The Elder tree in Summer

Description

the elder tree in summer. for more information please go to www.forresterbushcraft.wordpress.com

Tags: YouTube Editor,elder,foraging,trees,tree identification,bushcraft,bush craft,ray mears,Forestry (FGDC Keyword),survival,food for free,gardening,mycology,mushrooms,edible,Edible Mushroom (Ingredient),seasons,camping,scouts,Sambucus (Organism Classification),Summer (Literature Subject),Garden

Video Transcription

hi there guys a slightly different type of video to what I normally do today what the plan is for this is I'm going to be doing a series of videos on trees and plants have different uses within bushcraft survival throughout the year so and we're a start today using the elder tree and it's in summer so the old tree quite a commentary in the UK really easy easy to identify and that's why I'm going to start with it now to start with and will tell you kind of were to find it the elder tree can grow pretty much anywhere it's quite Hardy kind of tree or shrub but the easiest place to spot it and the place it seems for further most tends to be places like where I am now the edges of paths and fields all roads so I'm gonna get the camera to just pan around quickly for you to have a look at where I am now I'm not sure whether you can make out in that paneling because it is getting quite dark where I am there's quite a lot of elder trees around this area the reason to pick out if you're looking around a field because of these brilliant white flowers they've got which I'll talk a bit a little bit more about now so I'm going to go into how we identify them so nail the tree it's a broadleaf deciduous tree and in the summertime it's dead easy to pick out because it has these bunches of quite bright white flowers and they have about five petals on each flower arranged this star shape with these like sticky up little stamens there and you can see them from quite distance the leaves it's a broadleaf deciduous tree is not just mentioned the kind of shape of an arrow head or a spear tip and they grow in pers opposite each other and there's usually one at the end as you can see now we've got four opposite each other and one here but the elder tree can also grow in bunches of seven so you've got six leaves opposite each other and then one on the end the bark of the elder tree is kind of this greenie sorry grey kind of creamy novel e color you can feel it is quite rough this is the secondary growth the tree this is when the woods formats Bart properly and it started to go hard on younger trees or trees earlier in the season you can see the branches going really really straight and they're really really green they still have the Naga bits on and they're quite sort of soft so the use of the street there's loads and loads of them at this time of year the main use is the flowers the flowers a brilliant they're completely out of all you can eat them straight off the tree personally I'm not overly fond of them done this way you can cook them in kind of a fritter you can make elderflower cordial out of them the recipe for that will be on my blog which is Forrester dot WordPress sorry let me try that again it's forest of bushcraft wordpress.com and i'll put a link up in the video for that for you so we can make elderflower call it up and you can eat the straight way you can make fritters out them you can even make champagne out of them I hadn't tried that myself yet but that's on my list of to do's this year so other uses it's not just good for food as I said a moment ago the word of this tree can quite often grow really really straight this is quite an old now while it's quite quite been DB we found a young tree the branches grow really restrict this is fantastic because you can use it as a brilliant drill for using a hand drill set when you are doing your friction fire lighting and i'll go into on the blog how to make your own kit and how to actually do that i'll do a separate video for violating another thing that this tree is fantastic for is there's a particular type of mushroom that grows on this tree all year round so i'm going to do now is I'm going to go off and find one that has these mushrooms growing on it and I'll do a little separate video showing you how to find these Muslims on what to do with them okay so I've kind of ventured into the bush a bit more here into the side of the road I am still by a path and I'm not in the middle of no way that might look like it all its foliage behind me and what I've got here this is quite an old elder tree it's an elder elder if you will and on the rotting parts of this tree there are these little tiny little sticking out things they look like shriveled up little ears now when it's really sunny it's been really hot these things here dry up quite a lot and they go quite hard however they're quite easy to pull off and actually this is quite a good time to collect them when they dry like this although it does make them hard to spot okay so looking at this it doesn't look very appetizing but what you can do is if you put this in a bowl of warm or for about 20 minutes this thing will actually swell up and be huge and it's perfectly perfectly good to eat again I'll put some recipes open things what you can actually do with it because eating on its own it's not brilliant it's not the best texture in the texture in the world but we're a warning if you are going to come out foraging please do not use this video as an indefinite guide don't look at this video and go yes I can go out and identify that thing please just take this as an inspiration go out and get yourself a good book or get yourself on some where wild food course is plenty of them available because this stuff is dangerous these are very very easy to identify I would recommend if you get yourself a book look these ears up in your mushroom book and then go out and try and have a gold findings on there quite easy to find but there are things that look like this which can be potentially quite harmful to you so please please be careful and the same goes for getting the Elder flowers even though they're quite obvious you see a lot them around there are other types of flour which looks similar and sometimes grow in the same place as the elder trees and one of these is the hemlock plan you really do not want to be mixing up your elder flower in your hemlock ok so thanks for watching and I will be back talking to you about the elder tree next season thank