or the edge of roads or the edge of maybe like a field in the woods where they transition together so your indian pipe you're really going to want to go out to large old thick dense forests so when you look up at the treetops or as you're walking through the woods where the trees are intermingled and make that canopy that kind of really makes the bottom of the forest floor real dark and dense looking that's typically where you're going to find your indian pipe another thing that they like a real lot is when you look at your forest floor you want a lot of dead limbs and trees down you want a lot of foliage and dead leaves on the ground so these plants they don't create their own chlorophyll so that's why they're that white ghost color so really they're they're not going to be looking for sunlight like a lot of plants will they don't mind being in that dark moist environment but now they are a flowering plant so they're not a fungus they're not a mushroom so they're going to absorb their energy off that root system that's underneath of the ground there so just remember a shady area is kind of what you're looking for so a lot of times when you're out looking for them they're pretty easy to identify because of that ghost color so they're going to be slightly transparent sometimes pinky white opaque or opal in color but they could also have a little bit of purple purple streaks to them or grayish black streaks to them and the younger the plants are the head or the bell of the flower will actually be curled down and that's a younger plant when it's first starting to grow up so as it gets bigger the flower part of that head will get fertilized and as it's fertilized it'll actually stand up and as it matures it'll stand up so typically when you go to harvest these plants anywhere from like three inches all the way up to maybe eight inches at the most but really anywhere in between there is going to be just fine for harvesting them so a lot of times when you're when you go out looking for them you might find one or two of these stalks and then you don't see any more a lot of times the real little ones are actually underneath the canopy of the dead foliage or leaves on the ground and are just starting to push up through the leaves so if you find one if you gently uncover the leaves and stuff on the ground a lot of times you can find some more that are very close by usually they also grow like you might have one here and there'll be clusters of them in nearby areas so a good time to find these plants is if you have a dry spell you haven't had much rain and then all of a sudden you get maybe that rain that comes in we have rain for like one to three days it's kind of like with mushrooms after you go in the forest after a rain all of a sudden all these mushrooms have popped up off the ground it's kind of the similar similar to that they like that moist wet climate and that ground that's nice and wet but if you have that dry spell it's going to be hard to find them also when you go out looking for them it's not like a morale mushroom where you're trying to go out maybe mid and april to find those morales this is going to be the very beginning of summer all the way up to like early fall or the end of summer is when you're going to go out and try to find these indian pipes so we'll also include a map that we found and that map kind of shows you all across the united states and where you could find these indian pipes but now you can't find indian pipe all across the entire world but they are going to be more concentrated in certain areas so if you live in a desert climate that's super dry super sandy you're going to have a hard time or maybe not at all be able to find them you really got to find that that soil that's enriched with that dead plant material so an older technique when people would actually go out to try to harvest these indian pipes is they would either take the whole plant with the root ball and system the whole thing but nowadays we kind of look at it a little differently so the the flowering part of the plant is really the most potent but a lot of people when they pick them they use the stem and the flour but if you've got a cluster of a half a dozen of them that's growing up you really don't want to just grab it and whack it all off and take the whole thing so it is a perennial so it's going to try to come back every year so if we can we want to come into and only take a portion of that and really treat it like a renewable resource so if you damage that root system you're not going to be able to go back and find it so i kind of was thinking about like morale mushrooms and thought it was a good comparison not in the fact that it's a mushroom but just on how to go approaching the finding and hunting of the indian pipe or morales so really if you have a ledger kind of keep a map system together mark down where you find it when you find it maybe the weather and other trees or plants that you find around it it's going to help you in the future as far as locating these again but let's say this year you go out and you found some go ahead and harvest a little bit of it and mark it down in your ledger and then use that as a future reference so over some time of a couple years maybe you got a half a dozen different spots now that you know that have this indian pipe so when you want to go find it you can go back to these half a