Wild Food Foraging- Season 3- Milkweed, Tree Cambium, Fiddlehead, Pine, Cattail, Evergreens, Birch

Been half Native American ( Creek Indian ) your foraging is TRULY ON POINT you have great knowledge & great video Brother I’m TRULY enjoying watching them‼️

I always loved collecting ripe but not blown cattail heads. We'd get them, put them inside an empty cloth pillow, and strip the fluff from the stem. The fluff would explode into a lovely lofty down, and you could keep inserting cattail heads and stripping them till you had a pillow to your firmness preference, then stitch it up. When the pillow started to get lumpy and not comfortable, or smelly, you pick the seams, empty out the fluff into your compost, or just let the birds have it for nesting, and after washing and drying the pillow material, do it again.

We have milkweed growing in our front 'ditch' garden. What many people do not know, is that milkweed flowers have a VERY strong, beautiful scent. We can smell them in the house for months -- and the monarchs are a big bonus.

Milkweed used to grow in our backyard before we moved. Whenever I didn’t want to go to school, I would break off a piece of that plant and rub it all over me to make me have a reaction. Now that I am 16, and not 8, in retrospect that was not a good idea.At least it worked.

Beautiful I've never found anyone to break this down the way you have. As I have just found this channel I believe I'm going to stick with it for a while and see what I can learn. Earlier you were talking cattails. I have eaten Cattails raw and they have a slight cucumber flavor at least to me. I have drank the white pine tea and to me it has a mild turpentine flavor. As far as the fiddleheads, I have eaten raw fiddleheads and they have a very slight Walnut flavor to me and they done me no harm. I'm 71 years old and I know quite a bit about wild edibles which I'm just starting to teach my grandson. Part of this video is going to be a treat for him. I may know somewhat about wild edibles but I still love learning things that I don't know because the more I learned the more he learns and that is my goal in life. Thanks for the video please have a great day and stay safe and keep your powder dry and your sap running!

Most important statement in this video: “Just because you read about it on line, or see some guy on YouTube eating a wild edible does not mean you should take them for their word”. I’m sick of other you tubers touting some nonsense as definite fact.

Simply outstanding presentation...Absolutely the best presentation I have seen on YouTube...your attention to such detailed photography and your clear explanations are a cut above...thank you very, very much...

Milk weed flowers also smell soooo nice! Like strong lilac.

This is what kids should be learning in school. Very important

I loved that you included that the finns used cambium to make bread! It was called "Pettuleipä" in our language!!

You could save someone's life with this info. too many people starve to death in the woods, surrounded by food. The info isn't taught any more and should be.

My husband and I recently became the caretakers of a cottage of the Northumberland Straight, Nova Scotia. Back in the woods, we have just about every plant mentioned in this video. Excited to try everything! Thank you for your knowledge and videos.

Awesome video, if your not a narrator by profession, you could be.

I used to us that “milk” from milkweeds as glue when I was a kid I would try to glue rocks together with that stuff It didn’t work lmao

