Which wild plants do you commonly use?

outskirts

outskirts

I ain't getting any younger.
I'm curious as to what wild plants do many of us here utilize.
I've been using and researching wild plants for years, it really is a
passion of mine. There are so many that I use for all kinds of purposes,
food, medicine, intoxication, tools, bug repellent, basket materials, etc.
I'm always trying to learn about new plants from people, or new uses
for plants I'm already familiar with.
So tell me which ones do you commonly use and for what do you use them?
 
Oh god, I use so many. I've done a few treks where half of my sustenance came from what was around me. I'll name a few.

The most obvious friend of mine is Dandelion, I boil up mass quantities of the leaves, for greens. Then I fry up the rhizomes with bacon/other meat, or fish. You can dry the roots and use it to cut coffee with, and make it last longer. You can also use roots in a greater quantity to make a good cough medicine/stomach settler. Also, the flowers make a great wine. You can use every part, and it grows almost everywhere in North America.
Another particularly prominent one is the plantain leaf. You can boil it as a green. You can eat the seedstalks to get some fiber in your diet, not to mention if you eat 3 or 4 a day, you repel mosquitoes, as it makes your blood taste badly. You can take the bigger, broader leaves, and crush them on wounds and abrasions, and it helps them heal immensely. Make a compress on wounds (with Aloe Vera if you've got it) and it'll heal em in no time.
Clover is a great one in farm country. Grows everywhere, and eat enough of the flowers, with a cracker or two and some jerky, you've got yourself a great meal, and you can keep walking as you eat it! Just pick the flowers off the roadside as you walk and eat! The leaves are delicious as well. And you can use the flowers for an eye wash if your allergies are acting up.
Mint is a favorite of mine for seasoning foods, particularly fish. It's a SUPERB cough medicine, and also is great for belly ailments. If I had to pick one herb to have with me, and one herb only, it'd be mint. I've even eaten it as a green (mixed with others).
Cattail is my all-time favorite. It yields food ALL year. In the spring, the fresh young shoots are delicious eating, great fried with bacon or squirrel. Once they are tough, the roots/rhizomes are good eating too, but tougher to deal with, Gotta macerate them, dry them, and make a flour out of them. They can also be eaten like a starchy potato, if peeled well. Then, late summer, the pollen that gathers on the flowers is great mixed with flour for a delicious bannock. The roots can be dug all year, too, even in winter if your really going hungry. I've also heard of people boiling the brown flower heads like corn and eating them, never tried it though. Oh, and the sappy goop between the leaves at the base of the plant is great on wounds, it really heals them up nice. Put it on your face as a cleanser. And the leaves are great for weaving mats, I've also used the stem as a pipe reed on my corn cob pipe. You can build shelter with them, too. The local indians here in upstate new york revered this plant as a staple food, and used it for everything!
Burdock is good too, you can pull it up from the ground (it's tough to do, use a knife or a shovel) and the roots can be peeled and boiled. Sorta bland though.
Obviously wild berries/apples are awesome. Blackberry leaves can be used as a wash for wounds.
Less wild plants that I use: Oregano (a great disinfectant for wounds) Lavender (awesome for washing with, add some animal fat and some lavender to warm water if you don't have soap, smells good and keeps you clean) Bilberry (I grab them in pill form from grocery stores, and take them to aid night vision. It really works, I've got the eyes of a pilot)

If I think of more I'll post them! I've studied wild edibles and medicinals since I could read, I've always had a love for plants.
 
I am lucky to have several huge bushes of mugwort fairly close my house and during the spring I always harvest some to use throughout the year. It is a bitter that can be used as a general tonic, much like dandelion, to purge the body of excess. But what I really love about mugwort is that it gives me intense vivid dreams. I try not to use it too much because that effect wears off if you use it all the time.

Other than that, the only wild plant I've used is dandelion. But one of my friend regularly collected nettles and so I've eaten it on a number of occasions. They taste wonderful and are especially good for the kidneys. Nettles are very common but you have to cook them to remove the sting from their spines.
 
Hey man thanks for responding to this thread, I see you know your plants too!
I've eaten dandelion greens before, but have never tried the the whole roots for coffee thing.
You can use chicory root for coffee too. I just like the real thing to much when it comes to coffee.
The dandelion blossoms make some good wine though! I did not know that about plantain repelling mosquitoes, I gotta
try that one. As far as wild greens go I really like amaranth, purslane, black mustard and green briar tips.
Wild greens that you have to cook in any changes of water (milkweed, poke weed, wild lettuce, etc) just ain't
worth it to me.
Yeah mint is good stuff, sometimes there's nothing better than some fresh hot mint tea around a campfire, with or
without the whiskey in it, lol.
I used to eat a lot of cattails, till I found out how pollution tolerant they are, they can absorb insane amounts of
pollutants and not be effected. Still a very useful plant though. Slick use with the pipe stem, I gotta remember
that one. You'll have to try some spice bush twigs cooked with those burdock roots. Spice bush is great stuff, it's
leaves can be used as a tea or rubbed on the body as a mosquito repellent. The twig bark is excellent to spice up
fish and wild game, and the red berries it gets in September can be used as a seasoning too.
Lavender and oregano, though not wild, are great stuff also. But I find them more potent when you get them in pure
essential oil form. Oregano oil can clear up some really nasty shit like staff and strep. And lavender oil is stronger
than most people know, it is one of the best things for healing burns and it's bonus... it has the tendency to make
opiates work a little stronger ;)
 
venusinpisces said:
I am lucky to have several huge bushes of mugwort fairly close my house and during the spring I always harvest some to use throughout the year. It is a bitter that can be used as a general tonic, much like dandelion, to purge the body of excess. But what I really love about mugwort is that it gives me intense vivid dreams. I try not to use it too much because that effect wears off if you use it all the time.
Click to expand...

