nettles are surprisingly high in protein. finding fats and oils is the hard one. i spent 6 months in in a tiny tent in the mountains back in my youth surviving on a homemade muesli. oats, nuts, dried whole milk, whey and dried fruit. i caught trout, ate a few grasshoppers, collected pig nuts, visited the coast for a day or two of silverweed, lush mussels, winkles, urchin roe. sand dabs roasted with wild parsnip, dulse, and samphire. still had to buy oil/fat to thrive
I remember reading that while Modern people are trained to avoid fat ,back in Medieval times paradise was sometimes seen as a place where edible fat was everywhere.lol.
@@clairv.74 This! I wish life was still like this. It's My dream to buy a piece of land and go back to living a simpler and more fulfilling life, one were I ain't overworking Myself just to make someone else rich, while barely being able to scrape by Myself. I'd rather work Toward My benefit, not someone else's, especially someone who wouldn't even know My name.
I was stationed in Northern Germany in early 90s, and the nearby city had a day of mourning for elderly man who passed, at the end of WW2 when there was no food, he knew about edible plants that grew there. He foraged and taught others how to so so, and identify edible plants. He is credited with stopping a famine.
When I was a boy in the 1940s and 1950s because of WW2 and the shortages that lasted until about the mid 1950s (officially in some places 1954), everyone foraged, grew gardens, hunted, reused virtually everything. I remember seeing tin cans made into useable items and vividly remember tin can lids used to cover holes in fences and walls when we went to town which was a rare event because of gas shortage. There was a saying, " Use everything twice or more than twice " and people did. Old junk piles were raided for parts and metal. Old clothes became rags, quilts, and more. People learned to live.
My family's summer cottage on a lake, passed down for a century, has numerous lids covering holes in the walls. Summer use only, so the outer walls are the only walls.
My parents as well! After they passed away, and I was looking through their things, I would wonder why they kept so many things! The strangest things too! But I remember my mother telling me “waste not, want not” 😊
Nettles- blanched and then sautéed with onion, and served with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar- are an INCREDIBLY tasty food. Don’t be deceived by the palates of people who thought lobster was disgusting and tomatoes were poison! Stinging nettles are a LUXURY on the table and if you’ve never tried them, you should. Super easy to pick using just a ziplock baggie as a glove. Pinch them off just where the stem starts to get bigger around than a chopstick. Blanch for two minutes in salted boiling water, and thank me later.
Stinging nettles are one of the most nutritionally dense plants on earth. They are high in amino acids, protein, flavonoids, and bone-building minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc, and one of the greatest sources of vitamin K.
1:12 "other times not so much" - that was put very nicely. My great grandmother lived through WWI and WWII and was so used to foraging for food that she wouldn't abandon the habit even when times got better. Often to my grandmothers and mothers great embarrasment who were ashamed and afraid that people might think we were poor.
Foraging is also so satisfying physically and emotionally. It tastes good usually, is cheaper, and gets you moving, and is a source of pride and knowledge.
My grandmother as well! She ended up teaching my mother my mother taught me and it’s just engrained in who I am. Every year I fill my freezer up with things like fiddleheads and wild leaks, etc.. 😊
My mom grew up in post-war Germany and she told stories about accompanying her mother, going in the woods to collect stinging nettles whenever they had to cover a stretch of time where they didn't have enough food.
My Fiancee and I forage every warm season for food to save for the rest of the year. Our cupboards are full of mushrooms and dried plants like bayberry leaves for seasonings, and our freezer is full of blanched wild greens like stinging nettle and lamb's quarters. These things suppliment the venison from my hunts and the vegetables we grow in our garden.
Spent last summer in hammock and forged for most of my food! Burdock root was a new one for me ! Stinging nettle , mushrooms ,fiddleheads and dandelion has been a staple in my diet for a few years now! If you know what to look for dandelion are avaliable as soon as snow melts and if you're garden is well mulched the dandelion greens are bigger earlier!
Lambs quarters are very tasty. But try to pick ones that are growing in an area that hasn't been treated with fertilizers as the plant is said to concentrate nitrogen in its foliage.
I once spent 2 weeks in the bush with just a pocket knife, flint stone and snare wire. Had to trap, forage and gather water. It was an all day event to gather enough food for 1 meal a day. It sucked so hard! Lol but was a great life altering event. And gave me great appreciation for our ancestors. PS Fireweed tastes like crap but high in vitamin C.
Try making fireweed jelly. I know that's not what you're going to do in the situation you were in, but as you said it's high in vitamin C, so a great addition to any pantry
In Poland major foraging herbs are nettles, sorrel, hogweed and goosefoot(lamb's quarter). My grandma often cooked green borsch from sorrel leaves, and my mom still cooks it from time to time. It can even be preserved for winter - chop young leaves thinly, salt them well to draw moisture, then tightly pack into small jars to pickle them. Pour some vegetable oil on top to prevent spoiling. I'm not really a fan, but it tastes well enough with potatoes and chopped hard boiled eggs.
I love picking stinging nettle with my bare hands!! I have rheumatoid arthritis, and the "stings" are equivalent to putting capsaicin cream on my hands
@silvek99 When I was a kid, I thought thistles were stinging nettles. I lived in kind of a desert area, so you wouldn't run into nettles much unless you go up into the mountains. When I found some, I actually thought it was mint at first, and was like, "Why is this mint stinging my hands when I touch it??"
@JenniferPeterson-oc2nj That's cool! It's fun to learn about natural remedies some of these plants can provide. I forage mostly for fun or to try new things I haven't before, but having knowledge of some of the health benefits is useful too for sure!
My parents won't even try foraging beyond picking blackberries. My mother actually tried to dispose of a bunch of greens I had collected for my lunch recently, insisting I was going to poison myself. I live in western Washington, and foraging for food is only difficult when things are frozen hard. But a lot of people act like things are poisonous if they weren't planted or bought from the store. They will sadly learn the hard way if things go fully sideways.
If you don't have the proper knowledge then you shouldn't be foraging. Nothing wrong with your parents not wanting to forage. They don't have to forage just because you want to.
@@johncollins211 I never expected them to. They don't want ME foraging for my own food. I spent a year in an apothecary course focused on the plants native to my area. I don't bother trying to forage for them anymore because they just throw it away. I just wish they wouldn't get almost offended acting when I choose to eat the wild food around here.
@@froginprogress8510Its social conditioning sadly - enough fear mongering and reinforcement that only food from the supermarket is safe, you have a customer for life. Its hard to break these learned patterns of behavior and understand the wild plants arent all out to get you
I fondly remember my mother teaching me how to identify edible native plants, Sheep Shower being my favorite for it's slightly lemony flavor when eaten fresh.
