Wild Edibles with Sergei Boutenko | Learn How to Forage for 25 Tasty Plants

get closer because we're outdoors I have to project a lot and we're gonna become fast friends today thank you so much for coming first of all my name is Sergey I've been studying plants for a very long time and that's kind of what makes me credible to talk about this I'm not a botanist I don't claim to be I've just been doing it a really long time my family threw me into this is the short version of the story when I was just 13 years old my mom decided to hike from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail and we had no business hiking we'd never hiked more than a day before they took me to like a played against or invested what little money we had into really crappy backpacks and then on April mid-april in 1998 we had a friend drop us off on the Mexican border to start hiking as an adult I realize like how crazy this is but when I was a kid I was like oh I guess everybody's family does this okay when you hike that far you obviously can't pack all the food on your back right so you have to make arrangements beforehand to pack parcels of food that you ship to yourself and then every time you pass a little town you resupply again we had no experience hiking we sort of started guessing well how much food could five hungry hikers really eat in a week because the resupply points were about a week apart and I said five so as my mom my dad my sister me and then my cousin from Russia came to visit us for a year because my uncle wanted her to get a full rounded experience right so for six months of that year we took her into the woods to give her the American experience but that's a different story we get on the trail and within a few short days we understand that our calculations were off we just sort of figured all like how many dates can you really eat we allotted five dates per person per day small bottle of olive oil we're also raw food vegans at the time so we had a lot to think about a week into the trip we started running out of food so we have two more days left to hike and yet our food is gone how many people have tried fasting before by a show hands anybody it's not very fun right you always think about food now imagine fasting when you're expending 4,000 calories a day even less fun so we had a little family meeting we had to either decide whether we quit the trail and stop doing this or improvise and my mom's all about improvisation so you know she got some input we the kids were like well let's quit and my mom's like yeah let's not quit we picked up a little book upon wild edibles and we started just learning about different plants that was one of our little solutions that we came up with that first week was really scary and slowly we started learning new plants we used to test all plants on my father because he didn't speak English so my mom said that if we lost him it wouldn't be as big of an impact on the family that's Russian black humor long story short we successfully completed the trail at a certain point we were eating 60 to 70% wild edibles by volume so we were able to stretch the food parcels that we prepackaged and just put a bunch of wild food in them fill them up and so from a very early age I got to see that it's doable it's realistic just like any new skill it's hard at first but you perpetually get better and so today is going to be about perpetually getting better one of the things I really hope to accomplish is that through repetition we're just gonna learn at least three new plants and that's my goal for today that each one of you walks away knowing how to identify at least three plants if you learn 10 great but let's keep the bar low because my motto is always keep it simple stupid let's do like 10 minutes of theory because I think that's important in the parking lot and then the second part we'll go into the park to Jefferson Park right over there and we're just going to do hands-on looking at plants studying them talking about how you would eat them I propose that today we're not going to eat anything in fact maybe we can make that agreement simply because I've been here for about a month exploring and it's not the cleanest park so in the in the interest of keeping everybody safe let's just look at plants let's talk about them you know sniff them but let's not put them in our mouth sound good promise pinky promise okay and the reason for that is because outside of you know they're being plants that you shouldn't eat human pollutants are actually almost as big of a concern in fact maybe more so pesticides herbicides various chemicals railroad ties that's something we're going to talk about as well so why is it important to learn about plants the main reason is because it enriches our life it teaches us about our environment and actually that I recently learned from expand yoga because I started coming here and doing more yoga and I I know there's a whole list of various benefits like you get more limber and psychologically you rest but also I realized that yoga teaches you about about your immediate surroundings right so when liz and matt tell us to get in warrior 2 if you've never done warrior 2 before now you know you can do warrior 2 and then they say like we'll reach around and grab you know clasp your hands behind your back and you're like holy moly I didn't know I could do that now I have that as a skill it's in my repertoire so you've just expanded your life because now you know you could squat down like this and if you ever needed to you could do it right in that same sense plants do the same thing you go to the park and you're completely novice and it just looks like greenery you have no idea what it is then you start crouching down you start slowly examining every tiny little morsel every plant and your world gets so much bigger you know you think the world is huge because there's seven continents and you can fly for 11 hours and end up in Russia or wherever how much bigger is the world when you start looking at all the little microcosms so to me one of the biggest benefits of wild edibles is that it literally enriches your life it makes it bigger and how fortuitous that expand yoga is sponsoring this it's like a symbiotic relationship almost let's figure out if our worlds need expanding I made some handouts take one pass it around I'm gonna quiz you remember college anybody pop quiz this right here is a test that I came up with um it's in my book I have a wild edibles book shameless plug I have a couple copies that will be for sale afterwards but this is a test that's going to help us figure out how much we know about the natural world versus how much we know about the technological modern world so when everybody gets it we're gonna take it together I made this in 2012 so some of the knit brand names are now becoming obsolete but let's start from the left the top left and let's just shout it out what's that first T Twitter no cheating by the way no looking at the bottom how about the next one next one this is where everybody gets dumped MySpace how about the check mark next one McDonald's Mercedes Lacoste a French tennis brand right now it gets harder now let's look at the the names of the plants what's a oak well I'm impressed how about the next one for I like fur see how many people say clover raise your hand nice and high how many people say sorrel it's sort of good job all right dee not maple great ii maple seed pod or helicopter 8f Douglas fir cone see how the voices are kind of like getting okay gee I like the Christmas tree what type of Christmas tree it's a fern yeah so fir tree H Aspen good and I that's a maple okay so you guys did better than most but we could still expand our world a little bit more the second handout is what I call Sergei's wild edibles cheat sheet so it's basically a little printout I made to PDF and it on the front it has nine of my favorite plants and on the back it has some nutritional data and stuff and so I'm going to give you the paper version which you can laminate or you could use it and love it on this hike and then if you want to laminate it later because I'm emanated this for Liz and Mac there you go present you could go to my website which is on here print this off for free take it to the print shop get it laminated stick it in your car or your backpack and now you have a little field guide alright so there's some major benefits to wild edibles and I want to quickly run through those as well as how to stay safe benefit number one free food everybody knows that people kind of that's synonymous with wild edibles but when you look at it in depth food costs are continuously rising every year they go up three to five percent when I wrote my book in 2013 they were already expensive but in 2019 grocery store food bills are even higher than before especially if you want to eat healthy you go to met market or you go to a co-op you can barely get out of there for less than a hundred bucks right the food that we are gonna learn how to harvest and eat today is significantly going to reduce your monthly expenditure on food so during the summer months May through November I can offset easily forty percent of my food cost just by harvesting food out of my backyard you don't even have to go far some people think oh wild edibles it's a big pain in the butt you got to get in your car you got to take an entire day off of work go somewhere far it's literally stuff that's growing all around your house in a neighborhood park that kind of thing so wild edibles equal free food wild edibles are also healthier for you as well as the planet so because these plants are wild they're as nature intended they have longer root systems that can go down below depleted topsoil and draw out vital minerals and they also often grow in soils that haven't been depleted Janice Schofield an author that I deeply respect she also