Harvesting Spring Beauty Roots for Food

Description

Introducing Rebecca, ReWild University co-founder and plant guide, as she shows how to find and harvest spring beauty roots. Stay tuned for the "guest expert" and "bloopers" at the end! A bit of fun!

Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) is a delicious and often abundant wild edible of the purslane family (Portulacaceae). Despite ID guides that say to use it only as emergency food, this perennial is among the most widespread and abundant of spring ephemerals in our Wisconsin forests. The entire plant is edible, both raw and cooked (steam or boil the roots to give them a soft, creamy texture and get rid of the slight "bite" that some people experience in the back of their throats).

Found in mesic forests and associated with oak, maple, birch, aspen, and hop hornbeam, spring beauty is often the very first new green shoot people notice emerging from the forest floor. The newest, tiniest shoots can have a purple tint, but they soon become tinged with green.

As with any new food, wild or domestic, be aware that some people have allergies, so enjoy only a small bit when you first try it. And, of course, make sure that you perform your own identification with a good ID guide. Rebecca recommends guides that are arranged by family instead of flower color, as that will help you begin to recognize family traits.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,Rebecca Whitman,Spring Beauty,wild edibles,edible wild plants,edible roots,gourmet wild foods,wild gourmet,cute kids,Cute,Camping,funny

Video Transcription

hello and happy spring it's the beginning of April in Wisconsin and while it might look like it's too cold and snowy to actually harvest any wild edibles we are out here today to look at a route that signifies the beginning of spring and is often the most delicious this time of year okay I'm just going to clear away some weeks here and so we can see the first signs of this so here we have the very first spring beauty shoots coming up out of the ground to say hello to the sunshine all right so these plants right here are already a little bit further along you can almost even see those little flower buds right there and they've got their leaves so they're starting to get ready for the next round of wonderful deliciousness that the spring beauty has to offer so right over here we have an example of a cluster you can sort of see it here of spring beauty stems and that is going to often indicate a yoga that there's a rut underneath there that's as a fairly medium sized this might be an ideal candidate for us to harvest I've dug up a fairly large sized chunk here so that I can show you how we are going to just feel these stems gently they're really delicate and reach on down in here to find the root so here you can see I'm starting to get to that route there's another one so in fact looks like there was more than one cluster here all of this right here is edible if we were to wash it off of the dirt but i'm going to show you how to process this little rip part here so i'm just gonna break this off here and everything off of it yeah good way to get some of that dirt off is just to kind of roll it gently in your hands there we go and there's a skin on here that you don't have to take off but it I feel it greatly improves the flavor daddy

okay and here we have the final product these are really good bra but if you collect enough of them you can also cook them up and eat them that way do you want to try it Oh chew it once crunch it how's it taste how's it taste is it good haha landed took our notes follow it it's edible food you like it do you want to collect more oh ah not okay here with the spring beauty roots we are looking for medium to large clusters of the shoots coming up because those are gonna contain the largest rets which is what we're a minute para so here's one of those clusters here you can see an example this is more of a carpet of spring beauty shoots and those are gonna have the smaller little routes throughout so we'd want to pass over these oh here's what we have after a few minutes of harvesting you can see there's some quite large ruts and some more medium-sized ones and then some of the shoots that go along with it now you're not going to get buckets of spring beauty roots for your efforts here however this is the time of year when they have the most energy before they send up there their little flower buds and if you're really longing to get out in the springtime and enjoy the sunshine and the warmth and you just want to taste something wild and delicious this is a fun thing to do for a few hours and you'll have a delicious snack as a reward some people experience a little tingling in the back of their throat or they've said it like lemony aftertaste totally normal don't be alarmed it will go away if you boil it so if that's something you experience you can just try boiling instead and see what that's like

this fish was a big one so sweet so yummy i highly recommend getting out and harvesting some of these and a few weeks this is going to be a blanket of leaves and flowers and we'll come back when those are up but right now spring beauty roots delicious

around them if you don't now here to what um I know no big Jew and yeah my sand mine too what okay so why give you do and I like it make that dirty no problem mom's desk said okay and then why am i dizzy Knobloch demands we know and I can't do it Joe mine turn wine bar my work x-man eat it up don't got a mullet don't let me go what it go at making the one wing of children matter now hear it it's reacting I can't get back oh wow look at that one oh hello and happy spring it's the beginning of I over to they talked over it dude stepping on my lions hello okay okay do you want more yeah all right we're gonna try and so I'm going to pull aside some leaves here and show you what very early spring beauty what the help ditch the party this is a party haha there you go start chewing when you put it in like a bunny or a squirrel okay okay

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