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Raw Edible Plants
Category:
Home & Garden
Publisher: Dandelion Flower Publishing
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 77
Copyright: May 9, 2018
Price: $2.70 (eBook)
The best edible wild plants for Britain, North American and most of the Northern Hemisphere. Forage from your home for free wild food.
Amanda Scott does the hard work for us and gives us a list of some of the best wild edible plants.
Most of us don't eat wild plants regularly for many reasons. We might think they don't taste good or that it's too much hard work trying to find them. That need not be the case. Stinging nettles, for example, make a wonderful 'cooked spinach'. In fact, some say nettles taste better than spinach because it isn't as slimy. Other plants don't have to be cooked at all. If your only experience of a wild salad is a plate of dandelion leaves, and it was a very bitter experience, you have to try chickweed. It is mild in flavour and can be used as a straight substitute for lettuce.
This isn't about wallowing around in mud digging up roots and spending hours peeling, soaking and boiling all sorts of strange smelly plant material only to find that it tastes disgusting. It's about using a few of the good bits of plants commonly found in Britain's gardens today. For those that don't have wild plants there are ways of obtaining them including waiting for them to come (they will) or growing them. Go on. Give it a go. You know you want to.
Excerpt
CHAPTER 2: Stinging nettles
The stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) is one of my favourite plants because it screams 'stay away' and yet is one of the most useful plants found in temperate regions of the world. An herbaceous perennial from the Urticaceae family, it is known by many different common names throughout the world such as leaf nettle, common nettle, burn nettle, burn weed, burn hazel or just plain 'nettle'.
Robe up before you go in search of this little beauty. Any flesh showing will almost certainly come into contact with the tiny hairs made of silica called trichomes that break off easily dispersing a cocktail of chemicals into your body which include formic acid, histamine, acetylcholine and serotonin. These chemicals cause a stinging pain and ensure you suffer for hours afterwards with a tingly irritating numbness. Remedies for the sting include dock leaves, plantain leaves and calamine lotion but I can't guarantee any will be truly effective.
If you don't have any nettles in your garden, you can dig up a small clump of root and replant them. Nettles are considered invasive and difficult to get rid of so woe betide me for suggesting doing this. However, I don't think being labelled an 'invasive weed' is any reason not to grow a very useful edible plant. We spend far too much time eradicating plants that we should really be making use of.
Nettles grow to just over a metre in height with white to yellowish flowers but are best picked before they grow tall and flower. If you've got a good patch you can cut them down when they are about 30cm in height and let them grow again. This can be done three or four times a year or more under the right conditions. Remember the taller they get, the more tough and stringy they are. Also remember that this plant is good for wildlife attracting butterflies and moths so leave some plants to fully mature and flower. The tops of this plant will die down in the winter but it is a tough perennial and will emerge ready to go again in the spring.
The leaves, younger stems and the shoots can all be eaten raw. Use a clean glove and roll them tightly crushing them well before popping them in your mouth. This removes the sting. Other ways of removing the sting include wilting, blending, refrigerating, cooking and making a tea from them. I have to say I don't relish eating these little raw balls but prefer to add the fresh plant material to green smoothies or use to make a herbal tea. If you have any tea over it can be used as a hair rinse. My overwhelmingly favourite way of using the leaves, stems and shoots is by cooking them lightly in a little water and using like spinach. They have a nice mouth feel and are much less slimy. You can add fried onions, chickpeas and spices to make a type of spinach saag. Another age old favourite is, of course, to use nettles to make soup. A plentiful supply of nettles in your garden is a cheap and nutritious way of getting your daily greens.
Nettles have a lot of other uses. They make a good fibre which is created by stripping the outer stems. These stringy strips are then dried and spun into a yarn. Nettle yarn can then be knitted up or woven into a fabric. It is a long and somewhat fiddly process. Nettles are very beneficial medicinally but can also be used to make paper, biomass, compost/plant feed/compost activator, dye, rennet and oil.
My favourite ways to use nettle: The young leaves and stems made into a tea, added raw to green smoothies or cooked like spinach.
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