says that wild edibles have stronger immune systems for the area where they grow so for example if you live in Tacoma Washington and you harvest a dandelion that also lives in Tacoma Washington you can boost your immune system in the local region additionally when you eat chips or crackers from the store they come in plastic triple wrapped in plastic and the sole purpose of that plastic is to be thrown away that bothers me every time I do it like that's the only use for that thing it's for cleanliness and to be thrown away when you eat plants anything that's left over goes in your compost turns into soil it it reduces waste so healthier for you in the planet benefit number three is the epitome of local food the average food the average produce travels roughly about 2,500 miles to get from where it's grown to your plate a dandelion grows in your backyard so literally you walk out the back door and that's textbook local food so less of a carbon footprint it also diversifies your food Michael Pollan in his book in defense of food writes that hundreds of you ago we used to eat up to 80,000 different species of things and when I say species I'm not just talking about like elk and deer different plants thousands of different plants thousands of different nuts and seeds and grains and then over time that's reduced reduced reduced to roughly he says three thousand I actually think it's closer to three hundred so we think we live this diverse life where one day we have Italian food then we have Mexican food then we have Russian food and really all we're eating is wheat corn corn byproducts rice sugar and a few different things why do you think it's important to have a diverse diet anyone so diversity is important because all food is comprised of different micronutrients and the more diversity we get in our diet the more likely we're to meet all of our recommended daily allowances we eat some miner's lettuce it gives us some vitamin C we eat some kale it gives us some protein and some other minerals and so on and so forth and when we eat a very diverse diet our bodies get enough and I really think that the first person that coined the phrase eat a balanced diet he or she probably like pointed at everything and said you know here's some Lakes eat some food from there some algie's here's the ocean eat some more seaweed from there eat some pine nuts from the mountains eat a diverse balanced diet so wild edibles will help us expand our food options exponentially they also prepare us for unfortunate events should ever should a disaster ever happen you'll actually know what to eat and to other benefits that are worth mentioning is a they're gonna help you bond and make memories with your friends and family it really kind of important have you ever cooked a meal together you laugh you play now imagine going outside and harvesting the food and then making the meal it's it just kind of adds another layer and finally we're all here outside it's becoming more and more of a commodity these days we're standing we're getting vitamin D probably a little bit too much for our liking at the moment but we're getting vitamin D from the Sun we're breathing in fresh air and we're gonna crouch and we're gonna dig and that's going to lead to a benefit we call exercise that's my spiel I could talk more on this but I think we should just get at it start talking about plants a little warning we're gonna be very repetitive today and I do that systematically because I want you to remember one of my wild edibles teachers she actually lives in Issaquah her name is Karen Sherwood of Earth walks Northwest and that's one of the lessons I took away from her is that if you are repetitive you strengthen a muscle and then you'll remember it for the rest of your life so that's how we're gonna remember a lot of plants on that note let's go this is the only one I found I've been coming to this park for about a month now like every couple days and this is the only wild sweet pea that I found this is a very controversial plant so at every wild edibles class I've ever done somebody's always like but what about the guy and into the wild he supposedly died from eating sweet peas a version of this plant the first thing I want to say about that is that story is very inaccurate you read the book it says one thing you watch the movie it's a completely different story Jon Krakauer has been criticized heavily for a lot of his books but while into the wild is probably the biggest criticism he's received there's an author his name is Samuel Thayer really awesome dude a forger I respect in his book nature's garden he has a great account of into the wild kind of the true story basically what ended up happening is Chris McCandless he starved to death that was the official coroner's like what the coroner determined but it wasn't a very good story because you know this kid going out into the woods and for many many months not getting enough calories and then starving to death how are you gonna sell that it's a much more interesting story to sell this sort of scary fable about how plants he just ate a plant and it killed him so he supposedly mistook wild sweet pea for wild potato after he died both wild sweet peas and wild potatoes were studied extensively and neither the plants were found to be poisonous in fact one of the botanists that studied the plant said that I would eat both plants so this is a very lovely tasty plant that tastes just like a bean sprout and it grows all over it develops purple flowers sometimes they're yellow kind of looks like a house P it's a vine right today a lot of what we're gonna be doing is I'm gonna say please describe it to me please describe it to me so just take it take a look pass it around take one pass it around so what does it look like it looks like a sweet pea I need more information than that that rabbit ears for leaves ah I like curly Q's and tendrils so initially when you go out and you look for plants they all look green as hard to differentiate between the two and this is where we get scared because we're like oh look well how do I learn what a sweet pea is versus a sweet potato or whatever you learn about it in the same way that you learn how to identify a cabbage versus a head of iceberg lettuce our brains have folders in our heads and the folders just start storing information and that information is called a search image so when you're very young you probably didn't know the difference between a lemon and an orange right your parents could show you a lemon in an orange you'd be like I don't know they both look round and they both have a skin and eventually as you came in contact with lemons and oranges you started differentiating one in the other the same thing is gonna happen when we talk about plants so when I say what does it look like in somebody says oh it has tendrils that's a very good identifying characteristic that's going to help you recognize the plant so we're improving our search image and when you look at a plant long enough the folder gets really full and then for the rest of your life you'll know this is a wild sweet pea the sweet pea also teaches us something called Mary stems and Mary stems are the growing parts of plants so when a plant is growing meristem actually comes from the greek term to divide so when cells divide and split apart those are called meristematic parts so when a plant is young its light green and it's very flexible it's full of sugars it's full of minerals and vitamins and that's when its most nutritious and most delicious as the plant gets taller or longer the plant cannot support itself if it's all flexible so it starts developing a solid foundation very fibrous so you know if you feel this plant the bottom is very stiff compared to the top so this part is meristematic like the tops of asparagus for example you could snap them off they're very flexible they're very delicious but you go down the stem and it's very fibrous not as delicious so as foragers we're gonna want to look for the tops the meristematic bits so on the wild sweet pea in addition to the flower the meristematic part is this tender a little bit on we go there you go my gift to you uh-huh Sergei yep so the whole plant is edible but we're going to talk about that it's it's kind of um it's very objective while you can eat this part how hungry are you more often than not I just go through and I'd harvest like a small bowl of those and that's what I'd throw on a salad okay oh we go my friends get sick of this cuz like they'll take me out on a hike and I'm like there's there's like five things to talk about right here so the next thing that I want to talk about which most of us already know is grass grass is a plant that most people can already identify right there's lots of different varieties of grass and in my book it's probably the best survival food because everybody knows what grass is it's hard to miss I miss that there's some sedges and stuff that kind of looked like grass but more often not people know what grass looks like the grass has all the vitamins and minerals necessary to maintain proper body function which means that if your car ever gets stuck in the forest and you don't know what else to do you're really hungry grass will sustain you now we're not cattle we don't have seven stomachs it's very hard to digest but again if we look for the meristematic bits the light green parts they're kind of chewy and here hold on whenever I do this on camera it never works but boom BAM see so maybe let's let's all try this let's all come over here and just kind of pull on the top and try and expose this light green part so grass is kind of a tube right and if you pull at just the right place you can expose you kind of hear like a little squeak like a whoop yeah so when we were hiking on the trail for example one thing I would do I would get ahead of my family because I was