@@kmoecub Sheep Sorrel? I have a bunch of that growing in my food herb garden. That flash of sour does so nicely compliment whatever it gets added to, doesn't it?
Several years ago, I used to give a talk at some of the campgrounds on "wild foods." That is, plants in the local area that were edible, some needing cooking, but others that you could eat raw. As I told the people there, "this is not so you can go out in the woods and live off the land, but so that if you get lost, you can survive long enough to be found." Thankfully, these days it isn't absolutely necessary for survival, but I still enjoy doing foraging to add variety to the dinner table.
Foraging in the early spring is so much easier now than in those olden days. Today, so many of the plants we can harvest in the late winter and early spring are not native (like the dandelion and wild field garlic you showed). Instead, they were brought over as garden plants and have escaped cultivation, and have even become weeds that dominate native plants and places. Those European plants have such an earlier season because they are from farther northern latitudes, so our late winter daylength seems like springtime to them. And with warmer temperatures now, compared to the older days, even the native stinging nettles have an earlier season now. So it's hard to appreciate how tough those folks really had it, without the specialized knowledge and access to productive places. Stinging nettles were so important to people -- and are still one of the most delicious and nutritious wild greens out there. Happy foraging!
One thing that has changed in my lifetime is the dramatic increase in Autumn Olive trees in Kentucky. They aren't native, but they're suddenly everywhere in the past decade or so. They have berries that make a decent jam, but there's still way too many of the trees. Another modern development is it's much harder to find ginseng now because people in the last several decades overharvested all they could find to sell, which sucks because it's a great little plant.
Every year during this time I think of foraging at granny's home place. In the spring we'd gather nettles, fiddle heads, dandy lion leaves and early mushrooms. At the same time lettuce, beets and radishes would be planted. Before long the asparagus shoots would come up as well as the rhubarb. Peas would be planted. And so on. Easter was always a celebration using the last ham, the last of the root vegetables and lots of foraged veggies always cooked with ham hocks.
I would give a lot to eat another morel mushroom. When I was a child in the late 60s/early 70s, my father had a coworker who provided morels. What a heavenly flavor
Morels feed on dead or dying trees, of fairly specific species. Might I humbly suggest looking into what trees morels associate with? You'll need to look at what grows in your area, but apple, cottonwood, cherry and black walnut are a few examples. The trees are a lot easier to find than mushrooms among the leaf-litter, and now's (roughly) the time of year to be looking. Besides, those trees often provide food in their own right, later in the year.
When spending summers at my grandmas farm in my youth she always made nettle pancakes. Just absolutely delicious. She also made nettle soup. In fact, I think most things had nettles in it as long as they were somewhat in season. Even in the middle of summer you could still find good nettles to eat in shaded places.
My great-grandmother was an excellent forager and she passed her skills onto her children. My grandfather, also an excellent forager, passed his skills to my mother, who passed the knowledge on to me. We have all gone beyond foraging for wild greens with berry collecting, nut gathering, trapping the occasional snapper turtle, crayfish, crabs, fishing, or even hunting for small or large game. As was explained, early Spring was the most critical time for needing food supplies and nutrients for a rural-dweller. In our generational family of foragers, Spring greens were the focal point. Cress, both water and land cress, is one of our favorite greens. Dandelions, too -- with all of the various species. Foraging for wild Asparagus is very rewarding, although quite a bit of caution is needed since a great deal of them are found near roadways where chemicals are sometimes sprayed. My favorite foraged 'weed' is Purslane which is found in Summer. Typically cooked in liquid for a soup or 'tonic', many of my foraged greens are made into sumptuous dishes like quiches or creamy-cheese skillet meals. Even with my foraging abilities, and as delicious as foraged foods are, I seriously doubt that I could survive off of foraged foods long-term.
Any time my kids tell me about what they would refuse to eat I tell them, "That's because you've never really been hungry." The closest I've ever come to being hungry was when I was in the Army and we ran out of MREs and didn't get a meal for a couple of days. They brought us powdered eggs. I asked for seconds.
Foraging is still completely normal in european countrys today (i love wild garlic soup) but 50+ years ago you done it to survive. you coudnt just go buy exotic fruits in markets people dependet on preserved fruits and foraging. Here in germany my grandmother collected sorrel, nettle, goutweed, dandelion, woodruff. wild garlic, various leaves and berries for tea like blackberry-leaves and rose hip some as medicine (+a garden full of veggies appletrees 2 sows rabbits and chicken) After work, it was work again at home they even had a field for wheat that they brought to the bakery for bread coupons
I only ate wild garlic raw or in scrambled eggs, I will look up the soup! I had a walk yesterday, I saw huge garlic fields with lots of people collecting the leaves (I am looking forward to see them flower, they are pretty). I live in Hungary and indeed, it's very normal to collect wild garlic, mushrooms, wild berries... I used to eat rosehip on my winter walks... Isn't it normal everywhere where there are many easy to identify things to collect? (Mushrooms can be tricky but many of them are still easy. Maybe not for people who are careless. I put very much effort into identifying them especially if they are even remotely similar to one of the deadly ones and I ate quite many wild mushroom species this far. It's fun. I don't always know the species that I eat - champignons are confusing like that - but I always can be quite sure I won't die of it. And I love to find new species even if they aren't edible.) I have sorrel in my own garden, such a lovely plant, I only had to sow it once and it doesn't take space in my tiny veggie patch, it's fine just somewhere among the grass and it even multiplies and travel further every year.
Wild garlic, called "Bärlauch" in German is very good. Nice way to spice up scambled eggs, make a spring soup together with nettles. If you put it in a neutral tasting oil, you can make your own oil for salad vinaigrette. Or greek yogurth, some salt and pepper on a potatoe.
In americas rural areas we still forage throughout every summer and many of us have regular gardens and mushroom gardens plus most of us hunt so this art isn't lost yet lol I can't wait for paw paw season this year now that I have my own dehydrator
My grandma's family had forage during winter when they had to escape to the mountains when ustaše came to her village during ww2, they had to forage tree bark, plants and struck gold when they found a goat(used it for milk). When she went to the doctor two or three years ago, he asked her if she was a refugee because she was soo malnutritioned when she was 5 she developed osteroporosis at 80.
Nettle soup/tea is pretty tasty (though a literal pain to harvest!) and dandelion greens make a pretty good pesto if you don't have basil. Thanks for this video, Jon.
I buy bulk bags of nettle for making tea. It is excellent for people that suffer from respiratory issues. Dandelion greens make a great tonic for spring detox from those winter blahs. After eating dried or salted foods all winter I'm sure fresh greens would have been heavenly.
