Wild Food| Jack By the Hedge/ Garlic Mustard

Description

In this video I show how to identify Jack by the hedge (Alliaria petiolata) an excellent spring time edible for those who think ramsons are too strong!**

For a recipe on how to use this check out the video in the link below for the flying olives foraged pesto!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iKruyQlpTU

**Apologies for the buzzing sound in the background but the microphone seems to have picked up the sound of the telephone wire overhead!

Tags: Bushcraft,survival,camping,how to,Garlic Mustard (Organism Classification),Hedge,Food (TV Genre),Garlic (Ingredient),Cooking,Foraging,Wild Food (TV Program),Jack by the Hedge,Alliaria petiolata,spring

Video Transcription

all right guys what we look at today is another wild food on the wild forage ball and it's an excellent one to get you started it's very very easy to identify very distinctive and grows really quite prolifically it's very very easy to find and what I'm looking at today is this plant here which is Jack by the hedge and cut them the Latin name what I'll do is I'll put the Latin name in the description of the video and I put it in the description box below as well for you but its common name is Jack by the hedge or garlic mustard and that is your first clue on how to identify this plant positively garlic mustard because when we take one of the leaves which will have a close look at a minute but first thing to do is break it open and give it as smell it's got very quite a powerful garlicky mustard smell I think it's more garlicky than mustardy some people disagree but I suppose that's just kind of personal identification of this particular plan so best place to find this as you can see by the side of paths and roads and in hedgerows and places like that it really really favors that kind of environment and that kind of leads me to one of the things to be a world if you find in this particular plant by very busy roads you want to be wary of collecting it because what happens is as the plant breeze and respirate it can take in some of those harmful toxins from the cars and vehicles so it's a very very very busy world have a look at it get used to identifying it but I would recommend against eating it so the leaves themselves let's have a quick look at them so you can see the shape of this plan is kind of Arrowhead shaped when it's slightly older and it has these jaggedy leaves that come off the side but if you look a little closer you'll find that they're actually quite quite rounded towards the edges now those points become more pronounced as the plant gets older but if we have a look at the younger colonies the leaves are much rounder and the lobes and what's rounder as well and that's not the only way to identify this plan there's no

a couple of features we can have a look at as well so you can see as the plant reaches its adult stage it grows very very distinctive white flowers in these little bunches mainly there at the very top of the stems but some of them do shoot off towards top you tend not to find them lower down the plant but it's not completely unheard of the petals of this there's four of them and the kind of almost like rounded rectangle so that's quite an easy way of identifying them and as the plant goes what the leaves get smaller and smaller so you can see the leaves at the top here I've site to turn this burgundy color and they'll do the same from lower down I'll just grab up and down here as they get older they turn this ready color now some people say as they start turn red at the end here the flavor becomes better and the smell becomes stronger I actually disagree particularly older ones I started to dry out and to me that they pretty much entirely lost their the smell and the taste I prefer these much greener larger leaves you get more for what you're picking and I personally think the taste is a lot better so another great thing about this plant in particular is it's very easy to spot from a long distance the leaves are a generally paler cause everything else if you can purchase this grass here the leaves are much paler shade of green I think that's a very distinctive color the white flowers stand out from quite a distance and they grow in these huge colonies as well which means that from a distance you can you can really really see these things you know those huge colonies i know that just over the side of this hedge there's even more of this and there's more on the other side one other thing that I have found to be a good way of identifying these as well as they tend to favor south-facing embankments i am on a little embankment here there's a road just on the side a little forestry track and i know that on the other side of this road just you know 10 meet 10 10 foot away none of this stuff grows but it grows all the way along this side and that's because this embankment is facing south which means it's getting the Sun most of the day so you find these in patches which get a lot of Sun don't see much of it actually in forests and woodlands it tends to favor meadowland fields and hedgerows and it's usually that south-facing side on whatever I love that embankment or hedge gets the Sun all day long it really really likes a lot of sunlight so that's very quickly gonna have a look at young colony of these so that they can I tend to spread out my line I'll just want to show you that very quickly so this here is the young young fall of the plan and it stays quite low to the ground and it seems to almost cover the ground before it comes up into those very definitive shoots so there you go guys that's that's Jack by the hedge a really really really excellent plan to get you into foraging or one that I really like finding each it's on the first plant I actually learn to identify so and you know I'm quite fond of it it's a great one for cooking as well it adds so much flavor to things so if you like garlic but you don't like the kind of strong taste of ransoms or wild garlic or shop-bought garlic it's an excellent one because its taste is much milder and it does have that slightly must early taste to it as well and as I said once you learn to positively identify this thing you will see it absolutely everywhere at this time of year so it grows in kind of mid to late spring and late spring it's reached its full height and it kind of dies off a little bit and dries out through the summer but if we have a mild summer it will also occasionally it's not unheard of for it to to shoot back up again in september-october time for a limited period of time so it's one that can be there quite a lot and the great thing as well as what it goes into place one year it'll grow at the next year a little key on how taxi for is this is try to avoid taking the whole plant because that if you take the whole plan that plan isn't going to regrow the following year it can damage the colony of the plan so the recommended thing to do when foraging this is actually just to take a few of the leaves off each specimen you're not going to store what to do that the stuff grows everywhere once you've found one you will almost certainly find more and if you're interested in seeing a recipe for this one if you check in the description box below the flying Oliver's just done a video on using this to make a foraged herb pesto it was really delicious I had it for my lunch at work it was really really nice and it's a good way of getting used to using your wild wild foods so as always thank you all for watching please like share subscribe and comment I hope you found this video video useful and please do keep checking back for more while for enjoys i'm going to be doing a lot of them this year because people have asked for them so i've been buffing up on all my plant knowledge so if you're interested in more do stay posted here thank you all