walking them fastest I was a 13 year old boy and had a lot of energy to expend and I would just walk all day and I'd come and throw it away throw it away so by the end of the day maybe I had a thousand pieces of grass you know and this part is actually quite delicious again it's that kind of meristematic asparagus like part and then the other thing that accomplishes is because nature is very wise so when I harvest this eat this little bit and then throw the grass I'm planting more grass the symbiotic relationship and Wigmore does anybody heard the name and Wigmore before she's the lady that popularized wheatgrass so she was a Lithuanian woman who had all kinds of health problems and the medical industry basically said we can't help you and she noticed that her cat was sitting and eating grass every time it was sick and then it would get better so Ann Wigmore started eating grass and her health problems started going away and she was the lady that pioneered wheatgrass so now you go to the store and you pay $4 for a little shot of wheatgrass that's because of her but I have a little secret for you you could just juice the grass in your yard and then it save four dollars how about that it's the same exact quality there's nothing special about wheatgrass other than it grows the fastest I used to grow wheatgrass for a Health Institute and the certain red hard wheat just produces the most grass the quickest but there's lots of other wild grasses that are more nutritious than that now if you're gonna juice grass or blended in a smoothie you have to ensure that it hasn't been sprayed with pesticides so in my own backyard I know for two years we haven't been spraying it I would definitely throw that in a green smoothie or juice it but you know I wouldn't go necessarily to a park to do it the next plant is right over here that I want to talk about anybody know this is I like where you're going you've got you guys are not wrong so this is called sow thistle and I already knows what this looks like so why don't you guys pass it around sow thistle is in the same family as dandelion which is the sunflower family and it's essentially the root of lettuce so thousands of years ago when lettuce didn't exist people just ate dandelions and sow thistle if you've ever chewed on dandelion you know that it's very bitter my guess is how we got lettuce from dandelions as people got really sick of that bitter taste and so they started looking for varieties of dandelion that were less bitter and once they found that variety they started waiting for that variety to go to seed growing those seeds and then again choosing selectively the least bitter variety and growing those seeds and over time we have romaine lettuce which almost looks nothing like dandelion but it's in the same family so both sow thistle and dandelion are extremely good for our inner organs the bitterness kind of the white milky sap which some people say is not good to eat that's pure BS that bitterness is actually really good for cleansing our gall bladder our pancreas our kidneys and it also aids digestion we need bitters to help produce saliva and bile in our stomach and it helps digest food unfortunately now that we donuts and cheesecake and all that stuff bitter just doesn't compete so we throw the dandelions away or we can complain that they're weeds when in fact we should be eating more of this and throwing the donut away the easiest way to eat dandelions is to blend them in a green smoothie because when you blend sweet with bitter the sweetness counteracts the bitter and then the other thing that's good to do with them is put them in a pesto so you make pesto with pine nuts a little parmesan basil just cut out the basil and throw the dandelions in there and then the sweet and or sorry the salty and bitter it just it tastes delicious alright let's keep going there you go thank you absolutely okay thanks for bringing that up yeah what was your name Jenny Jenny that's me - jennice - Ichi today I love it yeah let's talk about it so let's address dandelion I had two questions number one oxalates there's two ways to think about plants number one there's like the botanist toxicology perspective which is like is this plant poisonous or edible based on its chemical build-up and when you look at that almost everything is poisonous so if you read a book about toxicology you find that things like mint are poisonous dandelions have certain alkaloids or oxalates in them that are poisonous in large quantities and the second perspective is more the Native American perspective where nothing is poisonous it's all about dosage certain parts that you can eat and the time of year that you can eat it I tend to side more with the Native American perspective because all the research that I've done sort of points in that and that that is the right direction so oxalates all greens have some trace amounts of either alkaloids oxalates or anti nutrients that it's a mechanism to preserve the the plant so the plant doesn't want you to only eat kale because if we only ate kale the kale would go extinct so kale tells you this it says like you can eat me but if you eat 10 buckets of me you're gonna have some signs of less than perfect health maybe the stomachache maybe you're gonna get a little hives some some relatively minor issues that we would like to avoid but nonetheless it's not going to kill you my mom Victoria Buteyko she came up with the concept of green smoothies and popularized them through her books and people loved it for 10 years and then all of this like don't eat kale and spinach because it has oxalate stuff started coming around because people supposedly would get like gall stones that from that right the trouble with that theory is that chocolate beer wheat and a bunch of other stuff have oxalates in them too and nobody is saying don't eat chocolate wheat or beer at least not at the local brewery but it's the green smoothie that gives you the gall stones right so have many resources online about this subject in particular I actually have a youtube video I'm on YouTube prevalently and and basically it's a non-issue if you eat a diverse diet if you were to eat buckets of kale every single day again you might run into some problems if you rotate your greens if you rotate the food that you eat it's not an issue because those oxalates will get eradicated through your kidneys and liver so it's not a big deal now if you were to eat seasonally this would be even less of an issue because in the springtime you're going to eat lots of dandelion then dandelions go away you're going to eat something else but because we've quote/unquote improved life we're now we have kale all year round at the grocery store you know it's it's more of an issue the second question was do you eat things cooked yeah wild edibles you're gonna cram them in your diet every which way you can throw them in salads and I'll spotlight some of the things that you could do with salads you know put these in smoothies do some you can also put them on your pizzas and saute them up throw them in soups get them into your diet as best as you can because these are superfoods and these are supplements that you don't have to pay for one of my rants on supplements is that it's kind of controversial some people don't like that I say this but I've never taken supplements I've tried many times but I found that there's there's no effect supplements first are sold on a fear-based scheme the nutrients that are around is not enough if you just eat organic food you'll never be healthy that's kind of how that supplement story starts and then if you like oh no man even if I shop at a Whole Foods and buy the best ingredients that I can buy I still don't get enough that's scary maybe I should get your supplement you take the best supplement and best most expensive supplement you twirl it around and read on the ingredients list and what is it made up if yeah most of the time it's like rice protein with some of the good stuff like 90% rice 10% everything else but if it's a really high quality supplement it's made out of fresh organic produce so please explain to me how if lettuce doesn't have enough of what I need but the supplement that I'm buying from you is made from lettuce like how does that make sense okay let's talk about this plant right here everybody grab one when we harvest plants I encourage everybody to engage all of their senses we have five senses because each one of those community is a different form of communication each one of those senses is meant to help keep us safe so sometimes when people get poisoned from eating stuff they're not supposed to it's because they just like and they only engage one sense well that's for other tests that you failed to do and the other thing on that that I want to say is that wild plants are not dangerous the only way that you would get poisoned is if you're just going through the woods and you just start eating stuff before you identify what they are all right there's no like bad dandelion sitting in an alley waiting for you to walk down that alley so they can jump down your throat so number one if you can resist the temptation to just eat foreign foods you'll always be safe then we engage our senses so we we put all plants through five different tests first what does it look like so what does this look like kind of like chamomile I like it you're a professional so it looks like chamomile so already it's telling us hey this looks like a familiar food that I'm accustomed to eating right that's a very good point I'm so glad you brought that up the next test is how what does it feel like it's soft I could conceivably eat this because it feels soft if I were to try and eat that telephone pole maybe my eyes were to get confused I don't think they would but if they left my eyes got confused I'd feel it and my hands would tell me what my eyes