We need a Canada version of Townsends. I bet he could do it, too, but a lot of extra work for him. Canada would be a fresh pallet, from early east coast provinces and the along the St Lawrence river provinces. (QC, ON). We had longer growing seasons south of you, and that was difficult enough. I would love to hear about the early settlers of your gargantuan western provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta. How did they survive? Were there edible wild greens, mushrooms? That might be more 19th century than 18th. Proud to be your neighbor. I hope we can hear more about you in future episodes. After all, we were both British North America at one time, and cousins.
@@josephmclaughlin9865 There are a good many Canadian channels offering insight on foraging, growing and homesteading. Admittedly, a good many of them (the Wooded Beardsman, Fowler's Makery & Mishief and others) take a modern perspective, while others are the doom & gloom flavour of prepper. Nevertheless, many are good, practical sources of data. I imagine searching TH-cam with words like "foraging, settling, farming, growing" and the province name would yield good results. I recommend searching by province rather than the nation as a whole, since things were traditionally done differently in the mountains, prairies, Maritimes and so on - much as they were in New England, the Dakotas or Appalachia in the US. Good luck!
I'd really like to see a video on the Sierra Nevada mountain range during the gold rush, so much wild cabbage you wouldn't believe, wild carrots fallowing the streams, rabbits and deer . But also bears,wolves, coyotes and lions in those forests. With nothing but a metal detector and a pick we found 1800s square nails that were definitely made by a blacksmith ruffly around the area around black springs. I've seen the tracks of a mountain lion that had to be very large that walked right by our camp perfectly displayed in the fine dust of those old logging roads. The Forest is very quiet save for the birds and chipmunks. I love being far into the red woods and sequoias in the spring time when the flowers are blooming. All white and yellow flowers and new grass covering the forest floors and the meadows
One of my favorite spring traditions is making a dandelion green curry or stew. Ideally accompanied by a saison (farmhouse ale) flavoured with dandelions (Fantome Pissenlit). Nettle stew is good too, and I've had some great nettle-flavoured beers. When I was a child, the house we lived in backed onto an overgrown valley filled with nettles, but we never ate them.
This is the one I've been hoping for. Foraging is one of my favorite things. Wild garlic, nettles, dandelion, plantain, and pokeweed are my most common finds here in Eastern Kentucky. Usually, the pokeweed is found around old homesteads, so it may have been planted by human hands.
@@SdW.8also as a general rule if you haven’t had it before only take the young shoots that haven’t yet turned purple and don’t touch the berries. There’s a fair few yt videos showing the process it’s definitely a plant you wanna be careful with though
@joybreegaming8781 Excellent advice. To be honest, I don't think poke is even worth the work as far as being an enjoyable food, but around here, it's kind of a cultural thing. It's considered a delicacy in Appalachia because it truly has saved a lot of lives here in past generations. People eat it kind of as a remembrance of that past.
Up here in Newfoundland many of us still pick dandelion leaves in the spring and boil them up with potato and salt pork and sometimes other veggies. They are very delicious but can get bitter as they start to flower.
My mother grew up during the depression. She gathered “weeds” her whole life. I always celebrate Spring with some nettles. They make delicious greens. 👍👍
My wife are an expert on what to eat in the forest. She is chinese and when she found a certain kind of celery that are very expensive in china growing in the wild here in Scandinavia she was very pleased.
Nice video townsends, absolutely adore the amount of historical accuracy and work that you put into your content on an otherwise unforgiving video platform.
Thrilled by this gem of a video, thank you kindly for featuring spring foraging-especially stinging nettle and dandelion greens. Those morel mushroom shots were truly marvelous too! What a gift it must have been to find hidden groves of forage-ables in the frontier when supplies were scarce and larders lean. Also, the stinging nettle porridge at the end reminded me a bit of the traditional Japanese New Year dish Nanakusa-gayu, or "Seven Wild (Spring) Herb Porridge." In all corners of the world after a long winter, cheers to the arrival of spring greens!
I found nettles in my backyard but decided to go with better greens from the grocer. The family that built my house in the 1930s planted a lovely garden that birds and bees love.
Your channel is a balm! I'm grateful to be living in a time of advanced medicine and with so much free access to information, but I love the little break I can get from other modern pressures by watching your content.
This early spring where things are just starting to sprout were called by the early settlers 'The 6 weeks of want' as all their stored food had virtually come to an end and it would be 6 weeks until things really started to grow and furnish proper sustinance. Now they had to forage and hunt hard to have food to eat.
But that is when the hens all start laying again. An abundance! Which is why Easter was celebrated by giving children boiled eggs, painted brightly and hidden here and there in the new green grass. Children foraging . . .
Americans severely underestimate how much of the plant life was cultivated by the native peoples. There are SO MANY forageable foods growing wild that we never bothered to learn.
Thank you for this excellent video! I heard mention of stinging nettles being edible. But nobody showed how to cook them like you did. Once again, thanks!
I grow stinging nettles in my garden purposefully. The stinging chemical is dissolved and made harmless after blanching in boiling water for 10 seconds. Nettles, in my opinion, taste better than spinach. The biggest issue with older nettles is that they can be stringy or woody. Both stinging and wood nettles are the same. The wood nettles in this video(3:16) were there roughly broad heart shaped leaf. I do take issue with the depiction of touching the fresh nettles with bare hands. Wear a rubber glove or use tongs. They sting, burn, and hurt for 20 minutes if your skin touches any part of the plant except the roots. They are also a weed, have no fear of over harvesting. Other spring foraged foods for me are morel and oyster mushrooms, ramps(wild onion), parsnip, burdock, asparagus, and dandelion.
I grow nettles in my backyard in a city. Usually I dry them for tea. Now I want to try some oatmeal soup with nettles and other greens. Thanks for a great experiment idea!
I haven't eaten them, but I've made nettle tea and it really isn't bad. Not necessarily a go-to for flavor being kind of "grassy" like many greens, but certainly not a hardship to drink and it's incredibly nutritious. I usually combined it with ironwort, which is also nutritious, but is a milder taste something more along the lines of chamomile, though I wouldn't say they taste the same at all.
This is so interesting. I just watched an interview earlier today by a North Korean who made it down to South Korea and she basically talked about how in the north, Spring is the season of death for most people for this exact same reason.
I used to forage back in 2014 but stopped for a time; recently picked it back up, enjoying the abundance of london rocket growing in the yard. Basic foraging is something we should all learn tbh
Jon T. is the history professor that we never had in college, but, whom we wish we did have. Abundant passion, energy and deep knowledge from the teacher keep us students riveted.
Here in so. VT, our family forages a lot. Stinging nettles, plantain, dock, ramps (wild leeks), dandelion greens, morels, garlic mustard, wild lettuce, winter cress, burdock root, wild ginger, watercress, day lily and trout lily tubers, dentaria, spring beauty, violet leaves, cattail shoots and roots - you can eat well and have medicine at hand if have the knowledge.