Fuck yeah! Mugwort dreams! That shit always makes me sleep like a log.
 
I use a lot of the common ones already mentioned. Dandelion, Plantain, Chicory, Nettle.

@ EastCoast315: Yeah man, Plantain really is great for wounds. I applied a crushed leaf to a burn once, and the pain subsided after about 30 seconds.

One of my favorite plants is the Pitch Pine. The needles make a delicious tea that has 6x more vitamin C than a lemon. In the spring, the flowers can be picked and eaten raw. They are high in fat and full of calories. The inner bark is high in carbohydrates and can be peeled and fried in lard. ( Haven't tried this yet, since I would have to peel the bark from a living tree. I'm waiting to find a fresh windblown) The pine nuts can also be roasted and eaten.

Besides food, The pitch pine is also great for starting fires. The sap, mixed with cotton balls or a similar flammable material makes a great fire starter. A golfball sized glob will burn for about 10 minutes. I've boiled water using dried sap, alone. The roots are full of resin and also make excellent fire starters. This is commonly known as "fatwood". I look for knocked over trees that have the roots exposed to harvest. You can also find pine knots lying on the ground. These are the remains of a long decomposed tree. The resin preserves the wood long after the rest of the tree has rotted away. If you can't find dry tinder, scrape fine fatwood shavings into a pile and ignite.

The Resin also makes a decent glue. You heat up a large glob until it becomes liquid, then add in finely crushed charcoal powder and mix it up until the two substances become a homogeneous mixture. The glue can be reused again and again simply by re-heating it.
 
Sassafras is good for tea. Leaves can be dried and used as seasoning. The roots dried are what is best known for tea but I've made it with
Leaves too. Maple seed pods peel the outside and eat the seed. Leaves I wipe my ass with a lot, that and oak. Boil acorns, A BUNCH of times, to get rid of the nasty ass Tanninc taste. Also rose buds and leaves can be eaten and made into tea. Milkweed you can make cordage. Maples are tapped hard in northern pa and if ya know how to do it, natural maple syrup is damn good, no high fructose
 
Real nice thread by the way, I've been studying bush skills and edibles since i was in middle school and read my side of the mountain, ha
 
I've always noticed how wild plants vary from one location to another. The further I get from Jersey, the less
plants I'm familiar with and can identify. I often take notice to the most mundane plant habits, like that I can
find Red Cedar on both sides of the Appalachians, but I have yet to find it in that mountain range. Or that
stuff like May Apple and Blood Root prefer clay soils but are not so fond of South Jersey's more acidic soil.
I remember the first time I went to California, I was going nuts just identifying all the plants I had only seen
in guide books, Hoarhound, Yerba Santa, Ephedra, Eucalyptus, Passion Flower, California Poppy and Various Sages.
I only got to scratch the surface the half dozen times I've been there.
When I went to Honduras... I couldn't identify shit! (except for the Mango and Cashew trees). Botanically
speaking it was like I got dropped on Mars! I did learn to identify Noni trees while there. Oh man does Noni
fruit smell really bad!
 
Hi,

Well I'm in Northern California and I am studying local/native plants.

Some stuff will appear in a all areas across the country, while other things won't.
Banana trees in LA but not up her ...bummer!!

My faves at the moment & in season:
Miners Lettuce - vit C powerhouse !!
Acorns
Chickweed
Soap root/Amole : awesome all purpose plant:
you can eat it, clean with it, use it for glue, and make brushes out of the root hairs.
Plantain

We are having a false/early spring which is playing havoc on everything, which will die
from late frosts like last year, even the Manzanita flowers are out already :>(.

Wish I could find 'Indian' potato, Cammas, Wapato ....but had no luck so far.

Also looking for a body of water for cattail...........
 
fuck yeah dmac, cattails are the best. They thicken any stew quick, and it makes your soup feel like it's more filling!
about 8903249243 uses for them, from shelter to food to firemaking to facial cleanser, no joke.

Does anyone know about wild tobacco? Called pukeweed usually, I've been trying to find a large patch of it, not sure where it'd grow though?
 
EastCoast315 said:
fuck yeah dmac, cattails are the best. They thicken any stew quick, and it makes your soup feel like it's more filling!
about 8903249243 uses for them, from shelter to food to firemaking to facial cleanser, no joke.
Click to expand...