missed this is really hard I'd break my teeth if I would eat it right this little plant has now passed the looking test and the feeling test now what does it smell like if if you smash the flower it smells like pineapple and I'm so glad you bring this up because this is called pineapple weed and it's a wild camomile so look at that this is how we learn about plants so it looks like chamomile well lots of plants look like chamomile we feel it it feels soft we smell it oh wow it smells like pineapple so now we just learned looks like chamomile smells like pineapple those are really good identifying characteristics so we have two more senses what does it sound like in Native American lore you would actually talk to the plant and it would talk to you which is a quality that I've lost but I interpret that sense to to be like what does the environment sound like I hear somebody mowing is that as somebody spraying chemicals is there a big roadway nearby is there anything and is there any sound that might jeopardize the edibility of this plant and then the very last test is what does it taste like and so you're not just gonna grab a bunch of it at the at the beginning and just put it in your mouth and go I hope it tastes good you're gonna approach it cautiously and you're gonna just eat a little bit and then you're gonna wait and then if you do this cotton you know cautiously and over time you'll understand though camomile wild wild camomile aka pineapple wheat if you dry this it makes a really good tea chamomile has calming properties if you have any sort of allergic stuff going on because of the seasons or food allergies it'll soothe those and it also helps to improve sleep so what I would do I would actually throw these flowers and tender leaves into salad I would saute them put them on an omelet if you will throw them in soups or just dry the leaves and make a tea out of them so okay so if there was my very first time eating this plant I would just put like a handful on it right and then just see what happens a handful is fine a lot of people get nervous about wild edibles because they think oh if I miss identify it the consequences are huge but the quant the consequence is most of the time are relatively insignificant like you might get a little bit of a stomach upset that being said we want to eliminate as many variables and consequences as possible so we approach new food cautiously and then we eliminate those variables and in fact actually on that sheet that I gave you I have ser gays rules for foraging and it's three simple rules number one don't eat something if you don't know what it is kind of common sense a lot of people actually disregard that surprisingly I get emails all the time people say my kids and I went out and we harvested this plant can you tell us what it is we ate a bunch of it like so I actually made a rap song that's on YouTube called don't eat something if you don't know what it is that plays around with how silly that can be the second rule is eat new foods and small amounts so maybe when you're young everything is foreign to you and your parents are very cautious like what is what happens when he eats sweet potatoes yeah he's good what happens when he eats lettuce oh he's fine and then maybe you get two peanuts and the your parents figure out pretty quickly oh he's not peanuts don't do so well for him so you learn at a young age what you're allergic to and what you're not allergic to well in the interest of staying safe that's essentially what you're doing when you're playing around with new plants so you're gonna approach all new plants as though you're potentially allergic to them so even though Sergei says pineapple weed is 100% edible the first time you eat pineapple weed you're just going to eat a little bit and then rule number three is you don't mix plants because if I made a salad with 15 new wild edibles and then I had an allergic reaction that'd be very hard to weed out what caused it right let's keep gone [Applause] so real quick what do you guys see right now when you look at this part what's the first thing that comes to mind grass dandelions dogs walking I like all those things because look you already just altered your world a little bit you know maybe before this started you would have just seen a park now I already had two different edibles grass and dandelions and three I love that you said dogs walking because that's a really good thing to consider hey there's animals it's a high-traffic area good job one more thing about dandelions these things are really edible and they're delicious the little flowers so when you're at home I invite you to this is your homework just take one of these flowers and plop it in your mouth chew it up you'll notice that it's very sweet kind of has a pleasant green kale like taste these things concentrate vitamin D and guess what in areas where we lack it many months out of the year this is a really good thing to put in your diet now how do you eat it flower fritters you can fry them up in a little bit of oil and batter great you can also take these and stick them and honey and the honey will just concentrate preserve them right so you make like a dandelion infused jam you can throw them on salads raw you can throw them in soups one thing I like to do sometimes is actually take the petals out out of it put them in an ice cube tray fill it with water freeze them now you have flour pedaled infused ice and in a summery drink it looks beautiful makes sense okay we're going to go into the shade over there kind of get a little reprieve from the Sun and talk about some plants oh yeah is it necessary to wash that absolutely you want to wash stuff yeah I like it okay there's been a few follow-ups about dandelion one is about the roots and one about the leaves let's see if we can't get both here so we'll do some digging and careful there's blackberries okay so number one if you can find a dandelion actually I'd love everybody to grab a leaf of dandelion if you can okay everybody has a dandelion leaf right here's a test to identify a true dandelion you're gonna flip it over and you're gonna run your finger along the main vein tell me what you feel smooth fuzz Wow let's see that should be smooth not so so the leaves are a little fuzzy but the vein of a dandelion is smooth that's a true dandelion so that's one great identifying characteristic so the one with fuzz on it is not a dandelion so there's lots of different varieties of dandelions like I already mentioned there in the sunflower family the sunflower family is the largest family of plants there's nearly 24,000 varieties and a lot of those are edible I don't want to speak in absolutes I don't want to say all of them are edible because some people might be allergic to dandelion for example and so for them they're not edible but it's a very good family to get accustom with accustomed to because you could potentially expand your food choices 24 thousand different ways right and I believe there's over 300 varieties of dandelions and all of them are edible you can eat the leaves and smoothies and soups salads you can eat the flowers you can eat the stems and you can also eat the roots but generally I don't Lee eat the roots because when you harvest the roots it kills the plant so in my book I have a chapter called respect the roots with something like a dandelion it's not a big issue because dandelions are extremely resilient so if you see a hundred dandelions growing you can eat 99 of them and they'll be fine but with other plants like wild ginger for example it's really really sensitive so if you start harvesting roots you're gonna wipe out that population and then it won't grow there so in an effort to be more ecological I suppose and responsible I didn't stay away from the roots and just harvest the greens and the fruits because I feel like that's nature's gift to us and I also I'm kind of lazy sometimes I feel like it's a lot easier to harvest some greens than some roots that's kind of where I stand on roots if you were to eat them you could bake them in the same way that you bake like sweet potatoes or potatoes in the south they actually make a coffee substitute out of dandelion roots and chicory roots it does not have caffeine so you get the taste of coffee but you don't get the stimulant what else can I tell you is there any other questions about roots so in this park I probably would not eat the roots because I haven't done my due diligence I haven't called the Parks Service to figure out what they spray or don't spray but in my yard I would eat the roots absolutely yeah okay we're standing under a tree who knows what kind of tree this is horse chestnut so horse chestnuts are not traditionally considered edible but since we're here I just want to point out everybody grab a chestnut so they look very similar to the chestnuts that we eat around Christmastime the one major difference between those and horse chestnuts is that the edible ones have a deep point on one side and these ones are kind of round with no point if you ever want to identify a true chestnut it's gonna look just like this but on the butt of it is going to have a sharp point so why are some edible why are not some not it's kind of an alkaloid issue we talked about oxalates horse chestnuts just concentrate more tannins so they're very bitter they hurt our stomach they're not considered edible so you would not eat these but the other horse or the other chestnuts with the point that have less tannins thus they are more edible and again something like this Native Americans might not consider poisonous because there are ways of extracting tannins for acorns and chestnuts but they're very labor-intensive and like I said I'm a little bit lazy I like to kind of throw something in my blender and get going so I can do it but I generally don't make sense again we have some wild grasses