Bushcraft Foraging: Pignuts

Description

Foraging for Pignuts was once a common practice. They are tasty and simple to dig for, but digging the roots does kill the plant.

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Video Transcription

other guys it's a very damp and humid day as you can see I've worked up quite a sweat even getting to this point here and I'm not even that far into the woods but we're coming to the end of May and a lot of the spring edibles reaching maturity and some of them already have and are dying off but a lot of the summer crop are coming through to join them in our last video we had looked at polypore squaw Moses and that's a type of edible fungus commonly known as dry and saddle that primarily grows on deciduous hardwoods and it's particularly nice if picked young but today we're going to have a look at another edible and it's an edible kind of root really that we're going to be looking at we're going to get onto this water source here where the ground is very soft and that'll make it a lot easier to dig up so the plants I've got in my hand here or part of it as a key part is missing as we'll talk about later and it's growing all around me and this water source all over the place in this nice damp shady area which is typical of the environments it would grow in it's called Cana podium magis or pig nut and a pig nut is a member of the unbelief trial a paci family which is the carrot or parsley family and that's a particularly dangerous family really and you want to know it well if you're going to go out and do foraging in that family because you got the hemlocks and you've also got fools parsley just a few that can really kill you or poison you quite badly depending on how much you ingest and they all have subtle similarities between each other but that aside the pigna is a member of that family and it's probably the easiest in my opinion to identify simply because of the leaf which is like no other in the family kind of terrain this plant grows him is going to be in areas where moisture doesn't drain particularly well I'm on a lot of clay here and this is a very damp deciduous woodland and as you can see lots of plants are thriving here it's very green it's quite a rich environment and this plants doing very well in this shady area which is what it likes but you will find it growing in meadows and pastures as well and breaks in the woodland on grassland and provided the water doesn't drain particularly well on the soil if we pull the pignut out the ground you'll see that the root has now been left behind because as it grows down it can go down up to 8 inches but in damp parcels it tends to be a bit shallower this will curve around and then the tuber the sort of potato like root will be on the end and that's the bit we really want to eat but from an ID perspective it's a very very easy plant to identify and the leaf as we said earlier as a dead giveaway unlike any other member of the unbelief rye families and probably closer to yarrow so it's not really close to anything that you could get wrong and potentially be poisoned by which is a good thing obviously when you're out foraging for edibles but if we look at the leaf you'll see it's very very fine and feather-like but if we get to the base that the lower leaves are generally slightly flatter but only very slightly and they still retain that sort of feather-like shape and it's a fantastic way of identifying the plum it almost looks like a triangle with lots of feathers coming off of it and you only see a few growing up the main stem and it's a single stemmed plant that often branches out as it goes to the top into those humble flower heads if you are interested in the flower I'd bring a magnifying glass with you because they're absolutely tiny they are white and they have five white petals with a sort of green blob in the center that will eventually become the fruit and they have five white stamens so that can always be a way of identifying them if you do bring a magnifying glass but the leaf is a brilliant way of picking them out we don't need anything too substantial to get to the root of the plant just a small trowel or even a digging stick will be absolutely fine I've had to quickly put a tarp up because of the rain we've got a great pignut here and you want to clear away just around the base of the stem of the plant being very careful not to hit it or knock it or pull on it ice it'll detached from the root almost immediately but we can put our shovel in more digging stick just go in lift it up and the whole plant should come out now you want to be very very careful as I can already see that that we've got a Bluebell bulb and Bluebell bulbs are very poisonous so you want to be sure that it does not look like that that is a Bluebell bulb and you do not want to be eating those if you're out in the woods so we'll toss that to one side and keep looking for the pignut we can see it might be in this bit just here you've got the stem still going in we'll clear this away you can see I've found the pignut it's just there and it's just detached from the stem as always sort of thumb and around lip put you can see there that's what the pignut looks like it's got a sort of woody skin on it if you break that skin away it should be white a lot like a hazelnut so we can see the difference just here this is the poisonous Bluebell bulb and this is the pig nut so this doesn't have a skin and you can see these sort of smaller roots at the bottom and it's a teardrop shape and the pig nut is often sort of like a nugget II kind of shape a bit like a hazelnut sometimes it's slightly imperfect I'm really bubbly it has a skin on it a very thick brain skin which is easy to miss when you're digging around in the earth but you can clear that away and wash it and eat it straight out the ground or dig a few more up so searching around sometime for that one you can see they're very easy to miss because they get covered in so much mud and then sometimes you strike away the skin and you spot it's standing out that one's a particularly good one the skin is very very easy to take off you can see it just peels off sometimes you can just squeeze them with your fingers and it'll pop out but it's easy just use your fingernail to sort of get most of it off obviously it's a bit of a wet muddy day so I need to wash these in the river before

so we've got a good batch of pig-nuts here some very ones some quite big and some quite small and there are a variation in species as well so sometimes they can be very very big almost the size of golf balls in some case and it's a real find when you get something like that because it's a few of those and you can keep them in your pocket and they'll keep you going for quite some time let's see what they taste like much like a hazelnut very tasty though hmmm really good definitely one of my favorites big nuts are very starchy and they're a great source of vitamin A vitamin C and also plant proteins and fiber as well but I just be mindful about how many you take but they do grow in very large colonies and they possess both male and female organs so they generally are quite a resilient plant so you can't really like damage the crop if you only take a handful for example but I hope you've enjoyed the video and I appreciate you watching and hopefully I'll see you in the next one so thanks again guys and take