The other day my husband foraged some mustard greens. I cooked them right up to accompany my otherwise colorless meat and potatoes, and they added a very nice touch! One of these days I'd like to take a local foraging class so I can identify more edibles.
The best meals I have ever eaten were foraged. If you learn your land and the enormous variety of plants that live there, you can eat well all year ‘round.
I live in Romania and stinging nettles are still used as food for humans and animals. Many use it for baby chicks, ducklings, goslings and other birds in their food for the first weeks of their lives. It is still used for soups. It's a very healthy and delicious plant.
I love foraging videos and important lessons in botany. Something very interesting I've noticed with the reintroduction of hemp and cannabis in some U.S. areas: There is a massive new wave of young farmers who started out growing indoor cannabis or microgreens who have moved on to buying a rural property for a life of self-sufficiency. Learning botany has never been easier, thanks to the internet. Coming with this, many of these new farmers/homesteaders are huge into foraging mushrooms and growing mushrooms from wood pellets or by spore-planting the dead logs in the brush close to their property. It's a really weird feeling, being able to manipulate life using so many species to feed our bellies and heal our pain, all with your own bare hands, even if that garden is completely indoors. Thanks again, Townsends!!!
My modern go-to for nettle soup is a stock cube, half liter water, plenty of nettles and too much butter, then hand blended. I look forward to it every year.
As someone who's huge in foraging, i love nettles. They are great for you and very nutritious. I also particularly love finding wild chives and onions. Chicken of the woods is amazing tii
I was going to say that trees are edible. Ate inner tree bark as a child myself. We called it "indian gum". Hopefully we'll have the trees all to ourselves 😉
My Russian grandma sometimes still cooks nettle soup and sorrel soup. Just because it's part of the countryside culinary tradition. For her, because it's a good thing to eat, but 100+ years ago, it was a way to survive for thousands of people in these areas
I lived in Sarawak Malaysia for a few years. Out in the jungle villages, foraging was a given, much like how we keep backyard gardens today. Lots of edible greens, fruits, tubers, “bush meat”, fish, insects, grubs, etc.
@@dominatorandwhocaresanyway9617 Heh, that's funny, I'm Czech myself, and I _thought_ it sounded Central European. 😅 (Personally I'm not used to goose at Easter, though, so I did not place it.)
Nettles are great, especially the fresh ones in spring. When they mature they have much more of the "dont-eat-me" molecules like fomic and oxalic acid. I find it best to not take the stems and cook them much like (we europeans) cook spinach. But one needs really much of them, so don't take too little. They can take it.
I just harvested 1 1/2 pounds of nettles this morning from my expanding patch. I am too shaded to garden so I am growing a food forest. We eat a lot of wild foods throughout the year. It saves on the grocery bill but is also much more nutrient dense than modern produce which, these days, tastes pretty terrible anyway. Nettles also contain a huge amount of vitamins and minerals, including calcium. It's amazing how little variety we have and are completely satisfied, not running around trying to make food our entertainment. It's just food. As long as we have oats, cornmeal, fats, salt, eggs from ur hens, and meat, the yard takes care of all our vegetables, nuts and seeds, and fruit. Without a traditional garden or domesticated produce.
Foraging is awesome! Every spring, I pick as much nettles and ground elder and other suff as I can carry with me and use it in my cooking. I make pies, omelettes, stew, soup, all sorts of things with them. You can also freeze them or dry them for later use. It's delicious and free and the picking part is very meditative and a great way to spend time in nature.
Actually, stinging nettles are delicious! I like them better than spinach! They lose the sting as soon as theyre dipped into hot water or if you dry them.
nettles are surprisingly high in protein. finding fats and oils is the hard one. i spent 6 months in in a tiny tent in the mountains back in my youth surviving on a homemade muesli. oats, nuts, dried whole milk, whey and dried fruit. i caught trout, ate a few grasshoppers, collected pig nuts, visited the coast for a day or two of silverweed, lush mussels, winkles, urchin roe. sand dabs roasted with wild parsnip, dulse, and samphire. still had to buy oil/fat to thrive
This made me so hungry
That's really interesting. Sounds like you would need some animal based foods with fat to make up for he deficiency
I remember reading that while Modern people are trained to avoid fat ,back in Medieval times paradise was sometimes seen as a place where edible fat was everywhere.lol.
@@clairv.74 This! I wish life was still like this. It's My dream to buy a piece of land and go back to living a simpler and more fulfilling life, one were I ain't overworking Myself just to make someone else rich, while barely being able to scrape by Myself. I'd rather work Toward My benefit, not someone else's, especially someone who wouldn't even know My name.
@@clairv.74 you would think since we're so efficient at converting sugar into fat, we'd be able to use that and just take sugar with us..
I was stationed in Northern Germany in early 90s, and the nearby city had a day of mourning for elderly man who passed, at the end of WW2 when there was no food, he knew about edible plants that grew there. He foraged and taught others how to so so, and identify edible plants. He is credited with stopping a famine.
Rest in peace to that guy
When I was a boy in the 1940s and 1950s because of WW2 and the shortages that lasted until about the mid 1950s (officially in some places 1954), everyone foraged, grew gardens, hunted, reused virtually everything. I remember seeing tin cans made into useable items and vividly remember tin can lids used to cover holes in fences and walls when we went to town which was a rare event because of gas shortage. There was a saying, " Use everything twice or more than twice " and people did. Old junk piles were raided for parts and metal. Old clothes became rags, quilts, and more. People learned to live.
There's an old American farm saying:
"Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without!"
My family's summer cottage on a lake, passed down for a century, has numerous lids covering holes in the walls. Summer use only, so the outer walls are the only walls.
My parents as well! After they passed away, and I was looking through their things, I would wonder why they kept so many things! The strangest things too! But I remember my mother telling me “waste not, want not” 😊
@@wayneantoniazzi2706 I think current gen has forgotten those teachings for the most part. I get flack for reusing stuff all the time.
and food. we trow things away because they have an exsperation date. stupid.
Nettles- blanched and then sautéed with onion, and served with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar- are an INCREDIBLY tasty food. Don’t be deceived by the palates of people who thought lobster was disgusting and tomatoes were poison! Stinging nettles are a LUXURY on the table and if you’ve never tried them, you should.
Super easy to pick using just a ziplock baggie as a glove. Pinch them off just where the stem starts to get bigger around than a chopstick. Blanch for two minutes in salted boiling water, and thank me later.
Early spring was frequently called "the starving time."
Nettle tea is pretty good, I've had that.
Stinging nettles are one of the most nutritionally dense plants on earth. They are high in amino acids, protein, flavonoids, and bone-building minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc, and one of the greatest sources of vitamin K.