Very well presented and informative video. Thanks, mate. I grew up in the Australian bush and I often saw the local native people harvesting sap fro native trees, like gum trees and wattle, but I never knew what they used it for. Possibly for other uses, too,not only as medicine or food. I also saw little native children sucking nectar out of a local Australia shrugged b called the "Bottle Brush" because it looks like a bottle cleaning brush, typically in shades of red. And once I saw such little native kids quickly scale a tall Eucalypt where they had spotted a parrot family of Crimson Rosellas nested each year. Mother parrot had just fed her babies on nectar from flowers she had gathered. So the little native kids felt entitled to also get some, as they love anything sweet. So they grabbed the baby birds, tipped them upside down with beaks open, so the nectar their mum had just fed them flowed out of their mouths and straight into the mouths of these little native kids. I couldn't believe the ease and dexterity they innocently did this in. "Hey, you! Leave them poor babies alone, they're little and hungry... " I yelled at these kids. "So are we... There's heaps more trees out there she can get food from... Grubs, worms, bull ants..." They had a point. There was any dant food in the bush, if you knew what you could or could not safely eat. They obviously instinctively knew that, if baby birds didn't die from what their mother had put into their mouths, neither would they if they took it straight out of the baby birds and put it into theirs. They seemed blissfully unaware of serious diseases that migratory birds in Australia, which can come from as far away as Siberia, in the northern hemisphere, can carry, when they come here to mate and return. These northern hemisphere ones are probably OK but there are many beautiful exptic species coming down from places like tropical areas, that could be bringing in diseases we cannot control. They don't go through Customs or respect any Covid lockdown travel restricts. They just fly in and out as they wish. And yet, despite all these potential health hazards from eating wild food and extreme wilderness survival etc, the Australian natives are the old surviving people's on earth, been around for about 70, 000 years and still here, though attempts to integrate them into white western society eg eating all our sugary, over processed foods, artificial drugs, alcohol etc kills them more than any previous very harsher life they lived, surviving by hunting and wild plant food, insects, reptiles etc they could catch, often in a very barren, hostile natural environment, with everything in nature ready to attack, eat, poison, hunt every other species in the competition for survival in a harsher environment. This sort of information you present is very useful to know because one never knows when it could come in handy. Like when those two dudes who decided to go on their last big adventure trip and died in the Canadian wilderness, after their killing spree. Had they know about extreme wilderness survival, they might have been able to enjoy their adventure trip with no need to go on a killing spree and then die of starvation themselves. I am sure there were enough beetles, insects, pine needles and Cambria, fiddlesticks ferns, Milkwood etc they could have eaten to remain alive on. A guy in Australia did this once, and remained alive a long time in the forest, just eating whatever he could forage in the wilderness, completely alone and nothing else, no outside help. It's possible. Re the clever girl Monarch Butterfly who is very fussy about her diet and very beautiful, watching her beauty and figure, by only eating Milkwood, I like the way she keeps herself safe from predators. By ingesting the plants poison which basically gives others a clear message to not mess with her. I wish we human females could find something we could eat that produces a very toxic "defence chemical" to quickly and automatically kill any rapists, murderers, domestic violence perpetrators etc on contact... (But not harm the good men...). I wonder if the lady Monarch's poison hurts male Monarch butterflies wanting to court her for her beauty? Maybe it kills them, too and, like the male spider, the male Monarch butterfly must die after mating and ends up eaten by his true lady love butterfly, so she can lay eggs etc and keep the life cycle going. Someone has to stick around to keep things going, lay the eggs, produce the next generation...

Hi, one small correction: neither the Yew, nor the Norfolk Island Pine are related to the Pinus genera, although they are evergreen. The best part of the pine, for me, is the candles that grow on the tips of the outer branchlets in late spring. Just eat them raw. The best way I have found to harvest cattails is to get them before they grow more than a foot tall. Also, the rhizome can be roasted on the grill. Don`t worry about the outer part getting burned, it`s the inner part you`re after. Thanks, enjoy your channel.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Monarchs in Maryland are drastically disappearing. I've planted milkweed in my yard to help the Monarch population.

Fiddle heads are amazing when first par-boiled in salt water, then pan fried with lemon zest, minced garlic, butter, salt and freshly ground pepper

This is the most useful video I’ve seen on YouTube. And I‘m very surprised how it’s underrated.

"What part of the cattail is your favourite to use?" - I love the tender flower part at the top - not the part that turns brown but when past ready, it is the part that turns to fluff before the bottom section that turns brown. Boiling these tops (after removing the husk like you do corn) in water, then rolling them in butter (salt n pepper to taste) then eaten like corn (the core is too hard - like eating a stick). Taste reminds me of asparagus. When the tops have split their husks already & have started turning yellow with pollen, shake these into a container. The pollen is delish mixed with eggs. Gives them a slightly nutty flavour. The pollen can't be stored for long though, it will turn to fluff in a matter of days if not frozen to keep longer. The young new shoots that have not broke the water surface yet and still only the size of your thumb or smaller attached to the root is very good too. Great vid by the way. I like how you actually show people you are eating this stuff. It is one thing to say "this is edible" but entirely another thing to show people and actually do it.