How to Recognize Seven Wild Edibles in Their Earliest Springtime Forms

Description

Field guides rarely if ever show anything except the mature plant. This video will help you to recognize seven springtime edible plants in their youngest forms. Spring Beauty, Wild Leek, Trout Lily, Ground Bean, Cutleaf Toothwort, Stinging Nettle, and Ostrich Fern. Plus a bonus mint!

Spring Beauty: 1:52

Wood Mint: 3:58

Wild Leek: 5:13

Trout Lily: 7:03

Ground Bean: 9:25

Toothwort: 13:02

Stinging Nettle: 13:56

Ostrich Fern: 15:31

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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,wild edible plants,edible wild greens,survival food

Video Transcription

we are having a super early spring here in Wisconsin and I'm heading out today with my apprentice Brett who you may have met in the ice breakthrough video we're going to do some botanizing and something that I feel is always missing you feel good is you know typically you see the mature form of the plant so you'll see the planned maybe it's flowers leaves but what are those plants look like for instance in the winter there's all these winter stocks and my plan is to do some ID videos on winter stocks but also this right now on the springtime forms of these plants so seeing a few different species today in their very first little incarnation in the spring and learning to recognize these little teeny things lets us know that in that area later on we can come and find the mature plants and in some of the cases today with some of these spring ephemerals is what they're called these are plants that come up in the spring and then they die back and usually don't see them anymore for the rest of the air is that they have some choice edible parts so learning to recognize them when they're very very young allows you to take those you know harvest some of those edible parts when they're at their prime and most full of sugars mm-hm just move some of the leaves back to reveal spring beauty and we've got some really tiny examples here we're looking for these little white rags almost at the end they get a little bit of a reddish green tinge to them over here is a more mature one and you can start to see them leaves developing here's an even more mature one coming up and you've got a nice stock you've got a couple leaves and those are the flower buds down here is a creature of the woodlands that is appearing to us because we're exploring and right through there but just found this for us the whole range these ones are pretty mature at this point tiny tiny little ones these are the very first ones

