How to Eat Wild California Bay Laurel
Hi I’m Feral Kevin and this is our herb walk and today its late April and we’re here with an unusual form of the California Bay Tree, ubellularia californica. Bill Moe once was said that everything gardens, chickens garden, mammals of all sorts, mice, squirrels, birds they all garden and deer garden too and this is what I call a deer garden because a deer like the fresh, only the fresh growth of the bay when its reddish like this and actually its good for us to eat too, I’ve been munching for it too and it seems I cant stop because its so tasty so the deer keep this, it’s a very small bush here and they keep it prune by eating on it constantly and so in this essence they are gardening because not only that they keep it from getting from this big tree when they cant reach the leaves but they also stimulate all these new growth constantly by pinching it off, so the reason it looks like this way and the reason there’s so much food on here for the form of this fresh red leaves is because of the deer that’s, like I said, I call it the deer garden. Another really interesting thing about this plant, its closely related to Sassafras, plant which is an east coast native and Sassafras, of course is what root beer comes from that’s the root beer flavoring, cause you actually use the Sassafras’ root, well this fresh red leaves on the bay tree taste a lot like root beer, so some kids would actually call this form of the bay tree, they call it the root beer plant. So what we’re gonna do here today is we’re gonna pinch off a lot of this growth, this nice reddish growth and we’re gonna put it in a bag, take it home and we’re gonna make what I called the leaf beer or California root beer. Thanks for joining me, see you next time