And they taste great. Nettles soup in spring is a delicacy. Add a few shrimp and it's perfect for dinner guests.
@@natviolen4021How would you describe the taste?
@@asinatrafanatic2697 It's hard to describe. A bit like herby, aromatic young spinach. A mild yet distinct taste of spring.
@@natviolen4021 Sounds lovely!
Yeah right
1:12 "other times not so much" - that was put very nicely.
My great grandmother lived through WWI and WWII and was so used to foraging for food that she wouldn't abandon the habit even when times got better. Often to my grandmothers and mothers great embarrasment who were ashamed and afraid that people might think we were poor.
Foraging is also so satisfying physically and emotionally. It tastes good usually, is cheaper, and gets you moving, and is a source of pride and knowledge.
She sounds like an amazing woman and a skill set lost
My grandmother as well! She ended up teaching my mother my mother taught me and it’s just engrained in who I am. Every year I fill my freezer up with things like fiddleheads and wild leaks, etc.. 😊
My mom grew up in post-war Germany and she told stories about accompanying her mother, going in the woods to collect stinging nettles whenever they had to cover a stretch of time where they didn't have enough food.
My Fiancee and I forage every warm season for food to save for the rest of the year. Our cupboards are full of mushrooms and dried plants like bayberry leaves for seasonings, and our freezer is full of blanched wild greens like stinging nettle and lamb's quarters. These things suppliment the venison from my hunts and the vegetables we grow in our garden.
Thats the life right there! Lamb is so good to my favorite
@@warmonsterj lamb's quarters is goosefoot, a chenopodia closely related to quinoa.
Spent last summer in hammock and forged for most of my food! Burdock root was a new one for me ! Stinging nettle , mushrooms ,fiddleheads and dandelion has been a staple in my diet for a few years now! If you know what to look for dandelion are avaliable as soon as snow melts and if you're garden is well mulched the dandelion greens are bigger earlier!
@@kirkvoelcker5272 i didn't know that
Lambs quarters are very tasty. But try to pick ones that are growing in an area that hasn't been treated with fertilizers as the plant is said to concentrate nitrogen in its foliage.
I once spent 2 weeks in the bush with just a pocket knife, flint stone and snare wire. Had to trap, forage and gather water. It was an all day event to gather enough food for 1 meal a day. It sucked so hard! Lol but was a great life altering event. And gave me great appreciation for our ancestors. PS Fireweed tastes like crap but high in vitamin C.
Try making fireweed jelly. I know that's not what you're going to do in the situation you were in, but as you said it's high in vitamin C, so a great addition to any pantry
If you ferment fireweed, or find it already white and fungusy. It can be used for a delightful tea that tastes much like Red Rose orange pekoe.
In Poland major foraging herbs are nettles, sorrel, hogweed and goosefoot(lamb's quarter). My grandma often cooked green borsch from sorrel leaves, and my mom still cooks it from time to time. It can even be preserved for winter - chop young leaves thinly, salt them well to draw moisture, then tightly pack into small jars to pickle them. Pour some vegetable oil on top to prevent spoiling. I'm not really a fan, but it tastes well enough with potatoes and chopped hard boiled eggs.
We have loads of plantain, dandelion, and nettles on our family's property.
Plantain is one of my favorite-tasting greens. It does take a little boiling first, though. About six minutes.
Plantain is my favorite medicinal herb lol
I'm an especial fan of plantain seed heads. They taste like white button mushrooms, with a hint of dill.
Foraging is my hobby, and stinging nettle was one of the first plants I learned to identify, so it has a special place in my heart. Loved the video!
I learned to identify them as a kid but in order to avoid getting stung 😂
I love picking stinging nettle with my bare hands!! I have rheumatoid arthritis, and the "stings" are equivalent to putting capsaicin cream on my hands
@silvek99 When I was a kid, I thought thistles were stinging nettles. I lived in kind of a desert area, so you wouldn't run into nettles much unless you go up into the mountains. When I found some, I actually thought it was mint at first, and was like, "Why is this mint stinging my hands when I touch it??"
@JenniferPeterson-oc2nj That's cool! It's fun to learn about natural remedies some of these plants can provide. I forage mostly for fun or to try new things I haven't before, but having knowledge of some of the health benefits is useful too for sure!
After you boiled and prepared them nettles tastes like butter.
My parents won't even try foraging beyond picking blackberries. My mother actually tried to dispose of a bunch of greens I had collected for my lunch recently, insisting I was going to poison myself. I live in western Washington, and foraging for food is only difficult when things are frozen hard. But a lot of people act like things are poisonous if they weren't planted or bought from the store. They will sadly learn the hard way if things go fully sideways.
If you don't have the proper knowledge then you shouldn't be foraging. Nothing wrong with your parents not wanting to forage. They don't have to forage just because you want to.
@@johncollins211 I never expected them to. They don't want ME foraging for my own food. I spent a year in an apothecary course focused on the plants native to my area. I don't bother trying to forage for them anymore because they just throw it away. I just wish they wouldn't get almost offended acting when I choose to eat the wild food around here.
@@froginprogress8510Its social conditioning sadly - enough fear mongering and reinforcement that only food from the supermarket is safe, you have a customer for life.
Its hard to break these learned patterns of behavior and understand the wild plants arent all out to get you
I fondly remember my mother teaching me how to identify edible native plants, Sheep Shower being my favorite for it's slightly lemony flavor when eaten fresh.
@@kmoecub Sheep Sorrel? I have a bunch of that growing in my food herb garden. That flash of sour does so nicely compliment whatever it gets added to, doesn't it?
Several years ago, I used to give a talk at some of the campgrounds on "wild foods." That is, plants in the local area that were edible, some needing cooking, but others that you could eat raw. As I told the people there, "this is not so you can go out in the woods and live off the land, but so that if you get lost, you can survive long enough to be found." Thankfully, these days it isn't absolutely necessary for survival, but I still enjoy doing foraging to add variety to the dinner table.
Can't say it enough..this man is a national treasure.
Foraging in the early spring is so much easier now than in those olden days. Today, so many of the plants we can harvest in the late winter and early spring are not native (like the dandelion and wild field garlic you showed). Instead, they were brought over as garden plants and have escaped cultivation, and have even become weeds that dominate native plants and places. Those European plants have such an earlier season because they are from farther northern latitudes, so our late winter daylength seems like springtime to them. And with warmer temperatures now, compared to the older days, even the native stinging nettles have an earlier season now. So it's hard to appreciate how tough those folks really had it, without the specialized knowledge and access to productive places. Stinging nettles were so important to people -- and are still one of the most delicious and nutritious wild greens out there. Happy foraging!