now you can see there's two different varieties at least so you have kind of more of like a wild oat type looking grass which has seeds and then you have like a big you have another variety of grass which probably from a foraging standpoint is going to be a much better thing to spend your time harvesting because look how thick it is versus this then you pull on the top there's more meristematic bits to eat versus this so one thing to think about you know if you're harvesting food you're gonna go for something that gives you more reward right and it'd be the thicker dress the other thing worth pointing out right here is blackberries so blackberries obviously the berries are edible but the leaves on blackberries are also edible and in fact they're really good for things like dysentery for fungus stuff they have antibacterial properties if you're ever traveling for example and you run into stomach issues you can eat charcoal but you can also eat blackberries raspberries thimble berries those leaves will help settle your stomach so how would you eat them good questions so right here check it out another lesson in merry stems so everybody trying and kind of get close and you can see that some as the plant matures the thorns get really stiff and hard but then if you look at the top part you see that it's lighter green that's the meristematic part of the blackberry and now very carefully just feel the thorns and notice how they're not quite developed yet so you can go through with a little knife and peel the thorns and eat the little stems of the blackberry and that's kind of more like you're a little wild asparagus or you can take the young leaves which are pretty much thornless use those in a salad or if you boil them down the thorns become completely not an issue they just go away the best way that I've found to use them is you just dry these leaves crush them up throw them in tea and then take a little bit with you when you've got traveled internationally and now you know that this stuff will help settle your stomach now the one caution about your blackberries and raspberries is you don't want to eat the leaves when they're wilting so you want to eat them fresh or you want to fully dry them because in the wilting process they start releasing like more alkaloids or something and it can sometimes have the opposite effect but if you eat them fresh like within an hour of harvesting or fully dry completely no problem all blackberries and raspberries are in the rose family roses apples blackberries are in the same family and a lot of those relatives are edible and delicious by the way wild roses are delicious in salads just the petals themselves and you know since in Washington you have a lot of them and they grow like weeds eat the weeds right behind you there's another plant I want to talk about it's called common mallow that's it yeah here's well sacrifice this root for the group okay I want to hear it what does it look like geranium good what else I'll tell you a little story so I went to here in Tacoma actually were really lucky cuz two really good foragers live within driving range one of my teachers her name is Karen Sherwood she lives in Issaquah and every Memorial Day holiday she hosts a three-day retreat outside of Yakima where all you do all day long is you harvest plants and then you make food and you harvest plants and you make food really good thing to look up her company's called Earth walks Northwest and then another guy does the same thing out of Portland his name is John Kahless he's another awesome dude so when I went to my first workshop with Karen she said Sara hey here's a big bowl go get a bunch of clovers put it in your salad we're gonna put it in everybody's salad so go out with the bowl and I don't collect anything I can't find a single clover to save my life and I come back deflated I'm like Karen there's no clover she says take this bowl go back to the field squat crawl if you have to but bring it back full of clovers so I go back to the exact same field where I was it was kind of on farm property and I squat and I start looking closely it was an entire field of clover I just wasn't looking close enough so there I learned the importance of describing a plant and when I say what does it look like I'm not looking for anything specific I mean I am because I know what it looks like but I'm looking for key words to hear like how will you remember this plant so when I say what does it look like what I want to hear from you is how will you remember this plant let's try it again what does it look like adora I like it uh-huh what else it's soft I love that very good so look at all these things it looks like a geranium and a doily it's got a soft fuzzy flower and a rough stem great characteristics yes it has lots of stems instead of main ones now if you look at how its growing on the ground what can you tell me do you think it's a creeping plant or do you think it's going to grow straight up very good identifying characteristic so this plant is called mallow common mallow or malva and it's actually a close relative of okra so when you see this plant this is one of the best eats that you can forage and it's a very common weed it likes dry soils so you'll generally find it growing in the Sun every part is edible though the flowers or the the leaves I'm sorry are the most delicious and if you were to eat them they taste just like okra they have like a gelatinous quality to them so what can you do with that you could put it in a gumbo you can make it okra gumbo great in soups sometimes when you make a smoothie and it starts to separate it kind of looks unappetizing you throw a little common mallow in it and it just makes it binds it better in fact in the olden days they used to use this plant in the cheese-making process where they would use it as a binding agent it also has little flowers and the flowers kind of look like they almost look like the little bluebells that grow everywhere and these flowers are delicious and salads if you ever go to a potluck and you bring a salad and sprinkle a handful on top of that people will go bananas and this grows in your backyard any questions about common mallow ma ll o w his name is David Wolfe he's kind of a health nut guy he's been all over social media for many years but when I met the guy it right before we started hiking the trail actually he introduced me to this plant and what we would do is we just take big leaves of mallow roll avocado in them and sprinkle them with lemon juice it was a really delicious snack actually on we go oh we didn't go very far what is this plant right here it's a bottle somebody said said it the dead nettle who would that sounds really scary everybody grab one and let's study it yeah perfect I might sit here for a while there's some over there too this is called purple dead nettle and it has a very ominous name it's actually not poisonous at all this is a wild mint it doesn't smell like mint so we're engaging all our senses everybody smell it it kind of has like a musky smell the reason it's called purple dead nettle is because it kind of looks similar to stinging nettles and because of that people don't like the way that nettles itches I think I guess that's where I got the name all mints have a square stem so just like the dandelion has a smooth stem all mints have a square stem the mint family is full of edible plants it's a good thing to know how would you use this I would just basically take that much of it and throw it in anything whether that that is a a salad this you know it's a little bit fuzzy so I probably wouldn't eat this raw but I mean I I could eat it Rob but because it's a little bit fuzzy I wouldn't enjoy it as much so let's come up with some ways that you would eat this anybody saute I like the tea idea but I mean let's let's get creative here what else could you do with this don't worry if you if you say something I don't like I'll tell you pizza anybody else tempura yeah I like it those are all great you can eat the stem and all mints again help to calm the system so if you have any sort of seasonal allergies or you ate something and it doesn't agree with your belly eating a little bit of mint will help to soothe it so that's like a really good thing to know so maybe if you're going traveling internationally if you want to go above and beyond you take some purple dead nettle and you dry the leaves and you mix it with some blackberries or raspberries and you dry the leaves and you kind of make yourself a little bag of of greens which hopefully customs won't sniff you for I usually put it in like a little supplement bottle I think that's what supplements are good they have like a nice little thing and and then I just make a tea out of them abroad okay who remembers the quiz that I gave them everybody grab some of these these are little baby helicopters and helicopters identify a plant or a tree what's that tree maple very good so this for this forest this Park has lots of different types of trees in it and trees are a class of foods that I would sort of consider as like a survival food because a lot of the common trees that we're used to encountering have edible parts and maple is certainly one of them they're kind of like in that grass area where it's not the best meal that you'll ever have but they are edible so in dire circumstances you could eat these tiny little maple seeds that'll give you some nutrition you can also see how some of these leaves are very tender and actually it's maple so they're very sticky you're I believe feel a leaf and that stickiness is actually maple syrup right the lifeblood of a maple tree is a clear fluid that's like maple juice and then people will go in here and tap the tree and get a big bucket full of this clear maple juice maple blood and then they'll boil it down for about 30 hours I believe it's 30 hours it might even be