Hi, I’m Tim MacWelch, of earth connections school of wilderness survival and ancient skills. This is our series on how to survive in the outdoors. In this clip were going to talk about wild anima; plants, How to identify and harvest safe wild plant food.
Before we get started I want to talk about some harvesting guidelines, these are very important rules and ideas to consider when you’re out looking for wild plant foods.
The first and most important guideline is that you have a positive identification of that plant, tree, or shrub with a good reputable field guide, even better yet a couple of field guides across reference together. You definitely want to make a 100% certain that the plant you’re looking at really is the plant in the book that says you can eat it.
Other guidelines you may want to consider would be to harvest from safe clean areas, you don’t want to harvest under power lines, next to old roads or train tracks, as these areas may have contaminated soil. We also only want to harvest one plant at the time, and try one new plant at a time because we don’t know what were allergic to until we had it for the first time.
You may also want to eat your first new wild plant food in very reasonable and small amount. Another guideline to consider is to harvest only abundant plants; you don’t want to be the very last of the edible plant in any region. You also want to consider cooking, water level where under water plant parts, for example if we have water crest salad, or some cocktail roots from a swamp. These water plants could have water born pathogens like viruses, bacteria and protozoa, on them more even in them. So its always washed to cook water level or under water plant parts before we eat them.
This shrub is called autumn olive, it’s also known as Russian Olive. And this little red berries are edible to people either in their raw form or cooked. You want to make certain that you’re positively identifying this shrub but the fact that the smaller red berries have little tan or grayed dots covering them, if we squish them open we will have one single yellowish tan seed inside, and our shrub has single simple leaves in an alternating branch pattern.
So these are all factors that we can use to identify plants. We look at the leaves, how it is shaped, do they have teeth on the edges? What is their branching pattern, do they grow out alternating in a zigzag pattern? One leaf and then another zigzagging up and down the twigs, or do they have an opposite branching pattern with the leaves and branches and twigs grow out opposite to each other like arms in the body.
This is a Virginia Pine, the needles of this pine and all other species of pine, in the Genous Pinus can be used in the same way. We can crush these needles up, and soak them in hot water, and make a vitamin c rich pine needle tea, which doesn’t taste too bad either.
We could also just chew these needles if we were not able to make tea if we had no fire, we could just chew the needles for Vitamin C supplement. These are Black Walnuts, inside of this husk that looks like a citrus fruit going bad is a hard little black nut shell, and inside that is some delicious high fat, high protein mineral rich nut meat. So first we get the husk of the outside, then we crack open the extremely hard nut shell. And there inside is the delicious white nut meat. Just white nut meat of black walnut. Now these are just a few of the wild plant foods that are available in the autumn.
Proper identification with a good field guide can take you to every season, and you can find wild salads in the spring, you can find rich nourishing vegetables in the summer time, you can find a wealth of nuts and berries in the fall, and even in the death of winter, you can still find edible roots, shoots tubers and little tiny salads, growing in protective spots out of the frost and out of the cold, but again the most important thing you need to think about which wild plant foods is positive identification with a good reputable field guide.
Now that we have talk about wild plant foods, were going to talk about what to put in a survival kit.
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