For the last month
I have foraged 100 percent
of my food from the land.
Every single bite.
Now in order to create a complete diet
and really reconnect with the Earth
and my plant friends,
I foraged about 100 different plants
as food and medicine.
Today I am going to introduce you
to about 40 of the plants
that I connected with over the last month.
Pile of manure: growing next to it,
wintercrest, land crest, creasy greens,
goes by many names,
but by all names: scrumptious.
Kousa dogwood,
delicious.
Wild rice, manomen, the food that grows on water.
I give so much gratitude
to the Anishinaabe people
who have been
the stewards of this wonderful food
for hundreds or thousands of years.
Without their knowledge
and their stewardship
this is a plant friend that I would not have.
This is my absolute staple,
both to my soul and to my body,
as it is the main source of calories
for my month of eating 100 percent from the land.
This is ginkgo.
I am harvesting the fruits and the nuts.
Goldenrod in the golden hour.
This is a wonderful all-around medicinal plant.
to make medicinal teas from.
A bounty of black walnuts in the parking lot,
ready for the picking.
Cleavers,
one of the ways you can identify this
is if you throw it at your chest,
it often sticks.
Just like that.
Cleavers are edible.
Creeping Charlie
people consider this to be
a noxious pest of a plant,
but it is a wonderful medicinal and edible.
Crab apples
much to many people's disbelief,
they are not poisonous.
Some crab apples taste amazing,
others kind of crabby.
All of them worth a try.
Chickweed
You know it is chickweed
because on the alternating sides
there is this little row of hairs
and it tastes like sweet corn.
Chicken of the Woods
one of the most popular
and exciting mushrooms to find.
Chestnuts
I consider them sort of like a potato
in the sense that they are calorically dense
and take very little processing work.
Hey look, I found some false strawberry.
Now, it is not a false strawberry.
It is a thing of its own.
It looks like a strawberry,
but it does not have the delicious
taste of a strawberry.
Still worth eating though.
Echinacea
I use the flowers and leaves
to make an immune boosting tea.
Ground cherries, which are a wonderful treat to find.
They grow in these husks,
just like tomatillos do.
They are quite the treat.
Ho Ho!
Here we have hawthorne,
which looks a lot like rose hips,
but I really prefer them to rose hips.
Hawthorne can vary a lot from tree to tree.
Some are incredible.
This one, it is all right.
Hen of the Woods or maitaki
a great edible mushroom
and a great medicinal.
Hackberry is a sweet fruit on the outside
and a crunchy seed on the inside.
Jewelweed, watch the seeds explode.
Autumn berries,
these are considered highly invasive
so eating them is good for our ecosystems.
Smartweed is another really edible weed.
It is also called ladyfinger
because it has these smudges
on the leaf that looks kind of like a fingerprint.
Lamb's Quarter
one of my favorite greens
and a weed in every city.
Mustard seeds
with this I can make my own mustard
or just add some real nice spice to my meals.
Mint, my spirit plant.
It makes a refreshing, minty water.
This is one food that is growing everywhere
It is mulberry
growing out of the cracks
here in urban New York City.
Most people know
that the wonderful berries are delicious,
but the young and tender greens
also incredibly nutritious.
This is mugwort.
I use this as part of my sleepy time
tea blend that I make.
A plant that looks like it is ragweed
and this has a silvery under leaf and also
ah a really nice smell.
Mullen
tea and soft toilet paper.
If it smells like onion
and it tastes like onion, it is onion.
This is all onion
This is plantago
and there are two species,
plantago major and plantago minor.
This is the broadleaf plantain
and the other is narrow leaf plantain.
These leaves are very nutritious.
They are an edible,
and they are a medicinal.
Something I like to make from this is a poultice.
So if I am stung by a bee, a honeybee,
because I am a beekeeper,
I will chew up some of these leaves
and stick that where I have been stung
and that actually helps
when you have skin irritation
from insects that have stung you.