longer and eventually it'll concentrate and turn in to maple syrup and just like you can do that with maple you could also do it with birch you could do it with Aspen and so like in Europe during World War two when there was food shortages a lot of people in Russia and Germany and France they actually went and they would eat like little buds of maples the seed pods the leaves and they would cook them in their soups just that it's pure nutrition so it's really good to know about that hey you know this is a maple that's a beech that's a birch and all all parts of those things are edible you can actually there's a layer inside the bark called the cambium layer the inner layer it makes for good eatin that would be in the same category as roots though you want to know exactly what you're doing so as not to kill the tree over here okay if I was a wild edibles superhero and I had a tool belt on my tool belt I would certainly include this plant so grab a leaf and pass it around I want to see if I can't find the other there's two varieties of this plant grab belief pass it around this is called plantain and it has no relation to the banana this is a very fun plant this plant has a lot of amino acids in it which is also known like as protein a lot of plant-based protein the reason I would have this on my belt as a superhero is because this plant can literally save your life so plantain has this miraculous quality to drop poison out of your system topically so for example a couple years ago I was showing off in front of some friends and I was doing a handstand I fell in the grass and I got stung on my back by numerous bees and I'm not allergic so it wasn't a big deal but if you are it could have been a really big deal right so it started to hurt and was uncomfortable and I knew what to do I ran around and I found this plant I chewed it up made a poultice spit it into my friends hand and I said can you please rub it on my back within 10 minutes the pain is gone so if you ever get stung by an ant a be a spider if you step on a rusty piece of metal and you can't get to the hospital right away this plant will actually draw toxins out of your skin Janice Sheffield an author that wrote a book called discovering wild plants she talks about how her dad I guess he was accident-prone and so one time he treated a gunshot wound with this stuff and another time he had blood poisoning which is a very serious thing and he was able to not die basically by using applying plantain to the wound have you ever heard of psyllium husk what is psyllium husk it's like oh here you go Liz found it this is a the other variety of Frank jobless so this is lanceleaf plantain this is broadleaf plantain so psyllium husk is a supplement type food that helps digestion it's like natural vegan gelatin right where does psyllium husk come from plantain so wild crafted food so a plantain will develop these seed pods that look very similar to baby corn it's a little too early for it right now but they'll develop these massive long stalks that can have up to twenty thousand seeds on them and those little stalks are delicious when you boil them they taste just like baby corn that's number one when those twenty thousand seeds all develop husks around them people somehow somehow have shake the husk away and that's what psyllium husk is so so what are some of the key identifying characteristics of plantain its fibrous at the bottom very good I love it okay so the top of the leaf is a darker green than the bottom of the leaf can everybody see that there's something very obvious yes so the veins grow out really long you see that they're very easy to distinguish I think that you like greens done so here check this out here's one of my own personal identifying characteristics so if you take the stem stem of plantain and you carefully crush it look at this so try that if you can find plantain near you see if you can expose some of the threads oh here I'll come over here so yeah here play around with that I'm gonna show these folks okay so yeah check it out so if you just see how they have these lateral veins if you just pull really carefully it starts exposing threads like like it's been sound very good so now you know what plantain is like right and so if you're ever in doubt like is that plantain you're gonna say Oh veins that you can easily see long seep seed pods and if you pull on the stock it's gonna reveal threads plantain absolutely you can eat the leaves they're pretty rich in chlorophyll which is not a bad thing but they do taste strong this would be like an advanced green so put it in a soup throw it on a pizza I literally cram wild edibles and everything when I was researching my book I'm sitting there and I'm just like what is this plant good for I have nutritional data in there I kid you not the USDA there's a website called nutritional data calm and is basically USDA information from the 60s when the government just had a bunch of money they were throwing at figuring out what's you know what food is rich in and surprisingly they have quite a few wild edibles on there so I'm sitting there compiling these charts and I'm thinking like well what is plantain good for and it's literally good for everything I kid you not it's not an exaggeration what is dandelion good for it's literally good for everything it's got tons of vitamins and minerals it's got amino acids antioxidants so at that point I was like it's kind of silly to remember exact things because it's literally good for everything okay see this plant with the purple flowers I'll meet you right by it look how pretty this is I don't even know what kind of plant this is but I know that it's a mustard and the reason I know that it's a mustard is because mustards are in the Brassica family which is nearly 2,000 different plants and it includes broccoli cauliflower cabbage and all mustards smell like mustard so sometimes we rely too heavily on our eyes and we can just be like oh I don't really know what this is I don't know what it looks like but then you come over here you grab a leaf you crush it up and if it's a mustard it just starts smelling like mustard so I invite you to come over here and start and do this with me this one's pretty faint there's other characteristics but the leaves on this are pretty faint smelling can anybody get a little hint of mustard look at how big this leaf is does anybody so did we get a little hint on mustard if not there's another mustard over here that you'll definitely smell it look how big this leaf is you can literally wrap make little wraps in this now one thing I like to do I call it gorilla wraps no just kidding you take a banana and you wrap it in a green leaf it could be a Collard leaf it could be a kale leaf it could be a wild mustard leaf and what you'll find is that the greens will complement the fruit and the fruit will complement the greens you could also make a nice dolma out of this you could opt you know if you say you like low calorie diets here's a perfect little tortilla also has these beautiful flowers all mustards have four petals they can be different colors yellow white purple pink and come over here and grab grab one of these all mustards also have 6 stamens stamen or those tiny little antennae that are in the flower so they have 4 petals 6 stamen 4 of those are going to be long and 2 will be short and then this one in particular has its own version of the seed pod which is kind of like a little pea almost and you can eat those too they kind of have a spicy peppery taste so if I was picking this plant for food I'd be like look big leaves I'm gonna do something with those maybe I'll cut them into salad but since they're big I'd probably make a wrap out of this this I'd probably throw on top of the salad because they're nice peppery they would enrich it make it look beautiful and then the seed pods would just add a little bit of crunch they'd be like a wild sweet pea jaune Kahless who has a book called a wild edibles from dirt to plate he says that wild mustards through his research are the most nutritious green on the planet and so it's a really good one to know about now let's go this way because I want to find I want to actually demonstrate how different two mustards can look and yet they still smell like mustard check out this plant if you touch it it starts shooting seeds come on you guys this is a bitter crest which is a mustard yet one of the things I've been criticized for in my book is that I don't have regions for where the plants grow and the reason I did that is because plants just like humans and animals they love to travel and they have different mechanisms for doing this hello this plant it propagates when you touch it it literally shoots out feet away that's the plant saying I'm going to produce a lot of offspring maybe let's go over there so the dog settles down so plants love to travel and in the natural world they get pretty far and I think the regional thing that's just something we humans have made up for convenience but nature isn't here for our convenience let's take one of this and we're gonna crush it up and see if it smells like mustard yep smells like mustard you get it who gets mustard raise your hand if you get mustard yeah but it's a very distinct like so not like the yellow mustard that comes in a can but like arugula mustard thank that you get it so this is called bitter cress and it's a mustard relative who knows what kind of tree this is it looks very similar to an alder in fact if you just look at the leaves they kind of look like alder leaves this is actually a beech tree and one of the tall tales of a beech is that it has elephant like skin so that's a great identifying characteristic the other thing is right beneath your feet let's see if we can figure it out so give yourself a little squat and see if you can't find some nuts beech nuts so this is how this