Hey welcome to UK Wildcrafts. This here is horseradish best known for its hot and peppery
root for making horseradish sauce this time of year in spring we're after the younger leaves.
Horseradish can be found on any patch of waste ground building site or roadside but
it's especially common around the coast in amongst the sand dunes.
Horseradish has long narrow quite elongated leaves and they have quite a crinkly texture
and a narrowly toothed margin
they've got quite a wavy edge especially on really young leaves they can be almost folded over.
They can be quite easily mistaken for a dock the leaves do superficially look quite similar
but with horseradish the leaves grow almost vertically up
straight out of the the root that's just under the surface
and they're a bit of a lighter green as well.
So once you've spotted horseradish a few times it will really start to stand out
it's leaves are standing straight up and a lighter green.
If you crush the leaves and smell them you'll get a mild smell
of horseradish if you've ever had the horseradish sauce you'll recognise it straight away, or if you
get on the leaves and break it off near the base of the plant
and smell the liquid that comes out there that's quite a stronger smell of horseradish there.
The root itself is best harvested in late autumn to winter after the leaves have died back and
after you've had a bit of a frost it makes the taste of the horseradish a bit stronger.
Here's a good sort of place to look for horseradish in amongst
bits of waste ground where it's just grass hogweed and cow parsley growing
you will often find horseradish there, you can see all the leaves standing vertically up
all throughout this grass here is
horseradish.
So i said before it's quite easy to mistake horseradish for dock so here's a dock here
and you can see that the leaves don't grow as vertically up they just kind of
lap over and they're a duller green,
I mean dock leaves are edible anyway so it's not a huge problem if you mistake them it's just when
they get to this size they're really bitter and they're not very good to eat like that
i'll try and do a video on the root a bit later in the year
for now as we're in May i'm just collecting up these nice younger leaves.
These are good around April/May time before they start getting too large and then they get bitter,
and these are good just really finely shredded and added into a stir fry as a
peppery mustardy sort of green.