One thing that has changed in my lifetime is the dramatic increase in Autumn Olive trees in Kentucky. They aren't native, but they're suddenly everywhere in the past decade or so. They have berries that make a decent jam, but there's still way too many of the trees.
Another modern development is it's much harder to find ginseng now because people in the last several decades overharvested all they could find to sell, which sucks because it's a great little plant.
Every year during this time I think of foraging at granny's home place. In the spring we'd gather nettles, fiddle heads, dandy lion leaves and early mushrooms. At the same time lettuce, beets and radishes would be planted. Before long the asparagus shoots would come up as well as the rhubarb. Peas would be planted. And so on. Easter was always a celebration using the last ham, the last of the root vegetables and lots of foraged veggies always cooked with ham hocks.
I love fiddleheads so much! I found some at the back of my property, and I was so excited ❤
As Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman famously said, “ Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
I would give a lot to eat another morel mushroom. When I was a child in the late 60s/early 70s, my father had a coworker who provided morels. What a heavenly flavor
Morels feed on dead or dying trees, of fairly specific species. Might I humbly suggest looking into what trees morels associate with? You'll need to look at what grows in your area, but apple, cottonwood, cherry and black walnut are a few examples. The trees are a lot easier to find than mushrooms among the leaf-litter, and now's (roughly) the time of year to be looking. Besides, those trees often provide food in their own right, later in the year.
When spending summers at my grandmas farm in my youth she always made nettle pancakes. Just absolutely delicious. She also made nettle soup. In fact, I think most things had nettles in it as long as they were somewhat in season. Even in the middle of summer you could still find good nettles to eat in shaded places.
My great-grandmother was an excellent forager and she passed her skills onto her children. My grandfather, also an excellent forager, passed his skills to my mother, who passed the knowledge on to me. We have all gone beyond foraging for wild greens with berry collecting, nut gathering, trapping the occasional snapper turtle, crayfish, crabs, fishing, or even hunting for small or large game.
As was explained, early Spring was the most critical time for needing food supplies and nutrients for a rural-dweller. In our generational family of foragers, Spring greens were the focal point. Cress, both water and land cress, is one of our favorite greens. Dandelions, too -- with all of the various species. Foraging for wild Asparagus is very rewarding, although quite a bit of caution is needed since a great deal of them are found near roadways where chemicals are sometimes sprayed. My favorite foraged 'weed' is Purslane which is found in Summer.
Typically cooked in liquid for a soup or 'tonic', many of my foraged greens are made into sumptuous dishes like quiches or creamy-cheese skillet meals.
Even with my foraging abilities, and as delicious as foraged foods are, I seriously doubt that I could survive off of foraged foods long-term.
In the future foraging will be essential. Again.
Any time my kids tell me about what they would refuse to eat I tell them, "That's because you've never really been hungry."
The closest I've ever come to being hungry was when I was in the Army and we ran out of MREs and didn't get a meal for a couple of days. They brought us powdered eggs. I asked for seconds.
Foraging is still completely normal in european countrys today (i love wild garlic soup) but 50+ years ago you done it to survive. you coudnt just go buy exotic fruits in markets people dependet on preserved fruits and foraging.
Here in germany my grandmother collected sorrel, nettle, goutweed, dandelion, woodruff. wild garlic, various leaves and berries for tea like blackberry-leaves and rose hip some as medicine (+a garden full of veggies appletrees 2 sows rabbits and chicken)
After work, it was work again at home they even had a field for wheat that they brought to the bakery for bread coupons
Foraging is part of the culinary tradition in Crete and was the inspiration for the Mediterranean Diet.
I only ate wild garlic raw or in scrambled eggs, I will look up the soup! I had a walk yesterday, I saw huge garlic fields with lots of people collecting the leaves (I am looking forward to see them flower, they are pretty). I live in Hungary and indeed, it's very normal to collect wild garlic, mushrooms, wild berries... I used to eat rosehip on my winter walks... Isn't it normal everywhere where there are many easy to identify things to collect? (Mushrooms can be tricky but many of them are still easy. Maybe not for people who are careless. I put very much effort into identifying them especially if they are even remotely similar to one of the deadly ones and I ate quite many wild mushroom species this far. It's fun. I don't always know the species that I eat - champignons are confusing like that - but I always can be quite sure I won't die of it. And I love to find new species even if they aren't edible.)
I have sorrel in my own garden, such a lovely plant, I only had to sow it once and it doesn't take space in my tiny veggie patch, it's fine just somewhere among the grass and it even multiplies and travel further every year.
Wild garlic, called "Bärlauch" in German is very good. Nice way to spice up scambled eggs, make a spring soup together with nettles. If you put it in a neutral tasting oil, you can make your own oil for salad vinaigrette. Or greek yogurth, some salt and pepper on a potatoe.
In americas rural areas we still forage throughout every summer and many of us have regular gardens and mushroom gardens plus most of us hunt so this art isn't lost yet lol I can't wait for paw paw season this year now that I have my own dehydrator
Stinging Nettles are delicious. They should be added to your kitchen, even for weekly fare.
My grandma's family had forage during winter when they had to escape to the mountains when ustaše came to her village during ww2, they had to forage tree bark, plants and struck gold when they found a goat(used it for milk). When she went to the doctor two or three years ago, he asked her if she was a refugee because she was soo malnutritioned when she was 5 she developed osteroporosis at 80.
Nettle soup/tea is pretty tasty (though a literal pain to harvest!) and dandelion greens make a pretty good pesto if you don't have basil. Thanks for this video, Jon.
Kinda lucky nowadays we have grocery stores to forage in. Although you have to forage some cash first.
I buy bulk bags of nettle for making tea. It is excellent for people that suffer from respiratory issues. Dandelion greens make a great tonic for spring detox from those winter blahs. After eating dried or salted foods all winter I'm sure fresh greens would have been heavenly.
Thank you Townsends for another great slice of history!
Thank you, Jon, and Happy Easter, all! Imagine this lemon is an Easter Egg.
It is still too cold here in Canada for things to be growing - we still have snow on the ground. But in a month or two we will be able to go foraging.
We'll need to forage at this rate
We need a Canada version of Townsends. I bet he could do it, too, but a lot of extra work for him. Canada would be a fresh pallet, from early east coast provinces and the along the St Lawrence river provinces. (QC, ON). We had longer growing seasons south of you, and that was difficult enough.
I would love to hear about the early settlers of your gargantuan western provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta. How did they survive? Were there edible wild greens, mushrooms? That might be more 19th century than 18th.
Proud to be your neighbor. I hope we can hear more about you in future episodes. After all, we were both British North America at one time, and cousins.
