Wild Food | Wild Garlic

Description

In this video we take a look at wild garlic or 'ramsons' and a few simple effective ways of identifying it, as well as a look at Lilly of the Valley, and how not to confuse them! wild garlic is a delicious wild food I highly recommend it!

To have a look at one way of using it in your bushcraft cooking check out the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6KvfulouFQ

Tags: Bushcraft,survival,camping,how to,Ramsons (Organism Classification),Garlic (Ingredient),foraging,food for free,food,cooking,spring

Video Transcription

hi guys what I've got for you today is a look at another wild edible and this one is really one of my favorites and I know that I say that a lot pretty much every wild a ball that I show you to identify but this one genuinely in terms of the flavor is absolutely definitely one of my favorites and that's because I really like garlic and today we're going to be looking at wild garlic or Ransome's has another name over the pond in the Americas which is I believe it's referred to as bur garlic because the birds really like to get down to the root of this thing and eat the actual the root bulb of it but I'm interested in the leaves of this and its Latin name I think is ursula caberta cadeau Etica I could be wrong on that but I will if I am wrong I will correct myself somewhere up here in the video with a caption for it so first thing to note on actually identifying this isn't something that we look up and it's not something that I can really convey over YouTube because it's a smell of this this stuff grows in these massive colonies it's like this area that I'm in now there's so much of it look at my distance it actually looks like it's snow because this white flower so you smell it before ever you see it but let's have a look at actually how to identify this thing by looking at it so this is the plant here as a whole you can see it's got this very very large white flower head on it with lots of flowers with lots of smaller flowers coming off it and these kind of spear shaped leaves so we're going to have a closer look at each of the parts of this but you can see here this is a really good example of it it kind of grows out in this clump so each leaf and each flower head actually has its own stem which it grows out from from the bulb so it's not like a tall plant we've got some leaves coming off with a flower at the top it's kind of a platter this one's got quite a lot of heads coming off it but it's kind of like a little quiet it's got a low flower I mean it's roughly knee height but coming out from it there are lots and lots of stems some of them have leaves and some of them have flowers on them so let's take a closer look at this flower head so this is the the bunch of flowers which comes out the top of this you can see there's absolutely loads of flowers here I'm not even gonna bother counting them but it's easy to identify this each flower head has six of these little white petals on it and each one has a very dark grey line which runs along the center of it and then arranged in the center of this flower head is a very geometric actually set of kind of reproductive parts the planets to the stain and they come up in the six of those as well and they are arranged more often than not in this kind of perfect equilateral triangle in the center of the flower

and the stem of the flower head is also quite interesting because I can just focus in you see here that it's you know it's got these two sorry three kind of grids which will run along the sides of it so this there's two very definite quite sharp ones along this side and then a rounded one along one side I mean look at the cross sets of that you see it really clearly so that's that that's the flower head in the stem and the flowers and have a very different actually just sort of generic flowery smell and it's the leaves it's actually give off that really Dalek you smell on that really garlicky fragrance and flavor so let's have a closer look at the leaves of this so the leaves of this plant each one has its own individual stem and they're very very pointed and have these smooth edges to them and we just pluck this leaf here you can see that that leaf fans out directly from the stem so it doesn't come to a point and then fan out into leaf it it appears kind of gradually along the stem of that and the interesting thing that's a really interesting way of actually identifying this is that the veins on the underside of this wreath I'm not sure that the quite faint so I'm not sure if I can will pick it out but the veins actually don't come out and go to the sides of the leaf what they do is they run out slightly from the the main stem of the plant and then up towards the tip of the leaf and the leaf has a slightly different shaped stem if I could just grab the one I just plot from here

so again it's it's got its a much flatter stem that comes from the leaf and it's got these two ribs from the side and it's actually those ribs which begin to fan out into the main leaf of the plant so it comes up up to here now it's interesting to know under point of the leaves that is when we are trying to identify this is when we could hit a little bit of a snag because there is a very very similar plant to this which grows in similar conditions which is lily-of-the-valley

so I've got some here growing in my garden so you can see here I'm just in my back garden where I've got some of this Lily LaValley growing you can see the leaves and the arrangement this plant is very very similar but there's a couple of subtle differences we can look out here so one the leaves of this plant don't grow up on a single stem they they grow up together they grow up and then a few come out the same stem so that's one obvious one the actual leaf arrangement is it's slightly wider and less kind of long than pointed but the arrangement is the same it's got those same veins that come up and out with a much rounder and the leaf also fans out from there from the stem there as well well that's one subtle difference so that if it's a leaf that's got like a few on the same stem that's one thing to look out for but the dead giveaway is the flower so this is the flower of the plant which is why it's particularly popular you can see it's totally different it's it facing down was it's really really tiny and it's kind of this bell shape so that's what we want to look out for with Lily LaValley it's very very similar but there's a few of these really subtle differences to look out for the leaves are also a little bit thick and they feel tougher and they don't crush up as easily as the wild garlic so just watch out for that one so in terms of identifying this plant by sight it's a pretty easy one to identify just making sure you don't mix it up with that lily of the valley as I said the main thing to look for is the flower heads they're arranged differently there are different shape as I've already said you know the leaves are similar so do watch out for it Lily LaValley is a toxic plant the other thing that can help with identifying this is knowing where it grows it has kind of quite specific locations in which it rolls and when you find one of these locations you can see behind me all these white flowers actually every single one of them is wild garlic or Ram Sion's so you know it grows really poor at politically so once you've found it one year you know you know where it's gonna go and it's a great one because you know you know a lot of these leaves isn't gonna damage the plant at all and it grows a lot around the same time it's quite late this year

but it does favor slightly acidic soil and it likes particularly at the size of rivers and small streams if you've got a small stream running through a broad movement if you're an old woodland like this one chances are you've gonna find wild garlic so you can eat the bulbs I prefer the leaves myself I prefer that white just like old leave because they're very strong on their own they taste really powerful actually don't burn a little bit on the way down so I tend to use these as they are good though that's okay and I tend to use these as you know an ingredient in cooking rather the main thing and the last thing on how to identify this is smell it the smell of these things is incredible it's a really really powerful garlic smell and going back to the wild sorry going back to the limit of barley that is one thing that we need to watch because the smell is so powerful and this plant will grow quite often in the same places in River Valley what can happen is once you grow from one rebook had a smell of it one year that's why garlic that smell is there on your handles the lily of the valley doesn't have much of a smell to it smooth so once the smiles on your hands with you've picked some wild garlic put up one yet that's what that wild Ark is and you pick another one unknowingly to do you put them in a valley give it a smell it's you know that's one of the garlic's still gonna be on your hand and that was something really wary if you're unsure don't eat it and then you pour it in if you're not 110% sure it is stay away from it but while garlic is a pretty easy one to identify look out for those flowers give it a good smell it grows in wet hot water Woodlands tech very very damp ground takes a great one so keep an eye out for it and I will cut to next video thank you all for watching please like share subscribe all that cheers guys