How to get started: Foraging

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Tags: YouTube Editor,Foraging,wild food,bushcraft,survival,ray mears,patrick harding,Survival Skills (TV Genre),sustainable living

Video Transcription

hi guys today's video is a video all about getting into foraging okay so the reason I decided to do this video's a few people have said to me how do you get into foraging how do you get started and instead of telling each person individually i decided to do a kind of broad video on how to get started with it and after this video and then going to go out and i'm going to start doing little foraging how to bits as he sees all you ever I come across I'm gonna always have a camera on me so whenever I find something out when I'm out about I'll do a quick video for you so get into foraging and what's the best way to start I would say the best way to start is particularly this time of year it's late-september here in the UK to go out there and give it a goal and the certain plants that everyone pretty much knows and berries and things that we all know we can eat things like blackberries strawberries blackcurrant damsons slows they're all this time you get out and just try and practice learning to recognize them before we get too far into this a little word of warning is I would say try to ensure that you are I would say one hundred and ten percent definitely sure that you know what you are picking is suitable for what you want to use it for because foraging isn't just about finding wild food a lot of the plants and mushrooms and fungi things that we can find aren't just before eating but they can be used for different bits and pieces which we'll talk about a little bit more later on but how do you get started learning things that you don't know so I've got a selection box here which I've brought to show you i'm going to do book reviews of each one individually but to start with on this video I'm just going to show you what the floor and how I use them together one book on it so when I tend to find isn't so good so the basic ones that I tend to always carry with me are these little collins gem one so I've got food for free wildflowers and a mushrooms book now this mushrooms book is really fantastic the guy who wrote it was the guy that also took me on my one of my first proper foraging courses guy called Patrick Harlan really good dye really friendly really knows his stuff look him up on Google he's got his own website Patrick Harding he's fantastic i'm hoping to get out do some videos of him as well expressed an interest so that's the mushroom book now I have this food for free book now I kind of guide to eat this as kind of a bridge book between my different bits and pieces so this food for free book it isn't packed full of information it has got some of the more easily identifiable bits and pieces in there but it's also got its got your fungi different plants and herbs you can use it's also got some series in there which is handy but it also has other bits and pieces like seafood in there which is really handy remember you can forage for like you know shellfish and stuff as well so what I tend to use this particular book for is that I find something i'm pretty sure what is i have a look in this book to see if i can find if i can find out if it's in there so for example if i found some yarrow i'll go i'm pretty sure that's yarrow i checked my food for free book find the page that has the arrow on it which is in here somewhere it is in there somewhere i'm not going to bore you by looking for it once i have it identified it in this book which is really nice because it has a mixture of hand-drawn pictures and also photographs which i'll talk a little bit more about in a while he's making a noise behind me thinks a woodpecker so I what was I saying yeah it's got a mixture of the hand Ron Pitts hand-drawn pictures and it's got a photograph to talk like a little bit more so once I found it in there and looks the same in this book I go yeah it looks like that picture well let me just double check and then I will come to some of my other books which I might want to use so this one is a really handy little book on herbs I picked this up for a couple of quid it's a to power 50 this book really nice it's got hand-drawn pictures in it and each plant that's in there has a paragraph and a kind of pay a half a page dedicated to it so that's the her book and then I've also got this enteral handbook which is really useful got a little recipes and stopping at a handful of different bits and pieces and mythology in there so I want to torch a little bit about mythology and folklore about herbs and foraging now mythology & folklore is very important I feel in foraging because it helps us to identify different things and of course the people that wrote these myths and legends