works oh hey I think that's an alder and then you kind of look at your surroundings and you start engaging your other senses and you find beech nuts and right now there's no nuts in it why is that oh yeah there you go we found some nuts so this is a beech nut right here so in nature we also compete with other critters and squirrels are much better at harvesting nuts than we are because they've had lots more practice and it's also not nuts season so right now would be if we lived seasonally right now would be our time to eat mustards and kale and dandelions and grass and then later on in the season we would be eating more nuts things like beech nuts so these are essentially similar to acorns the native tribes used to make meal out of them and make breads and cookies and all kinds of little biscuits out of them like I said there's not a whole lot to talk about because these are last year's nuts and there's it's not great but it is a good food source they're edible require a little bit more food prep than some of the greens again because they have tannins in them and tannins come off as extremely bitter so traditionally you would either soak them or boil them in water Native Americans would actually take a wicker basket put a bunch of nuts in there like acorns and just stick that basket in the stream and it was really ingenious because it didn't there wasn't any extra work for them but the water that was perpetually changing would wash the tannins out and then they would take those nuts after 24 or 48 hours grind them make a flower and then make food out of it so looks like an altar has elephant-like skin and then when you get close and personal you see that it has little nuts and now we just identified beech this is something that all gardeners should know the little white stuff yep that might be one common name for it I know this has chickweed so everybody grab yourself a chickweed this is the macro part of the wild edible Walker chickweed is like a wild lettuce now it's a very common herb it's a very common weed in gardens so when you go and you plant a garden a lot of weeds start growing there and if you weed them out before they really get big before you can identify what they are you miss out on a bunch of free food one of my friends in Missoula runs a garden he just runs a big farm a lot of the stuff that grows in between the rows of corn or onion or whatever is things like chick weed and they're actually more nutritious than the food that's being grown we just forget to look for him so Kylie my girlfriend can attest to this we're planting our garden right now and she really desperately wants to weed and I'm like save that that's really good food this is a vitamin C powerhouse so this is like nature's emergency I believe a cup of this has over 90 milligrams of vitamin C so that's antioxidant rich it's got properties that will help fight off cancer you're gonna be less likely to ever develop cancer if you eat this stuff and it tastes awesome it's like a really mild lettuce let's examine the flowers first tell me what they look like how many pedals does it have can-can any because any buddies vision good enough to count the battles so very good it looks like 10 pedals but it's actually only five but the pedals are very deeply cleft see what I mean so it's like a double pedal the other thing that chickweed has this is very hard to explain but you can see it is it has a mohawk hairline on one side of the stem that alternates in between Leafs so like if this is a section and then that's a section and below that leaf is another section there's a hairline it'll jump to opposite sides of the stem and it's a plant that likes shade look it's growing under a tree that's telling us it's communicating more information to us it likes shade so this Beach is doing that for it and it likes to spread on grass this is like a wild sprout super good raw in sandwiches wraps you know if you ever go to the deli and get a sandwich it's your guilty pleasure just make sure if you throw some chickweed on it there's a lot of Crispus like trees in this world right can be very difficult to tell them apart I'm gonna give you a little trick right here and now pine needles are long generally long spruce needles kind of almost look like mid stems that have four corners so you can spin them in between your fingers right if you can spin it it's probably a spruce if you can't spin it it'll be flat it's a fir so now you just learned all about conifers long needles PI short needles that kind of look like pipe cleaners at first glance could either be spruce or fir and then you do the test it spins it's a spruce it doesn't spin it's a fur so this is your test over here come over here we're gonna do this at least three times while we're in the park grab a needle and it's kind of cheating because that branch probably fell off this tree but what kind of tree is this this is a party trick right here next time you're hiking with your friends just say guess what it's a spruce all evergreens have edible properties they actually also concentrate vitamin C they're really good for respiratory stuff so if you have any sort of cop or phlegm going on the best thing to do for that is to make a tea from the needles so you basically get a pot throw a bunch of needles in there and then heat it up boil it for like two minutes then let it cool so that it's drinkable and pour yourself a nice little glass of pine needle tea kind of has a Christmassy vibe to it but it has a really nice lemony characteristic and it's a great thing to do when you're camping like if you want to engage your kids or your friends or your partners next time you go camping this is Sur gaze homework number two just harvest some either spruce or pine or fir and make some trailside tea for yourself the you can eat the Spruce tips in it and you actually beat me to the punch there's a tree that has them but that's that's cool I'm glad that you pointed that out the only caution on evergreens is if you're pregnant or nursing you don't you want to avoid them because there's something that small kids and fetuses don't like so if you're pregnant avoid that otherwise they're completely edible and beneficial we have a nice little birch here and again this is kind of like a a survival food in my opinion so like all of the little if if I was starving to death I would come over here and I'd eat some of the tender leaves these buds are really good food source this is a little bit past its prime but these little guys when they're green like baby corn you can boil it and so you can imagine if you've got maybe a gallon of these that would be a pretty substantial food source again the inner cambium layer the bark of the tree is edible but if you don't do it right you can kill the tree so I generally avoid that but birches are edible this is probably the most pathetic miner's lettuce specimen I've ever seen but because it's in the park I figured you talked about it I'll let you take a picture look at how unique that looks so it's a this is called a basal rosette this growth pattern where mustards do this too they kind of spread out it's not just one stalk and leaves so everybody grab one of these take one pass it around miner's lettuce is one of the tastiest wild edibles this tastes like butter head lettuce and it also has lots of vitamin C in it we used to do trade shows like health fairs and book conventions and so one of these fairs our neighbor in the and the booth next to us he got on this high horse where he's like I'm gonna make Sergey eat some supplements and I have nothing against supplements other than that they try and sell them people through fear-based tactics so this guy would not let me alone he's like you need to try my supplement you're just not getting enough nutrition in your diet and he had some device that somehow could calculate how many antioxidants were in your system and so he finally he made me a deal he's like I'll leave you alone if you take my test and if I find that you're lacking in antioxidants you have to try my supplement ok whatever so he puts me through the test and his his scale was like zero to ten thousand you know ten thousand I forget his unit of measurement but it's not really important so it as close to ten thousand his ideal as possible right when he measured me I had fifty thousand so I was literally off his chart so then he was like okay well that's gotta be something went wrong so he tested me again same result he tested my mom she had forty five thousand my dad had the most he had seventy and he was like okay wait what do you guys do again so then he was like okay I'm prepared to listen so miner's lettuce is really rich in antioxidants is it's good to get as much as we can in our diet and this will do it as well as all of the greens that we've been talking about and so we've already identified that it grows in a basal rosette the key tell of miner's lettuce is the disc shaped leaves and then the stem goes directly through the middle of the leaf it's a satellite dish yeah it's like a deep deep deep pop quiz how do you identify a true dandelion smooth vein how do i how do you identify a miner's lettuce leaf looks like a satellite dish that's the right answer it has a disk leaf and then the stem goes directly through the leaf how would I eat this this is a great plant to eat raw it it's kind of like spinach if you try and cook it you need to get like pounds of it and then when you cook it down it's gonna go whoop so more more often than not I would just eat it raw in a salad it's really delicious you don't almost don't need to do anything to it it tastes great and the reason they look so puny and pathetic here is because this plant likes shape so it usually grows under trees on hillsides if you go to chambers Bay where you never want to harvest because you don't want to harvest from golf courses but if you do the loop