dozen spots and you got a way higher success rate of being able to find these more continuously also like with the morel mushrooms a lot of times people will pick those then they'll bring in the spores to a different location and shake the spores out the indian pipe is kind of the same thing if you have that indian pipe that's completely standing straight up that means the seeds inside that flower has been fertilized so if you wait a little bit to those seeds are starting to come through you might be able to transplant those seeds that are already fertile in a new area that you could try coming back to the following year so i brought my backpack here but inside of that i have my tincture that we've already started so we're going to take some of these things out and kind of get ready to take a look at them so this is our tincture that we started previously so we're going to talk about this a little bit so when you pick your indian pipe some people were kind of curious about is it already dried out it sounds kind of crunchy you know how how wet or moist is it maybe so when you first pick it you want to pick it in in its live vibrant kind of state so it has a little bit of crunch to it when you touch the plant or cut into it kind of like an apple like an apple could be real moist and juicy or a potato but when you start cutting into you can see the juice coming out of it but it has that not that it's fibrous but it has that crunch to it a little bit but now the flower head itself after it's been fertilized can actually get kind of hard almost like an acorn would but now when you put this into your alcohol so we used vodka at a 80 proof i believe it was as far as your ratio goes some people say you could use a 50 50. what we normally do is once you put your indian pipe in there you want to pour enough vodka in there to raise it off the bottom a little bit and make sure that the entire top of the plant material is completely covered so as it sits there it almost looks more like a grayish black color right now but within a day or maybe two days it's going to change color drastically so it's going to have a purple bluish kind of hue to it or maybe even a grayish black color to it but as it sits there and you're letting it kind of marinate come in there and stir it a little bit every once in a while and make sure you release any air bubbles that are down there if air gets trapped underneath of whatever vegetation you have in here you have a possibility of it getting like turning moldy or that plant material going bad so you want to shake it every couple days turn it a little bit make sure all those air bubbles get out don't turn it so violently if you want to say that you're forcing air back underneath of it though just stir it a little bit and push the air back up so with this you could also use other choices of alcohol that are about that 80 percent proof another one i seen people doing was rum but we always use the vodka though but after a few days it's going to turn into this dark color and what it's doing is is it's extracting all that good stuff that we're trying to pull out of the plant and you're going to want to wait about five to six weeks for this process to be done so as far as the location on storing this when you're trying to make your tincture you want to kind of keep it in a cool dark spot so maybe if you have like a root cellar or maybe a pantry where direct sun's not going to hit it that's going to really damage it but we're going to go ahead and start filtering this now so you could use any kind of container you have mason jars are awesome but this is some potato cloth and that's what we're going to use to filter it but you could use anything you have cotton t-shirt bandana cheese cloth have to layer it several times but we're going to use this potato sack here we're just going to use this funnel to try to help make sure we don't lose too much of it and as far as storing it another option is we have this little vial here has a little dropper that's a good way to measure your tinctures out and this amber color glass is going to help protect it from any uv rays or anything that we're going to get inside of it that's going to prolong the life of this so this is really simple real easy i'm actually going to use one layer i think we're going to do is just pour it in there we don't want to force it through it just let gravity let it soak through the cloth and then drip through [Applause] [Applause] so [Applause] as far as like the smell of this stuff it's pretty pleasant it doesn't it does have a little bit of like the alcohol vodka smell to it but at the same time it has kind of a a flowery kind of smell to it kind of like a sweet flower smell but also has like an earth undertone to it it smells pretty nice it does have the alcohol vapors coming off of it so as far as making your tinctures when you're making it and when you put it into your storage container you want to try to have small bottles to limit the amount of air space or oxygen that's going to get to the top of your tincture the more airtight you can make your containers the more that your tinctures are going to last longer and be more effective so we could shake this a little bit but what we really don't want to do is we don't want to squeeze it really because if you squeeze it you're going to push a lot of sediment back into that liquid so we got our tincture