volt laws were using these plants and different bits and pieces on a daily basis so they were event they were very big part of their lives so they would have made these stories or parameters of things and the stories tend to elude towards the various uses that each plan so let me try and think of an example for you things like the king alfred's cakes is a story the guards of the King Alfred cake which is a mushroom use violating now even though the story itself doesn't really relate to it too much doesn't actually doesn't mention the mushroom at all the story of King Alfred cakes is he burnt some cakes now this is important for two reasons in my opinion the more shoes themselves look like little bird cake so it helps to identify them because you can remember in the story he burnt the cakes and they look like burnt pegs it's an easy way to make that connection but also the King Alfred cake is used for fire lighting which is quite interesting because bird cakes on a fire mushing that was the prevaricator you for violating so these things kind of link cook and there's lots and lots of different myths and myths of bulk laws and legends ago with that and you can tend to find them in these these herbal books so this one's the hedgerow handbook recipes remedies are ritual really really nice book now this author has very very beautiful unless just stir this one I've open it the dandelion there's very very nice line and colored a mix of line and color to the pictures in it now how do you choose whether you want a book with photographs or a book with actual hand drawings of them I like to have a mix with me because no two plants of the same specimen are going to look the same so sorry I said that wrong no two plants of the same type a bill that saves the two specimens will look slightly different more not now photograph is really handy because although they look very very similar you can look at the photograph little squirrel you can look at the photograph and you can say yes this looks very very similar however there's a few differences this is with mushrooms as well however what you find with a hand-drawn thing is that it's not a direct copy of a specific specimen it's kind of almost like an archetypal form of the specimen so for example the dandelion picture that I just showed you hasn't been copied from an actual dandelion it's probably been taken from quite a few different types of the underlying to make sure you've got all those distinguishing features in there clearly visible on a photograph you may not necessarily have all of those distinguishing features about it so it's good to have a mix of the two now the books here that I've got the ones I tend to carry around with me if I'm actually going out foraging there's a couple i can leave behind couple of the heavier ones if i'm on a long trip but if i'll actually out specific forage and i'll just walk in the day i'll take them all with me to make sure i can identify stuff and try and learn a bit more however if you pick a particular plan and you're fairly certain what it is don't eat it because fairly certain isn't enough what you should have is a selection of larger more detail books at homes not necessarily one ones that you'll be carrying with you so you can take your specimen think you know where it is and then triple check it when you get home and then only when you are 110% absolutely certain what that is should you eat anything okay even be careful touching some plant some plants are dangerous to talk so take some gloves with your gardening gloves or some of the latex gloves gardening gloves better because some of the plants has to have thorns in them a lot of them do have poisonous or irritant saps in them so please beaker with Aston a couple of the other books are thick with me again going back to mythology stuff I've got this nice little tree in your pocketbook now this book contains information about all the different trees and it also has the organ runes and the runic rooms and an awful lot of mythology and things it was used for and I quite like books that have the runes in the old traditional ways of identifying these plants in them because a lot the plants can be used for for crafting as well it's not just for you know for eating and dying and stuff like that so you can you can keep these books with you so for example later on in the next couple of weeks I'm gonna be making myself a walking stick out of haze or so I've used this book to look at the different types of runes and autumn that goes with the hazel plant from way back in in in traditional industry additional past and you know bushcraft all about crafting things and making things look nice as well so it's a nice little touch another book I've got here which I carry around with me is Ray Mears his wild food it's not the most detailed of books it's very very nicely written and it has other information how to collect together things but the thing I like about this is it it shows you how to produce how to produce certain meals how to prepare them and how to process certain foods that you won't necessarily like to eat so for example the a call and you can't just cook it and eat it because it's gonna make you ill or in this book it shows you and tells you how to process that food and how to eat it and I do recommend actually the wild food series you can get most of that online or you can get the dvds pretty cheap they'll actually fantastic little series another nice look what can I got this flowers book because remember foraging isn't just about berries and herbs flowers can be very very useful as well now the way that this book is arranged because I'm going to talk about how you know how to choose the right book for you the way this one is raised is very very clever the flowers in this book are arranged not by family or type or name they're arranged by color so for example if you find a red flower when you're out about and you're not sure what it is you can get your book go straight to the red bit and then just go through the pictures quickly until you find the one that it is and then as always double check it once you think you've found it etc etc now that's a good where that books arranged however for things like herbs and particularly fungi a good way good type of book to get is one where the same for example the mushrooms are arranged inside the book by their family their kind of genius or family so what that means is instead of trying to learn to identify each individual fungi what you would want to do is try to learn to identify each family of them so look for the features the distinguishing features that are present in all the species of one particular family and then once you've found a mushroom you go oh I know this mushroom is an X family you go to that part in the book find the specific one that is and then you go this mushroom using X family and it is in and it is why mushroom it's edible inedible poised notes etc etc etc and again this brought by Patrick Harding is arrays in that way and it's the way that he taught me to identify things so it's a good way of doing it so yeah it's a clever way of doing it but you know think think what works best for you i find that works the best for me because i don't want a book that's got everything around all of all the fungi arranged by say the size and then i can find the mushroom measure it and then have to flip through hundreds and hundreds of pages if I know that there's about 10 to 20 pages of a specific family of mushroom I can go straight to those 10 to 20 pages flick through them really quickly rather than going having to go through the whole book looking at each individual picture it's just an easy way of doing it again another wildflower book which is again raid had me arranged by a family type solid Colin stem actually these college dem books are fantastically can get your hands on some of these they're great because they fit really nice in the pocket the lightweight the pretty cheap I think most of range from about 5 to 8 pounds i think another all about 5 pounds really really fantastic and again the wildfire walkers are college mates the train going past tell us with my videos to train for running on time what else so the things that you don't want to take with you for foraging now you can do it just to carry a bag that's absolutely fine you're going to want a pair of these a decent pair of gardening gloves for the ones that I use are these nice kind of i'm not sure what type of leather this is actually I think it's possibly pigskin gloves really really soft really comfortable really really hard wearing it looked quite nice the warm in the winter and they cost me seven pounds from Wilkinson's highly recommend these blogs you don't need anything particularly a fantasy don't spend too much money on them because they will get damaged and wrecked mean these used to be white but yeah the gloves are used also you can take your carrier bag out with you I'm not a particularly huge fan of that method however you can get a big bunch carrier bags scrunch them all up shoving me bad they're not going to take much space or boss in a tight situation you can use them to keep all your stuff dry however I tend to take some like leather pouches and bits and pieces with me just to put my forage goods in but all rip what you what you carry them in all really depends on how much you're planning on collecting all the bits and bobs if you really get into it obviously I carry a little nine for me for cutting certain things particularly things like like net plaid me nettles you can also get specialized knives so for example you can get a mushroom knife which has a little brush on it for brushing off dirt particles so you can really have a good look at the mycelium etc on the on the fungi and a nice little post secateurs is pretty good but to be honest a little gardeners makers really all you need it depends it really depends what you're after you'll learn these things as you get into your foraging and of course your books as well make sure that you really know what you're doing you know you make sure you know everything is and please be careful please be really curve when you're foraging plants are just as dangerous as fungi in fact more so than fungi and also it's worth learning the stuff you've you plan on being out about because there are a lot of herbal remedies remedies which are real and they can be used and used to have to take everything in some of the herbal books was a little bit of a pinch of salt but remember our medicine does confirm herbs and plants so you know there is truth in a lot of it Oh Matt all I'd say it's just be careful get out there and enjoy yourself if you can try and get yourself on a foraging course somewhere that's well worth having I mean it's all well and good me teaching you this here but actually having someone in person teaching you how to do things it's far better for anyone I can't I can't really express that any any better on the on the video you know having some wonder teaching it goes for all the things I'm doing here get out and give it a go but if you can get yourself on a course definitely do because it much better to have someone in person showing you things that get on enjoy yourselves and thank you for watching thanks very much guys you