@@josephmclaughlin9865 There are a good many Canadian channels offering insight on foraging, growing and homesteading. Admittedly, a good many of them (the Wooded Beardsman, Fowler's Makery & Mishief and others) take a modern perspective, while others are the doom & gloom flavour of prepper. Nevertheless, many are good, practical sources of data.
I imagine searching TH-cam with words like "foraging, settling, farming, growing" and the province name would yield good results. I recommend searching by province rather than the nation as a whole, since things were traditionally done differently in the mountains, prairies, Maritimes and so on - much as they were in New England, the Dakotas or Appalachia in the US.
Good luck!
Many wild greens are special ingredients for traditional spring dishes
I'd really like to see a video on the Sierra Nevada mountain range during the gold rush, so much wild cabbage you wouldn't believe, wild carrots fallowing the streams, rabbits and deer . But also bears,wolves, coyotes and lions in those forests.
With nothing but a metal detector and a pick we found 1800s square nails that were definitely made by a blacksmith ruffly around the area around black springs. I've seen the tracks of a mountain lion that had to be very large that walked right by our camp perfectly displayed in the fine dust of those old logging roads. The Forest is very quiet save for the birds and chipmunks. I love being far into the red woods and sequoias in the spring time when the flowers are blooming. All white and yellow flowers and new grass covering the forest floors and the meadows
One of my favorite spring traditions is making a dandelion green curry or stew. Ideally accompanied by a saison (farmhouse ale) flavoured with dandelions (Fantome Pissenlit). Nettle stew is good too, and I've had some great nettle-flavoured beers. When I was a child, the house we lived in backed onto an overgrown valley filled with nettles, but we never ate them.
The concept you talk about ~2:00 minutes in is called the hungry gap by farmers
Nettles is an interesting plant, the soft fresh tops are good for eating, the stem has some decent fibers.
This is the one I've been hoping for. Foraging is one of my favorite things. Wild garlic, nettles, dandelion, plantain, and pokeweed are my most common finds here in Eastern Kentucky. Usually, the pokeweed is found around old homesteads, so it may have been planted by human hands.
How do you make your pokeweed? Some popped up in our yard and I would like to use it somehow.
@@SdW.8 Cook like greens, but boil it twice first because it is quite toxic!
@@SdW.8also as a general rule if you haven’t had it before only take the young shoots that haven’t yet turned purple and don’t touch the berries. There’s a fair few yt videos showing the process it’s definitely a plant you wanna be careful with though
@joybreegaming8781 Excellent advice. To be honest, I don't think poke is even worth the work as far as being an enjoyable food, but around here, it's kind of a cultural thing. It's considered a delicacy in Appalachia because it truly has saved a lot of lives here in past generations. People eat it kind of as a remembrance of that past.
@@dannzalbjorklund Thanks for this technique! I'll try it this year.
Knowledge is power. Knowing what grows around you that is edible, the nutritional values, and how to prepare, is worth much more than gold.
Up here in Newfoundland many of us still pick dandelion leaves in the spring and boil them up with potato and salt pork and sometimes other veggies. They are very delicious but can get bitter as they start to flower.
To be honest, Watching these videos kinda gives me comfort and peace.
Thank you for making these kinds of videos.
Here in Finland, nettle pancakes are a fairly common food. Similar to spinach pancakes you eat them with lingonberries. Delicious and nutricious :)
I love nettles! They can make a great spinach substitute, and people even replace basil with them and make pesto. I still haven't tried that yet.
My mother grew up during the depression. She gathered “weeds” her whole life. I always celebrate Spring with some nettles. They make delicious greens. 👍👍
Uwielbiam tego typu materiały, w szczególności w waszym wykonaniu. Chętnie zobaczę więcej
My wife are an expert on what to eat in the forest.
She is chinese and when she found a certain kind of celery that are very expensive in china growing in the wild here in Scandinavia she was very pleased.
Nice video townsends, absolutely adore the amount of historical accuracy and work that you put into your content on an otherwise unforgiving video platform.
Thrilled by this gem of a video, thank you kindly for featuring spring foraging-especially stinging nettle and dandelion greens. Those morel mushroom shots were truly marvelous too! What a gift it must have been to find hidden groves of forage-ables in the frontier when supplies were scarce and larders lean. Also, the stinging nettle porridge at the end reminded me a bit of the traditional Japanese New Year dish Nanakusa-gayu, or "Seven Wild (Spring) Herb Porridge." In all corners of the world after a long winter, cheers to the arrival of spring greens!
Love the content. This is comfort food for the brain for me. Warm. It also helps his voice reminds so much of Metal Gear Solid's Otacon.
I found nettles in my backyard but decided to go with better greens from the grocer. The family that built my house in the 1930s planted a lovely garden that birds and bees love.
Your channel is a balm! I'm grateful to be living in a time of advanced medicine and with so much free access to information, but I love the little break I can get from other modern pressures by watching your content.
This early spring where things are just starting to sprout were called by the early settlers 'The 6 weeks of want' as all their stored food had virtually come to an end and it would be 6 weeks until things really started to grow and furnish proper sustinance. Now they had to forage and hunt hard to have food to eat.
But that is when the hens all start laying again. An abundance! Which is why Easter was celebrated by giving children boiled eggs, painted brightly and hidden here and there in the new green grass. Children foraging . . .
I absolutely love nettle. You can make soup, you can mash it, and you can fry it. It's delicious and it's good for you.
Goodnight, Em
Here in Czechia I've had fish soup with nettles (delicious) so the mention of the fish and nettles together was quite amusing. 😅
These skills are good to know with everything going on now
Americans severely underestimate how much of the plant life was cultivated by the native peoples. There are SO MANY forageable foods growing wild that we never bothered to learn.
Non Americans underestimate how Americans conquered and mastered a land…
Thank you for this excellent video! I heard mention of stinging nettles being edible. But nobody showed how to cook them like you did. Once again, thanks!
I grow stinging nettles in my garden purposefully. The stinging chemical is dissolved and made harmless after blanching in boiling water for 10 seconds. Nettles, in my opinion, taste better than spinach. The biggest issue with older nettles is that they can be stringy or woody. Both stinging and wood nettles are the same. The wood nettles in this video(3:16) were there roughly broad heart shaped leaf. I do take issue with the depiction of touching the fresh nettles with bare hands. Wear a rubber glove or use tongs. They sting, burn, and hurt for 20 minutes if your skin touches any part of the plant except the roots. They are also a weed, have no fear of over harvesting. Other spring foraged foods for me are morel and oyster mushrooms, ramps(wild onion), parsnip, burdock, asparagus, and dandelion.
I grow nettles in my backyard in a city. Usually I dry them for tea. Now I want to try some oatmeal soup with nettles and other greens. Thanks for a great experiment idea!