If your using them for food just watch were you pick them. Cattails have an extremely high tolerance for pollutants,
they can even thrive in some of the most polluted waters. The entire plant can actually store up at a lot of nasty
stuff(lead, PCB's, hydro carbons, DDT, etc.). I used to eat the inner part of the young shoots a lot, now I don't
eat them as often. I'm now just a bit picky about where I pick them from. The younger plants are probably the
safest when dealing with contaminated areas since they have had less time to acquire as many toxins as the
older plants. I'm not trying to scare anyone off of cattails, just saying be careful if your eating lots of them.
I often use the same rule with fish in questionable waters, the larger older fish have been around longer than the
younger smaller fish, they have had less time to acquire the same amount of toxins.
 
EastCoast315 said:
Does anyone know about wild tobacco? Called pukeweed usually, I've been trying to find a large patch of it, not sure where it'd grow though?
Click to expand...
I'm not as familiar with the "wild tobacco" aka pukeweed that your looking for. That particular plant, Lobelia inflata I have
never identified. However I have seen large marshy areas along creeks where a close relative of it's was growing,
Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis), it's also a Lobelia but I'm not sure if it's used the same. Around the end of summer
it's easy to find Cardinal Flower, the marshes will have little blazes of red spotting them. It's flowers are really that
brightly colored!
I have found Wild Tobacco(Nicotiana rustica) growing in PA before. It was in a patch outside of an old farmstead that
the owners were obviously ignoring. Mixed in was a lot of Brazil Tobacco(Nicotiana Tabacum), the cultivated kind that's
in your smokes. Man did I have a lot of tobacco for my pipe that summer!
There is also another tobacco that grows wild, this one in in California, it's from Argentina and looks like a cross between
a small shrubby tree and Nicotiana rustica. From what I remember reading this "tree tobacco" is poisonous and supposed to
cause seizures, strokes and death. Of coarse I read this after I had sampled some! Obviously I did not die, but that shit
did make me feel a little funny, and not the good kind of feeling funny. That wasn't the first time I've accidentally poisoned
myself... and probably won't be the last!
 
I made stew with fish, dandelion leaf, and plantain. It tasted good and made me feel cool.
The best tasting wild food I've eaten is the wild onion, which are all over the place in PA right now. Eating enough of this would repel insects.
I've chewed on tasty wild (invasive) carrot roots also, but this was in late summer and they were tough and very sinuous. They seemed to have a high amount of calories, and I'm going to get some this spring while they're nice and tender :]. Don't mistake the deadly poison hemlock for wild carrot.
I'm going to look for some nettles this spring also and try them boiled and raw. Watch this:
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I'm really just building skills that may come in handy sometime.
 
In case anyone is wondering I will often use those fancy Latin botanical names for plants in these posts.
However I generally don't use them when I'm talking to someone about wild plants. I use them here so it's
easier to find pictures and plant info on the net. Just trying to make it easier for anyone who wants to do
they're own research.
 
There are so many, and I enjoy the taste of wild food. Seems like everyone likes Oxalis, and you just pick it and eat. (Oxalis looks similar to clover, but its leaves are shaped like hearts, very easy to spot.) Other plants you can eat raw: chickweed, violets, henbit, purslane, lambs quarters. Purslane grows feral in the Phoenix area, and it's great because if you're hot, it'll cool you off. EastCoast315 mentioned clover flowers, but you can also eat the leaves.

I've made tea out of sumac as well as eating the berries. Don't eat poison sumac (if the berries are red, you're safe-poison sumac has white berries). I've also had pine needle tea. Just don't boil the water when you make it, because you'll end up drinking turpentine. Wild fruits and nuts are great - blackberries, plums, persimmons, passion fruits, blueberries, strawberries, hickories nuts (includes pecans), walnuts, pine nuts. It can be work getting the meat out of wild hickory nuts, but it's worth it. If there are palms nearby, check to see if they are date palms. The Mexican Fan Palm gets huge bunches of berries which I think are delicious. Also, you can eat the berries from Lantana; they're not meaty, but they taste good. The flowers of the redbud tree are also edible.

In the desert, you can eat any cactus flower or fruit safely. Also, the pads of the prickly pears can be eaten raw or cooked. Of course they have to be handled carefully. The leaves of the beautiful ocotillo can be eaten raw. Yucca roots can be cooked and are quite tasty, and they can be mashed for soap. I have a lot of strong rope that I've made from the leaves. If you look at a yucca leaf, you'll see the fibers running from tip to base. You get them by pounding or by scraping carefully with a knife. Hard to explain how to twist a rope though-easier to show someone. You can also make a needle and thread with the yucca leaves because of the pointed tips. Same with the leaves of agave. If you've never had mesquite pods and you get a chance, gather them up. They are sweet and have a wonderful flavor. You can pound them into a flour, but you can also just chew them.

If you think back to your childhood, you might be able to think of some plants you used to eat. Most people I talk to can remember eating plants when they were kids.
 
dandelions are good yea. morning glory and mugworth for trips. kansas prickly pear u can cook and pull of the thorns. make sure u get em all. some are real fine.
 
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