NOT a Weed: STOP Killing This Shockingly Useful Plant

[Music] hi LA from wineberry Hill here what if I told you there was a plant that you could use for wounds and uh improving rashes and bug bites but you could also take this plant internally for coughs indigestion uh digestive issues reducing inflammation improving your blood sugar but this plant was also edible and you could use it in soups and salads and other recipes and could also give it to your livestock both fresh and dried as a leaf hay in the winter and then on top of all of that you could use this plant to make string and Twine and other textiles and then use the same plant to dye them on top of that this plant is also useful as an emergency fire starter now pretty amazing plant right ironically this same plant is the same reason why most people treat their lawns with chemicals like weed killer and for most of the people watching this video if you look out the window it's probably in your yard curious what am I talking about I'm talking about broadleaf plantain and it turns out broadleaf plantain grows in pretty much every growing region on planet Earth in fact if you're standing in your yard watching watching this video right now it's very likely underfoot now some of you are probably wondering wait a minute plantain isn't that a tropical banana like fruit well broadleaf plantain and the tropical fruit plantain aren't related at all you are not the father they're completely different plants from completely different families but they share the same name for an interesting reason linguists believe it's because they're both edible and apparently the terminology that became plantain meant hey you can eat that but this sort of thing is Not Unusual when it comes to [Music] food I'll give you an example what do you think of when I say the word pepper depending on your point of reference it could mean a lot of different plants some of which aren't even related and like I mentioned this kind of thing happens in Foods all the time uh depending on what part of the world you live in when I say the word biscuit chip fry you'll have a completely different picture in your mind okay but the plot thickens when you learn about the origin of the Latin word plantain the Latin root of the word plantain is planta meaning soul of the foot and there are two different camps or theories as to why that is the case some historians believe that it's because some plantains leaves resemble Footprints now the other Camp believes that it was because uh the plant was used to treat foot ailments and you can hear an echo of that in a common foot ailment we have today plant are fitis but whatever the case is those are just educated guesses by historians but one thing we do know is that the plant throughout history was used for an incredible array of Medical Treatments an example of this is a scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet where Romeo jokes with Benvolio that plantain might be a remedy for a broken heart evidence suggests that the use of plantain goes back Millennia and people would use it for all sorts of conditions on their skin well you'll feel a lot better after a good bleeding but I'm bleeding already say who's the barber here uh if they had an injury uh they would make a pus uh either by grinding up the leaves and applying them to the wound or they they would chew them up and then take that resulting pus and hold it on the wound uh they would also put it on bug bites uh and and my arch nemesis poison ivy they would use it to calm down the inflammation and it's possible that in that process of chewing it up they realized that it also helped with sore throats and uh so then it was used in teas and in syrups to make a a sort of cough syrup that would help people that were having a inflammation in their throat and in the respiratory tract and then as it got further on down they realized hey it's calming down my gut uh I'm having issues of everything from diarrhea to you know bloating and things like that people would take plantain leaves there's an interesting kind of corollary to this story so we're talking about one type of of plantain broadleaf plantain of which there's quite a few members of the family uh I have a a plant right here here that's actually called rib wart plantain and its next cousin is called blonde plantain and you've probably heard of what they make blonde plantain into uh it's an over-the-counter digestive treatment called Metamucil uh psyllium husks come from plantain so wow right I mean what a what a versatile plant and I I mentioned on top of that uh you can use it as a food source uh in soups and salads and things like that and I I also mentioned that feeding livestock is something uh that uh you can do with it especially animals that like lots of fiber uh the first animal that comes to my mind is rabbits uh rabbits need an incredibly high fiber diet and along with being so fibrous is the benefit of being able to use those fibers and so very carefully people would um in Years Gone by they would twist those fibers into often strings and and threads and twines uh as I mentioned on the outset to use in textiles uh and portions of the plant are in fact quite useful as a Dye uh that is sort of in the yellow yellow green uh Hue family and lastly this same portion of many different types of plantain the portion that the psyllium husk is derived from from is also very useful in starting a fire it seems that throughout time people would cut these off dry them and save them as Tinder for Fire Starting what an incredibly versatile plant now I probably didn't cover all of them so I just realized while I'm editing this video that I forgot to mention one of my most favorite aspects of this plant and that is its ability to improve the quality of the soil and it does this in two way ways the first is it has a very deep tap rout and what that does is it loosens up compacted soil the second thing is that deep Tap Root draws up nutrients up into the range where other plants can use them so if there was one takeaway that I could give you from this video is that perhaps you could resist the temptation to remove plantain from your property because it's in fact trying to do a pretty noble job of helping out the other plants okay back to me if you know of a use or you have a use that I didn't mention or you would like me to make another video about one of the me one of the methods that I mentioned let me know in the comments it seems like it's the only way to get YouTube to notice my channel and I will say clearly it's working because in the next few weeks my channel is about to cross 50,000 subscribers so thank you very much all of you uh stalwart uh members of the channel That watch these videos all the way to the end thank you very much now uh if you would like uh specific access to my plans and my guides or one-on-one access to me if you have a project that you want to bounce an idea off of uh me with well paying members can do just that and as always if you like 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Channel: Wineberry Hill

Views: 149,208

Keywords: benefits of plantain, broad leaf plantain, broadleaf plantain, harvesting and cooking broadleaf plantain, herbal knowledge, herbal medicine, holistic healing, medicinal plants, natural healing, natural remedies, natural remedy, plantago major, plantain, plantain as medicine, plantain benefits, plantain herb, plantain identification, plantain uses, wild medicinal plants, wild medicinals, wilderness medicine, uses of plantain, plants for pain relief, inflammation, herbalist

Id: NPZmIGuQVNk

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2024