right there there it is and once you clean off the dirt you can eat the spud and the leaves and everything here's an example the very first very first little teeny one coming up right there that purple thing really interesting and because it's a woodland mint and what I feel like perhaps one of the most delicious mints yeah out there at least in a while and an interesting thing is that it seems to be an evergreen perhaps I mean we're finding we're finding this coming up I mean much too early well to have this amount of growth perhaps so it might be under the snow I'm not sure on that completely but we have the winter stocks here too which is interesting and like all mints it's going to have a square stem sometimes you can heal that better than you can see it but you can pretty what you can see it here and it's really hairy and then you taste one of those leaves and you have a fabulous mint here's the winter stock the leak those distinctive little black beads this is the really young plant the rain this one really has the green some of these a bit more purpley these are going to grow in a little colony like this see one there one there of course you can easily identify lose by their scent is it had that garlic onion smell I also like you can peel is you know it almost rubbery and strong so you can just this one you could find blind when I was trying to find the trout lilies I was noticing that was there a lot of like really tough to be stuck in the ground little twig sticking up these are all little baby maples and I don't think the travelers are going to be growing near here because these things you know they have these wide rod leaves that walk a lot of sunlight and so I think the travel is tinder proposal had a baby maples too much competition yeah okay and they're just so abundant right through here that nothing really else can grow that's why you don't see any leak stocks like that no you're right there's nothing else under there okay so what do we have here these are trout lilies the very very early sprouts and if you want to get so they have a little bulb under here and the optimal time to get them is before you can find them very easily so you have to know what you're looking for but at these little yellow to purple stalks and then I'm here you have this little bulb it's very sweet yeah Mirabella since right what you call it and he'll lollipops yeah what's lollipops okay so we have another one over here here but yeah these are prime whenever they're the hardest to find unfortunately but if you know what you're looking for and you if you know if you start to see them later in the season you can sort of mark the areas and make note of where they are and then you come back at this time of year and you'll start to see these little tiny sprouts and then if you dig up those bulbs they're pretty delicious and the whole thing is edible you can eat the roots stem believes it's kind of and usually we're not finding a lot of them around here but usually they're there in these huge groups and whenever they start to flower and the leaves start coming up you'll really see lots of them and it's funny you so you come out here and you see something like this and you don't think that you'll be able to recognize it but when you really pay attention they're actually really obvious and you can start to spot them and distinguish them from things that look sort of similar and it's you know kind of a cool feeling to be able to just glance at something like this and know exactly what's underneath there love that there's always mysteries you come by to this is a fungus a mushroom of some kind and I'm not quite sure if it has just come up this early in the spring or if it's somehow held on to the winter really cool creature ground bean doesn't have any leads or anything coming up yet but it's very recognizable by its winter stock so you've got these little vines met twirl all over everything these are not it reads you can see it's winding up around the stem its wine me up around this little good stuck and once you start seeing it's everywhere it's a thin your locale you can look like grass but you can start to tell the difference between rug grasses or this is edge actually and a little round climbing ground being so threat is up here and he is already dug some up you can see these are decent sized beams and he's been just working in this this pile and how you cooked these up the other day yeah I mean it took me a while to gather enough to make a small dish out of you know it's just a side dish but yeah they're uh they're pretty tasty they I think they kind of taste like cooked egg yolks not in a bad way but you know they kind of have that texture and a little bit of the flavor but they're pretty good and you know they're a little difficult to get in quantity but they're a good protein source out in the woods if you can't find anything else or if you don't have any hunting ability or trapping but yeah they've got this little thin skin on them if you peel off their sometimes they can be purple and spotted so if you see something like that don't be worried that you found the wrong thing they can be kind of creamy colored actually this one's got a little bit of purple to it you can sort of get a a hint of the coloring and you just dig around underneath the vines and yeah you just you find where the vines are and you just start churning the ground and it takes a while to get the hang of finding them here's another one right here they're just kind of in this pile of dirt and once you get used to finding them you'll start to recognize them a little quickly like here's another one you can just kind of see them this one looks this is a perfect example of the purple spotting so you can see well it's beautiful yeah so sometimes you'll see them kind of like that mom sweet been sitting here for less than five minutes and I've got five beans that's being a minute maybe or you know maybe a little faster but yeah and so sometimes I'll dig for five minutes and not find anything but sometimes I'll find a bunch right in a row so it's kind of random like I said when you get the hang of it you can start to notice them a little easier and it gets easier to find them these are fresh beans so you don't have to soak them overnight and cook them forever and ever you just right well it up a little bit yeah I just put it in some boiling water with a little bit of salt and added a little more salt one of right drain the water then you can eat it draw too right yeah yeah I'm a really good a snack on them occasionally yeah they're like really crunchy and they don't have that I'd like they don't have the egg yolk flavor or texture if you're eating them raw you have to cook them to get that but they kind of have a little bit of a sweetness to them too not bad sometimes when you're looking around under the leaves you're going to find to thwart you can see this little teeny rut when I sorta just sit on the surface they're attached to my tiny little threads and some people feel these have a really strong horseradish flavor others feely have a turpentine flavor we don't like them at all but the leaves when they come up they are they have a nice flavor I think I don't really like the roots but the leaves have

kind of a horseradish cream flavor that is really good on a sandwich arena salad and just kind of litter on the surface and look like little bananas or something okay here's a great example of really really young form here of stinging nettle and sting metal of course it's a great edible and we're seeing it a couple different stages of growth here

is that purple color to it often a little teeny kind of pink purple bud coming out and these guys tend to when they do start to come up they come up very quickly with their friends so unless you're really out early you're going to find a couple that are in there more mature forms and those will be easier to recognize because they have the you know kind of a relief form that they're going to happen they're more mature stage already and you can already see on these metals the little spikes that later on are going to have the you know the poison in them that gives you the sting and the long ridged stems this is ostrich fern which is a really great wild edible and this is the winter stocks that we would see if we look down here there it is these out of the beginning of the fiddlehead I pull some of this back you can see the curl up form really tight right now this is a good example of one that doesn't have any of the winter stocks but you can see the broken off stalks there sometimes it'll have the stocks up other times like with this one the stocks are falling down you might not notice them in the undergrowth so once they fall down and get buried much tougher to see with these are very distinctive and boy when they're up about this high they're starting to get prime in the winter stocks we're looking for somebody felt that this look like an ostrich feather and then a nice indent furrow that runs up along the stock thanks for watching and sure anything you like in the comments regarding these plants your experiences with these plans if you've tried them before if you're excited about trying them I will see you soon