Backyard Plant ID | Part 3/3 | How to Identify Edible and Useful Bushcraft Plants in the Summer

Description

0:01 - Cattail

2:09 - Willow

2:58 - Random Bramble Scramble

3:40 - Plant in the Apacieae family

4:38 - Burdock

6:04 - Woody Nightshade

6:57 - Random Bramble Scramble #2

8:02 - Dogbane

8:55 - Catnip

10:17 - Bloopers

Tags: Plant (Organism Classification),Plant Identification,Botany (Field Of Study),Survival Skills (TV Genre),bushcraft,Knowledge (Quotation Subject),Les Hiddins (TV Personality),Camping (Literature Subject),Outdoor Education (Literature Subject),Outdoor Recreation (Interest),Backpacking (Sport),Hiking (Sport),how to identify plants,Edible Mushroom (Food),edible plants,wild edibles,Wild Food (TV Program),bushcraft plants,cordage,medicinal plants

Video Transcription

things are a little more open here and there's a ditch here where water has collected which is ideal for the growth of this cattail plant none of the distinctive heads are at well there's some back here but this plant is super useful unfortunately less so in suburban areas than it is in the wild but all this in the early spring will have a lot of yellow pollen and you can take that it's very powdery and you can just use it like any other sort of flour or meal just mix it with water make some dough and also in the spring the bottoms of the stalks if you pull them up let me show you here there's plenty of this stuff growing everywhere and cat tail is a sign of a weaker wetland so it's not too huge of a deal to pull one but you can see that it's got this beautiful white part and this is just really delicious but I'm not going to eat it here because if you smell it you can almost smell the chemical of like pesticides and other things that I've run off from everyone's lawns and from the roads into this ditch and I've actually tried tasting this before and you can tell that it's got like a almost a spiciness to it that's very unnatural but in the wild it tastes really good kind of like heart of palm really a huge shame that you can't eat it here but in the fall you can dig up the rhizomes that are further down below the plant and eat those as well and of course the cattail heads during the winter in the fall become Brown and you can break them up when they become really fluffy that's just perfect tinder and the best part is that when you get those you also get these all dried up and that makes a great kindling for a flyer too so an extremely useful plant but unfortunately even though it's very commonly grown here there's not much you can do with the other than making fire wish I could eat it now if you were to eat that you might develop a headache or something but luckily this tree willow the bark of this tree is actually the basis for aspirin so the modern medicine you take now is based on this tree and if you choose some of it you'll still get that effect it sort of tastes like the pill and it'll relieve any headaches or any pain you have let least some of it it's really beautiful it's also worth mentioning that willow is often a good wood for fire spindles and earth boards because it's sort of a softer wood anyway I guess we'll keep going by carefully separating the bark from the wood you can also carve young willow branches into whistles but they'll stop working after one day there's some sort of ramble fruit growing back here and none of them are really ripe but this is the most ripe now based on what it looks like when you take it off this is a blackberry they also tend to have larger little nodules but uh when you take a blackberry off the plan a little tip of the stem will stay inside of the fruit whereas with raspberries it'll be hollow inside when you pick it but uh I guess I'll give this a try really quick are you good still place our because it's under right foot really juicy an impression so these are the seed pods of another plant with a numba love flowers similar to the wild carrot we saw earlier and this could be cow parsnip it could be a hog we'd both of which are not good to touch and really poisonous to eat or it could be a wild parsnip which is still sort of irritating if you touch it but has an edible root and one of the ways you can tell is that cow parsnip and hog we'd have white flowers while wild parsnip has yellow flowers and there's some other coloration issues with the stem that you can look at but a right now it's gone sort of round so it's not of much use but basically when I see plants like this I try to tend to stay away because a lot of times there's too much room for confusion and the toxic variance of the plants are just too toxic to bother with there's a lot of ways to distinguish all these different plants but we'll talk about that in another video over here though is a pretty safe plant and it you can see it has this really long stalk with these little brambles these burrs that stick to your clothes sometimes when you go walking through the woods in the fall you'll just come out with tons of these on you this is called burdock and really the most distinctive feature is probably the huge leaves now this plant in particular is the second year plan burdock is a biennial plant so in its first year it'll just have a bunch of basil leaves growing out at the bottom coming out from the same area in the ground but its second year the leaves will come out from this long stalk that grows now you can't eat the bottom of this stock at least when it's a bit younger and it's pretty good kind of crunchy almost like celery like but when you want to eat the route you have to go for a first year plan so you're looking for a plant that does not have the stalk it just has a bunch of big leaves at the bottom it's a bit tough to dig up but you get a decent sized root and you can either clean it and cook the whole thing or you can peel the rind off and eat it you can eat it raw cooked anything and they actually sell variants of this in the Japanese market and we've made stir fry with it's got a very crunchy taste and it has kind of a woody taste so it's maybe not the best flavor for some people but it's quite good I think now this I know that these berries look really good looks kind of like tomatoes or something and these flowers look so beautiful too with the yellow and the purple but this is called woody nightshade and if you were to eat it it'd be really really toxic potentially fatal even and of course there's plants in a similar genus or in the same genus called a deadly nightshade and if you get any of that you'll just pretty much died are those in the same thing is bell peppers cuz bell peppers and tomatoes are both nightshades yeah yeah it's the same family as tomatoes which makes it extra difficult there's another plant called a horse nettle which also has a similar growing fruit and it's also really bad to eat

um so yeah just look at it with your eyeballs but not your tongue now here's another strange plant and the stem is kind of a segmented it's got a very distinct like sides to it and thorns and it's got these oddly shaped five Leafs with thorns on the bottom this is another plant in the genus rubus actually so it'll grow a lot of these similar bramble fruits like blackberries and raspberries there's none on it right now but if there were I would probably eat them there are some over here that are still a bit under ripe but and it looks like these are also blackberries based on how they're coming off of the plant but uh unfortunately I'm not spotting any ones that are ripe so I guess I won't be having any fruit today I'm gonna end the video with two plants now I don't own any pets I don't know any dogs or cats and plants are much easier to tend especially when they grow in the wild because you don't have to do anything but the first plant is called dog vein and it almost resembles milkweed but it's got all these branches coming off and it's got this really red stem and when you break the leaves it's got a milky sap as you can see coming out of there and the outer fibres of this are actually really strong and flexible so in the summertime when you break it you can make cord out of that and actually in the fall when this turns brown you can peel that off and sort of scrape the inner fibers and spin those into string as well really good plant but for for all you feline lovers out there there's another plant down this trail that you'll likely be familiar with until then you can see some more of these elderberries and things like that but this here it's called catnip and it's just growing out here in the wild and it's got actually a very minty smell it's kind of like mint mix with a skunk very potent smell and if you dry this up and feed it to your cat you'll start a hallucinating and getting all high and probably start listening to acoustic guitar music or something but it's really fun to watch so unfortunately I don't think humans can use it in any way like that or maybe fortunately depending on how you feel but uh it's just pretty incredible that this random hedge along a path and a railroad just in the middle of Suburbia have so many different uses so you've got your food you've got your medicine and you've got plants for tools and shelter I could just live out here maybe hop on the railroad and travel around once in a while but until then I'll see you next

now this is actually a toxic plant but there's something called that's okay there's just this long hedge that goes along this path and adjacent to a railroad is this nice beautiful hedge which is also adjacent till real and we actually already you