you'll see that along the hillside there's tons of miner's lettuce and there's another variety they're called Siberian miner's lettuce which is a little bit different on we go everybody grab one in fact actually let's take this moment to kind of just chill for a second I know we're getting close but we have like maybe three or four more plants to look at so these are wild daisies and daisies are in the sunflower family and a lot of sunflowers we already discerned our edible there's over almost 24,000 different varieties so these little brown daisies are really good to eat rot in fact actually if you find some leaves and they're pretty hard to get to under the grass but the leaves kind of remind me of like arugula almost they kind of have this slightly skunky smell to them and so I would throw the leaves in a salad I would throw the flowers in a salad because they're beautiful they're edible I would again take the petals and throw them in an ice cube tray and make petal infused ice maybe while I was harvesting dandelion greens and flowers I would take some of the these daisies and mix them with the flowers and throw them and honey our maple syrup and that way when it gets cold cloudy and dreary in Tacoma I'd go to make a piece of toast and I would just spread some of that jam on my toast and get a little boost of vitamin D I mean it's literally that simple and the other thing I want to talk about since we're here is clover so most lawns in the world at this point I've been to 66 countries and I can say with confidence that in every country that I've been to have been able to find clover on a lawn so most lawns have clover on them grab a clover leaf clovers are in the pea family so they're kind of like wild peas which is the first thing that we talked about and peas have a lot of protein in them and they also have B vitamins b1 b2 b3 b6 b12 they also have phosphorus I believe magnesium manganese and zinc so they're very very nutritious and delicious you could just take this little leaf and throw it in your soup salad cook it eat it raw I like smoothies personally because I feel like that's the easiest way to get greens in our diet it's funny one of my comments on my book on Amazon some guy went through my book and counted how many times I say smoothie and I think I say it like 250 times and he's like I didn't realize how much this guy likes smoothies but the only reason I do is because it's just an easy way to get greens in our diet you just wake up make a smoothie for yourself and that ensures that you're gonna get at least two salads and smoothie form in your diet so this is a great thing to do in smoothies let's talk about how to identify this thing so all peas have three leaves unless you're lucky then they have four clover has four sometimes we call that a four-leaf clover did you know that a four-leaf clover is actually more nutritious than the three leaf clover it's 25% more nutritious another identifying characteristic of clover is that the leaf has a crescent-shaped little white part on it it's beautiful right okay now take the leaf really close and personal and look at the edges and tell me what you see it's jagged it almost looks like it has tiny little spines on it those are great identifying characteristics it's literally that easy you just right now what you're doing is you're building your search image of clover we're spending time with these plants intimately and you don't even realize may be fully right now what you're doing but later on you go home or in a month in a year you're gonna be sitting in a park with your friends having a picnic and your hand is gonna wander because you get a little bored and you're gonna pick up a clover and you're gonna be like huh three leaves oval clover and that means I did my job somewhat correctly okay on we go a few more and then we're gonna head home answer some questions and anybody that needs to go can go what kind of tree is this how do we know long needles a fun fact about pines this is this ruin my surprise so another way to identify Pines is they always either have two or five needles so they're gonna be long and then they're either gonna have two or five needles and again you can make tea from these needles just boil these down but what I'm here to look at today is this that's pine pollen so if you're allergic to pollen probably not the best edible for you but if you're not allergic to pollen this is pure protein this is amino acids so how you would harvest this if you put a plastic bag over this and you just shake or you can literally just take these and just eat them or throw them in a smoothie or a soup you know if you're making like some pizza you could put some of that in the dough get creative and that stuff's really nutritious the other thing I want to show you while you're here is this plant that grows underneath it let's all grab one of these I'll get some more grab one pass it around okay this is another one of those plants that we can identify much easier by smell than sight so crush this up and tell me what this smells like so this is called yarrow and yarrow develops a very big like umbrella like flower in late summer sometimes it's white sometimes it's yellow sometimes it's pink and yarrow is another sleep aid so if you have problems with insomnia if you just have trouble falling asleep at night you could take some of that wild camomile that we learned about you could take some of those daisies and you could take some yarrow which smells very sweet almost makes you salivate you could dry it put it in a tea and now you have a foraged sleep aid pretty cool huh the other thing that's nice about yarrow is if you ever cut yourself and you're in the woods you can literally press this into your wound because it has antiseptic antibacterial properties in fact Vikings used to use this they would actually fill their wounds with it when they got battle wounds Native Americans did similar stuff one time when I was on the trail I cut through my palm while trying to cut a piece of fruit that we had in our backpack and obviously I was 50 miles away from a hospital so there was no way that I could stitch it up and what I actually took is rose petals because they're natural bandages and then I would alternate that with yarrow and you can look at my palm later but there's almost no scar it's sealed up really nicely wild edibles can literally save your life sometimes and this is another one of those what kind of tree is this what kind of tree is this how do we know flat needles it's a fern okay on we go boys and girls what kind of tree is this how do we know okay who thinks spruce raise your hand who thinks fir okay you're right it's a fern okay on this one let's also point out the bright little green tips who was talking about those earlier you were so these are awesome eating these are like the springtime green tips and they taste like lemon yeah so these parts you throw straight into salads they concentrate vitamin C they're good for your respiratory they get phlegm out of your system you can pickle them so in the springtime now I've come through here with a little bowl and I just start taking them and before long I'd have enough to really make a meal of you know you can also use these in tea but they're not quite that these are the meristematic bits of the first so they're not going to be as fragrant I think for tea you use the more mature ones and then for eating for salads you use the more nutritious more delicious bits which is the meristematic bits okay what kind of tree is this who said spruce I'm gonna pick on you come over here and grab a needle and this is actually a good example so the last pine had two needles this pine has five needles count them up this will be the last one right here okay take a leaf pass it around and we'll we'll do this take one pass it around take one pass it around first we're gonna do the test and flip it over is this a dandelion it looks like it yes how do we know that it's not a dandelion it's hairy good job so this is in fact is not a dandelion it's a dandelion relative and this is called cat's ears probably because it kind of looks like a little cat ear it's perfectly edible it has similar properties to a dandelion which is that it's good for your inner organs your gallbladder pancreas liver kidneys because it's fuzzy this one is a better green to eat cooked it's much more pleasant so again you throw it in soups and pastas stir-fries this is a great green for stir fries how else you could bake it you could put it in lasagna you could do whatever the heck you want with it but this is a great green and it's literally everywhere in Tacoma the other identifying characteristic is it will develop yellow flowers kind of like a dandelion but a dandelion has one flower four stem and cat's ears will have multiple yellow flowers per stem okay so I promise this will be the last one this will be the last one let's head back to expand if anybody who wants to buy a book I have a couple of those otherwise I'll answer questions and if people need to go they can go or we can kind of linger for a little bit and talk more about plants you

Channel: BoutenkoFilms

Views: 555,754

Rating: 4.8668351 out of 5

Keywords: wild edibles, wild edible, forage, foraging, wild edibles walk, plant, plants, plant walk, how to, how-to, sweet pea, dandelion, sow thistle, pineapple weed, horse chestnut, sweet chestnut, blackberry, common mallow, purple dead nettle, maple, plantain, wild mustard, hairy bittercress, American Beech, chickweed, pine, spruce, fir, miners lettuce, clover, cats ears, common weeds, weed, edible, food, nutritious, delicious, eat, wild crafting

Id: EM81V9sgdos

Length: 94min 49sec (5689 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/whoiskey]

Very cool, man. Right now I'm up to my knees in morels, but I'm definitely going to watch the full video when I have time.