transferred into our jar here so now we're going to go ahead and pour it into our dropper vial so we actually got a full vial here so we'll have to grab another one to finish storing that actually over filled it just a hair but again with these storage containers try to use smaller ones and don't leave a lot of air space above it that airspace is actually going to damage it so as far as how much should you start taking you really kind of need to go slow with this if you've never been introduced to it before so typically one to three drops is kind of your recommended dosage and you could do that twice a day so i would start off with one drop see how your body reacts to it see how you feel with it wait four six eight hours before you try it again and then just kind of slowly increase as you get more used to it and see how your body feels and reacts to it as far as what to use this for so people use it for all kinds of different aches and pains whether it's your headache a sore throat back pain they're really looking at this as a alternative to like a heavier narcotic so a lot of people are saying that this is actually non-addictive where some of those heavier narcotics you're going to have to worry about being that addictive traits to go along with it but now i don't you really use it for pain as much as i would use it for if you're a person that has anxiety so maybe if you're have trying to go to sleep at night and you have racing thoughts or if you have a lot of built up energy when you're trying to go to bed if you take a dose of this stuff it's actually going to help you sleep and just calm your nerves a little bit so this does react with your nervous system and so it's going to deaden those nerves but a lot of people they say they still feel the pain but it helps the mind separate from the pain so if it calms your nerves it makes you a little bit more relaxed it's going to help you not focus on that pain as much so like with anything guys you need to make sure that you're doing your own research talk to people in your local area that you know that have used it or that kind of help you identify it and just make sure you use good judgment so another thought that i had that i thought might be really helpful for a lot of people but if you can maybe use some google a little bit and research if you could find a local herbalist or maybe a survival expert a lot of times a survival expert that's in your area they'll have a medicinal section with part of their training program and so they'll actually have a lot of these plants already marked out in the woods so when you sign up for those classes you can go on a hiking trip and they're going to show you like well hey here's some indian pipe that we have if it's the right season but then that way you can get on your hands and your knees climb right up to it and really get a good look at it and help you identify it and also if you find these people that are local you might not have indian pipe in your area but they're gonna have that knowledge to be able to share with you maybe something that you could use as a alternative but i'm gonna go ahead and we're gonna take some of this today so with my eye dropper here i kind of got an idea of how full i want it and i'm going to take about three or four drops of it so it does have that vodka alcohol undertone to it but at the same time it has a very fragrant kind of flavor to it almost like a a mouthful of perfume or like if you were to pick a flower and you ate that flower doesn't taste bad but if you're a person that really doesn't like the flavor of vodka maybe using that rum as an alternative might be an option for you and also you could if you really hate the flavor of it you could always put it in like an orange juice or something like that and dilute it down a little bit as far as trying to mask that flavor another good option is maybe if you took this or mixed it with a spoonful of natural honey that honey would go ahead and mask that flavor of the of that alcohol in there if you don't like it as far as the medicinal purposes it's going to take a few minutes before you really start feeling the effects of it but i put it on the tip of my tongue and a little bit of underneath my tongue but it has a little bit of a slight numbing effect to it some people say that it's kind of like when you get your laughing gas at like the dentist office how you can still feel everything yet it kind of puts you in a better place a little bit and kind of gives you that tingling sensation so as far as the the front of my mouth goes it almost has a slight numbing effect slightly tingly nothing that's overpowering or that's going to hit you like knock you off your feet just from a few drops of it and i'd almost say that i do kind of have a a slight euphoric kind of feel a little bit of outside your mind a little bit as far as being relaxed but i think this is a great alternative a great option for people that maybe want to try something that's not just a chemical compound mixture that you buy from the pharmacy but always use good judgment make your own choices we appreciate you guys joining us on g2 homesteading today we'll catch you next time

Channel: G2 Outdoor Adventures

Views: 286,334

Keywords: #natural pain relief, #ghost pipe, #indian pipe, #medicinal, #self reliance

Id: peBhUI-XXGQ

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021