Backyard Plant ID | Part 1/3 | How to Identify Edible and Useful Bushcraft Plants in the Summer

Description

Andrew takes a walk down a bike path and looks at all of the diverse bushcraft and edible plants.

0:45 - Pokeweed

1:10 - Curly Dock

1:32 - Thistle

2:23 - Queen Anne's Lace/Wild Carrot

4:07 - Stinging Nettle

5:42 - Jewel Weed

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

Video Transcription

we're on this bike path and it's about a quarter of a mile to the road just as long stretch and all along the path is this beautiful hedge that runs adjacent to a railroad and it's amazing because you think that a hedge in the middle of a suburban area would just be you know nothing too interesting maybe a lot of exotic plants but this is full of a lot of really useful interesting bushcraft plants so let's take a look so the most notable one right here is this huge plant with these big red stems and these interesting sort of pumpkin shaped berries almost and this is called pokeweed now it's actually a toxic plant but you can make a dish out of it called poke salad and the way you do this is you take the leaves you have to take them while they're still young and they don't have any red on the stem but you take them and you boil them three times over and this will get rid of any of the toxins inside and there's a similar plant over here you can see it's got these sort of reddish seeds coming off of it and there's also these sort of wrinkly leaves and what this is is called curly dock in similar to the poke sallet it's got toxins it's got a lot of oxalic acid in it but if you boil it three times over you can eat the leaves so just above it is this plant which is a thistle and the most obvious way to tell is it's got these leaves with a bunch of thorns coming off of them but right now it's growing all these fluffy seeds and this is fantastic tinder it'll catch a spark and just light instantly I'll give a really quick demonstration here

so just in this little spot you've got a plant to start the fire and a plant to cook over it now there's another edible plant here commonly known as Queen Anne's lace also called wild carrot now the trouble with this is that it looks extremely similar to another plant called poison hemlock and I think you can guess that you don't want to eat that but there are some key ways to tell the difference first of all is if you look around you'll find some flowers have this little tiny purple flower in the center here and also with wild carrot the stems sort of have this hairiness on it so you can pull up the root and just eat that so this is a plant that I've definitely identified as wild carrot and you really want to be sure and I'm just gonna try and tug on this route until it comes out see if maybe I can loosen it up a bit there we go really small for how big the plant was but it is a wild carrot after all just take this off let's get the knife out

it's kind of got this rind on it you can peel away that way you can get rid of the dirt quite easily let's give it a try it even has a slight carrot smell but woody or maybe but see how it is the root tasted woody and wasn't possible to eat it's better to eat these in the fall but if you don't know for sure what plant you're looking at it's not worth the risk so over here is one of my favorite plants and I'm being sincere about that it is one of my favorites this is the stinging nettle many of you might actually already know about this but there's tiny little hairs on it and if you brush up against it the right way it'll inject this chemical inside of you and it hurts like hell and it sort of makes your skin bubble up a little bit but the pain is temporary and if you grasp the plant firmly enough it won't affect you but the beautiful thing about this is these leaves are actually edible you just pick them and you can soak them in the water for 10 minutes to get rid of the hairs and then you can either boil it stir fry it or you can even just take the whole plant and roast it over a fire and let me tell you this is really delicious i actually prefer to spinach in a lot of other leafy greens that you can find in the store some of the ways to identify other than the stinging hairs are these leaves they have these very distinct serrations and also the stem sort of has a square shape it kind of looks like four columns that are arranged in a square let me show you what I mean if you cut the stem you can see that it's sort of a square shape made up of these four different columns around it stinging nettle also has strong fibers that can be spun into cordage the beautiful thing is that right next to all those stinging nettles is this plant which is jewelweed and if you get stung by the nettle you can just take a piece of this stem and just rub it on where you were stung I got a little bit on my finger here so you just sort of rub the juices that are in the stem onto the affected area and it'll soothe it really elegant plant and they've got some beautiful flowers down here too and this one also has a seed pod and when you touch these they just pop like bubble wrap there's no need for water this time though our thirst was quenched in our spirits were filled we hiked across the fields making our way to a distant evergreen forest