Bushcraft Foraging: Alexanders

Description

In this video we have a look at a Wild Edible Plant called Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum).

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here and I'm out on the case line again and I wanted to show you a wild edibles I eat quite a lot of and it's growing all around me here in this paddock and all all across other ends of the case line I've also found this wild edible in Cornwall an awful lot of it down there along with many others that you can eat and this is one that's a member of the a paci family or unbelief Roy family as it may be documented ours as well which is the carrot and parsley family and that's quite a tricky family there's a lot of plants within that family or all species of plants that can kill you and make you very ill if you get them wrong and they all look very similar and have a distinct kind of look about them and this one here is good Alexander's it's probably one of my favorites in that family it provides an excellent source of roughage I've eaten this one quite a bit with pigeon it goes very well with fish it's basically like a black pepper almost in its taste and it's fairly easy to identify and once you get to know it you'll be able to spot it at a drop of a hat so this particular plant here will emerge early March and it will start flowering in April through to about June where I'll hang around for a little bit longer and then die off and it's a biannual plant so it lives for about two years and when it's young no just see little leaflets all over the ground all over the place you won't find it in woodland you'll find it on the coastline which is its preferred environment if we have a look at this plant a little more closely we can pick out some key features to help us identify it one of the main things to know about this plant is it's one of the earliest to emerge from the unbelief Roy family so a lot of the others will still be in their infancy but this is sprung up already sometimes growing very tall probably about 40 to 50 centimetres in some cases and it's already produced flowers and those flowers already forming into seeds but for me the key feature to pick is its leaf or leaves this one has very broad leaves and they have long stems as well and if we go up to the top here you'll see you have a long stem three leaflets long stem three leaflets and the same again here sometimes the leaves can have lobes and sometimes they can just be large leaves with no lobe at all and it does vary around the plant at the base it's far more frequent you've got three long stalks there and they spring off into the three leaflet sections that we have here so we've got three leaflets there three there three there and the same just here as well and they have very very long stalks and you can see this avail that the base their whites with purple lines very distinct breaking off away from the stem which has purple lines down it as well it would be very difficult to make mistake this plum for hemlock hemlock has purple spots and it will grow in a very different environment but there is another type of hemlock that grows around the coastline which we'll have a look at later and it's something that you might mistake with this at the certain times of year if we make our way up to the top of the plant you can see that the flower head is very distinct it's not white like a lot of the unbelief rice a very very bright kind of yellowy green color quite easy to pick out quite a full plant really in its appearance alexander's is a non-native plant introduced by the Romans and the entire plant is edible raw or cooked the leaf the stem of the leaf even a shooter the main plant and the root can be used like a substitute parsnip if sight and touch aren't enough for you don't be afraid to smell wild edibles as well you can actually smell the peppery taste and that sounds unusual if you smell this and crush this up in your hand it's incredibly strong you've got a really sort of parsley pepper eat a steaming through that completely different to hemlock

it smells lovely it smells almost exactly how it tastes so here we have it in this is hemlock water dropwort you can see very different environment it's growing by a river river by stream and that's very typical of it and you will find in great abundance on boggy damp saturated ground with fresh running water like this and it spreads very quickly along these areas and covers it in great abundance it's a bit of a danger zone when it comes to other members of the family like cow parsley it can grow in quite close proximity to this but this is probably about 15 yards away away from where we picked the alexander's so it's not very far away but there is a definite difference in the environment the alexander's is growing by the coastline on a pasture where there's no moisture in sight in some respects not like this anyway it's growing on pretty well-established soil weathers this is growing actually by the river itself and it is growing all the way up this river as far as I can see and this plant will grow very very tall and a distinct difference really will be a big white humble flower hut as opposed to the yellowy green one which is actually quite small on the outlet alexander's compared to what this will be like this one here is probably more mistakable with wild carrot simply because it bears a lot of similarities with wild carrot is very hairy on the stand and it'll grow on it again a completely different environment you're most likely to see wild carrot by roadsides than you are out in the wilds to be quite honest with you these days but let's have a closer look at it so already we can see a distinct difference in the appearance there's no flower head there's a sort of dominant stem that's very distinct coming up through this part and this this one won't be spotted like hemlock that you find further inland this one is effectively very bare in some respects it's almost like a pale green the stem and you can see the leaflets are far more apparent and it's got lots of leaflets very finely toothed kind of ruffled almost you can see these new leaves coming through they're really distinct nothing like alexander's a lot more leaflets on an actual leaf stem very feathered very full the again white not yellow or green like Alexander's and it's gonna flower a lot later in the year it's still very young at this moment in time but again not something you want to want to eat to be quite honest with you foraging for fallen are all flora on the coastline or inland is a fantastic practice and their skill sets that greatly reinforce every other aspect of bushcraft when you're a practicing skills just out during time with your friends camping and you can prepare meals with alexander's that we found in land and various other plants and whatever's out here that we can find there a crab so you could fish you can collect mussels limpets and different types of seaweeds and you could repair a very good meal even adding it to supplies that you bring with you in the field but it takes a great deal of time to learn these things and persistence as well and you need to want it neater want to learn it and it doesn't just come and a lot of the time I find myself constantly going back to various plants and making sure but I know everything about them and I've been studying wild edibles for a long time I'm no expert I'm just self-taught like a lot of people out there and I always listen to that part of my mind that instills doubt in me but don't get too cocky or complacent when I'm out doing various things because that's when mistakes start happening if I'm not sure about something I leave it alone completely because you can't afford to make mistakes and your ego will always try and lure you down various paths and then you make a mistake and you reset yourself again and it's a great way of learning but sometimes it can be faithful and it's not really the right way to go about wild edibles you need to be a hundred percent 110% and the more you familiarize yourself with them the more you touch them see them smell them taste them the more you'll have that reinforcement and confidence that you really know what's what it is you're touching and eating and that really just comes with time and exposure lots and lots of ventures and the food field seeing things in different environments and he's seeing something in a city where it might be pale and really acidic soils and then suddenly seeing it out in an environment like this where it's green and rich and far different you know these these plants can take different tinges and they can look especially on the side of funghi and they often don't play by the rules but I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope you found it useful it's gonna take a lot more than this video alone to educate you on alexander's and on water hemlock hemlock water drop and hemlock alone

it's best to really familiarize yourself with the a paci family or unbelief Roy family it's a family that can catch you out but thanks again for watching and hopefully I'll see soon again in another video take care guys