That is called a poultice.
This is poke or pokeweed.
It is one of my favorite greens.
This is a toxic one that you have to cook.
You only eat this
when it is in its meristematic growth stage.
Not when the leaves are flat,
but when the leaves are still pointed upwards
and they are young and tender.
It is not a banana.
It is not a mango.
It is a pawpaw.
It is a true treat of the woods.
You can tell when pawpaw is ripe
by poking it with your finger.
If it pushes in just like an avocado
when an avocado is ripe,
that is how you know.
Poor Man's Pepper
but my friend Eric Joseph Lewis
taught me to call it rich man's pepper.
It makes a great pepper substitute.
Sochan,
if you want to eat a lot of greens
this is the green for you.
Stinging nettle
the stings are medicinal
and the food is wonderful.
Shag bark hickory
for making hickory nut milk.
Violet, which is very mild
and makes a great base for a salad.
Wild Water
bubbling up from the earth
Wild pears
I do not find a lot of these trees
compared to apples,
but when I do,
they are abundant.
Acorns
how you eat them,
is you have to remove the tannins.
you can do that through a hot water bath
or cold water bath
leeching out the tannins
and then you get an acorn mash.
You can dry that into an acorn flour.
The acorn also produces the acorn grub,
a tasty little treat.
That is a pretty typical size for acorn grubs.
Rich acorny nuttiness;
that is good grub.
The everyday, very usual
and quite abundant, wild chives.
to be picked from front yards
parks and wild spaces all across the land.
Here, the dandelion stands.
It is an incredibly resilient plant.
The leaves are edible.
The flowers are edible.
The stem is also edible.
The milk inside of that, edible.
The roots are edible as well.
Young and tender amaranth
a nutritious and tasty green.
Here we have Doc
The leaves of doc can be delicious,
or they can be downright terrible.
You will learn the different docs.
This is the seed head here.
Often people will use these making crackers.
The root of doc can also be roasted
just like you would with dandelion
to make a root tea.
After having apples straight from the land
a grocery store apple
just feels like a vessel full of water.
Apples were one of my absolute staples.
Harvesting dozens and dozens of them,
sometimes shaking them down from the trees
and harvesting the bounty,
and other times just picking them.
My favorite thing to make from apples
is of course applesauce.
Eating applesauce every day.
Growing up, I ate blackberries and raspberries.
I did not even consider it foraging.
It was just picking berries.
It is one of the most common things
that people forage.
Right here, I am with blackberry.
This is one of the bramble berries
which includes blackberry, raspberry,
black raspberry, thimbleberry, salmon berry.
There are more.
Not only are the berries edible on these plants,
but you can make tea from the leaf.
Raspberry leaf tea is
the most popular of all of them.
The time that you want to do it
is when the leaves are young and tender.
That is going to make the best tea.
Aronia or sometimes called chokeberry,
not choke cherry, chokeberry.
The best way to work with it
is to make a very nutritious, rich juice.
This is a very commonly found landscaping plant,
so it is perfect for urban foragers.
Butternut
a lot like walnut, but it is a butternut.
Different flavor, different shape, but very similar.
Black Nightshade
few edible plants create so much fear.
This is a plant that millions believe is deadly,
yet millions and millions of people have eaten
both the leaves and the fruits
as staple food for the last hundreds
or thousands of years.
Black nightshade berries are incredibly delicious.
I enjoy them thoroughly.
Yet for me to explore
is eating the young and tender greens,
but again, something that millions
of people around the world enjoy.
Food and medicine is growing
freely and abundantly all around us.
These plant relatives,
they are just waiting for us to create
relationships with them
that will help us break free
from the global industrial food system
and live in a more harmonious way
with the Earth, with humanity,
and with all of our plant and animal relatives.
It starts by learning just one plant at a time.
Who knows, maybe one day
you will never have to take a trip
to the grocery store again.
Oh my God.
That tree is loaded.