I haven't eaten them, but I've made nettle tea and it really isn't bad. Not necessarily a go-to for flavor being kind of "grassy" like many greens, but certainly not a hardship to drink and it's incredibly nutritious. I usually combined it with ironwort, which is also nutritious, but is a milder taste something more along the lines of chamomile, though I wouldn't say they taste the same at all.
Now I want to try a nettles, dandelion greens and wolverine meat sandwich!
Good morning from Syracuse NY brother and everyone else thank you for sharing this video and Happy Easter/Resurrection day everyone
This is so interesting. I just watched an interview earlier today by a North Korean who made it down to South Korea and she basically talked about how in the north, Spring is the season of death for most people for this exact same reason.
Those days were the real test of survival. Thank you.
I used to forage back in 2014 but stopped for a time; recently picked it back up, enjoying the abundance of london rocket growing in the yard.
Basic foraging is something we should all learn tbh
Love your channel. Few places you can find nostalgia, history and cooking and food together. What a magnificent mix.
Happy Easter Townsends!! Love you guys!!
Happy Easter, Townsends!
Jon T. is the history professor that we never had in college, but, whom we wish we did have. Abundant passion, energy and deep knowledge from the teacher keep us students riveted.
I'd love more of these! I'm Gen X and it's fun to see my parents, peers, kids, and grandkids stuff being highlighted next to one another.
I eat nettles all the time 😋 they’re very good at helping with allergies. I make tea with them too
Here in so. VT, our family forages a lot. Stinging nettles, plantain, dock, ramps (wild leeks), dandelion greens, morels, garlic mustard, wild lettuce, winter cress, burdock root, wild ginger, watercress, day lily and trout lily tubers, dentaria, spring beauty, violet leaves, cattail shoots and roots - you can eat well and have medicine at hand if have the knowledge.
The other day my husband foraged some mustard greens. I cooked them right up to accompany my otherwise colorless meat and potatoes, and they added a very nice touch! One of these days I'd like to take a local foraging class so I can identify more edibles.
The best meals I have ever eaten were foraged. If you learn your land and the enormous variety of plants that live there, you can eat well all year ‘round.
Thanks 🙏🏼 much needed episode As a Army Veteran near & dear to my heart ❤️ thanks 🙏🏼
We often made nettle soup when I grew up and that was in the 80s. I always loved that as a kid.
Fascinating! Really cool piece, Townsends Team! 😃👍
The closest I've come to foraging is selecting a nice bunch of collards from the produce section
I live in Romania and stinging nettles are still used as food for humans and animals. Many use it for baby chicks, ducklings, goslings and other birds in their food for the first weeks of their lives. It is still used for soups. It's a very healthy and delicious plant.
Nettles are very good. I like them with a little salt and pepper and a dash of balsamic vinegar. Put on a piece of toast with an egg.... mmmm.
I love foraging videos and important lessons in botany. Something very interesting I've noticed with the reintroduction of hemp and cannabis in some U.S. areas: There is a massive new wave of young farmers who started out growing indoor cannabis or microgreens who have moved on to buying a rural property for a life of self-sufficiency. Learning botany has never been easier, thanks to the internet. Coming with this, many of these new farmers/homesteaders are huge into foraging mushrooms and growing mushrooms from wood pellets or by spore-planting the dead logs in the brush close to their property. It's a really weird feeling, being able to manipulate life using so many species to feed our bellies and heal our pain, all with your own bare hands, even if that garden is completely indoors. Thanks again, Townsends!!!
I’m so thankful I found this channel a couple years ago. It’s such comfort viewing for me. Keep up the great work Jon and happy Easter
Your consistency is astounding. I could watch an episode from 8 days ago or 8 years ago and still be entertained and educated. Great stuff always
I love your channel. You bring us history and cooking lessons in an exceptionally comforting way. Bless you!
Great video and a reminder of how hard things were.
My modern go-to for nettle soup is a stock cube, half liter water, plenty of nettles and too much butter, then hand blended. I look forward to it every year.
As someone who's huge in foraging, i love nettles. They are great for you and very nutritious. I also particularly love finding wild chives and onions. Chicken of the woods is amazing tii
Huge respect for picking and chopping them with just your fingerless gloves!
I spent two month in the wild eating saw dust soup.. tree bark and a lot of wild beans 🫘
I was going to say that trees are edible. Ate inner tree bark as a child myself. We called it "indian gum". Hopefully we'll have the trees all to ourselves 😉
My Russian grandma sometimes still cooks nettle soup and sorrel soup. Just because it's part of the countryside culinary tradition. For her, because it's a good thing to eat, but 100+ years ago, it was a way to survive for thousands of people in these areas
I lived in Sarawak Malaysia for a few years. Out in the jungle villages, foraging was a given, much like how we keep backyard gardens today. Lots of edible greens, fruits, tubers, “bush meat”, fish, insects, grubs, etc.
We usually use nettles here as the key ingredient in various dumplings, and spring stuffing (like for a goose during Easter)
May I ask where "here" is?
@@beth12svist Czechia. But truth be told, people who live in the city substitue it w spinach or something
@@dominatorandwhocaresanyway9617 Heh, that's funny, I'm Czech myself, and I _thought_ it sounded Central European. 😅 (Personally I'm not used to goose at Easter, though, so I did not place it.)
Nettles are great, especially the fresh ones in spring. When they mature they have much more of the "dont-eat-me" molecules like fomic and oxalic acid. I find it best to not take the stems and cook them much like (we europeans) cook spinach. But one needs really much of them, so don't take too little. They can take it.
Nettles stewed in bone broth, with wild onions, salt, and pepper are absolutely delicious!
I just harvested 1 1/2 pounds of nettles this morning from my expanding patch. I am too shaded to garden so I am growing a food forest. We eat a lot of wild foods throughout the year. It saves on the grocery bill but is also much more nutrient dense than modern produce which, these days, tastes pretty terrible anyway. Nettles also contain a huge amount of vitamins and minerals, including calcium. It's amazing how little variety we have and are completely satisfied, not running around trying to make food our entertainment. It's just food. As long as we have oats, cornmeal, fats, salt, eggs from ur hens, and meat, the yard takes care of all our vegetables, nuts and seeds, and fruit. Without a traditional garden or domesticated produce.
Foraging is awesome! Every spring, I pick as much nettles and ground elder and other suff as I can carry with me and use it in my cooking. I make pies, omelettes, stew, soup, all sorts of things with them. You can also freeze them or dry them for later use. It's delicious and free and the picking part is very meditative and a great way to spend time in nature.
I'm glad to have nettles and wild lettuce/garlic, lemon/pecan/mulberry trees, and countless other edible plants on my premises.
Actually, stinging nettles are delicious! I like them better than spinach! They lose the sting as soon as theyre dipped into hot water or if you dry them.