Bushcraft Foraging Edible Plants - Alexanders

Hi there guys, it's Mike from MCQ Bushcraft here and I'm out on the coastline again and I wanted to show you a wild edible that I eat quite a lot of and it's growing all around me here in this paddock and all across other ends of the coastline. I've also found this wild edible in Cornwall, an awful lot of it down there along with many others that you can eat and this is one that's a member of the Apiaceae family or Umberliferae family as it may be documented as as well which is the Carrot and Parsley family and that's quite a tricky family, there's a lot of plants within that family or species of plants that can kill you or make you very ill if you get them wrong and they all look very similar and have a distinct kind of look about them and this one here is called Alexander's, it's probably one of my favourites in that family it provides an excellent source of roughage. I've eaten this one quite a bit with pigeon, it goes very well with fish, it's basically like a black pepper almost in its taste and it's fairly easy to identify and once you get to know it you'll be able to spot it at a drop of a hat. So this particular plant here will emerge early March and it'll start flowering in April through to about June where it'll hang around for a little bit longer and then die off and it's a biannual plant so it lives for about two years and when it's young you'll just see little leaflets all over the ground, all over the place, you won't find it in woodland, you'll find it on the coastline which is its preferred environment. If we have a look at this plant a little more closely we can pick out some key features to help us identify it and one of the main things to know about this plant is it's one of the earliest to emerge from the Umbelliferae family so a lot of the others will still be in their infancy but this has sprung up already sometimes growing very tall probably about 40 to 50 centimetres in some cases and it's already produced flowers and those flowers already forming into seeds but for me the key feature to picking it out is its leaf or leaves. This one has very broad leaves and they have long stems as well and if we go up to the top here you'll see you have a long stem, three leaflets, long stem, three leaflets and the same again here. Sometimes the leaves can have lobes and sometimes they can just be large leaves with no lobe at all and it does vary around the plant. At the base it's far more frequent, you've got three long stalks there and they spring off into the three leaflet sections that we have here so we've got three leaflets there, three there, three there and the same just here as well and they have very very long stalks and you can see this veil at the base there, white with purple lines, very distinct, breaking off away from the stem which has purple lines down it as well. It'll be very difficult to mistake this plant for hemlock. Hemlock has purple spots and it will grow in a very different environment but there is another type of hemlock that grows around the coastline which we'll have a look at later and it's something that you might mistake with this at certain times of year. If we make our way up to the top of the plant you can see that the flower head is very distinct, it's not white like a lot of the umbelliferis, a very very bright kind of yellowy green colour, quite easy to pick out, quite a full plant really in its appearance. Alexander's is a non-native plant introduced by the Romans and the entire plant is edible raw or cooked. The leaf, the stem of the leaf, even the shoot of the main plant and the root can be used like a substitute parsnip. If sight and touch aren't enough for you, don't be afraid to smell wild edibles as well. You can actually smell the peppery taste, I know it sounds unusual but if you smell this and crush this up in your hand, it's incredibly strong, you've got a really sort of parsley-ish peppery taste coming through there, completely different to hemlock. It smells lovely, it smells almost exactly how it tastes. So here we have it, this is hemlock water dropwort. You can see a very different environment, it's growing by a river, by a stream and that's very typical of it and you will find it in great abundance on boggy damp saturated ground with fresh running water like this and it spreads very quickly along these areas and covers it in great abundance. It's a bit of a danger zone when it comes to other members of the family like cow parsley that can grow in quite close proximity to this but this is probably about 15 yards away from where we picked the alexanders so it's not very far away but there is a definite difference in the environment. The alexanders is growing by the coastline on a pasture where there's no moisture in sight in some respects, not like this anyway, it's growing on pretty well-established soil whereas this is growing by the river itself and it is growing all the way up this river as far as I can see and this plant will grow very very tall and a distinct difference really will be a big white umbel flower head as opposed to the yellowy green one which is actually quite small on the alexanders compared to what this one would be like. This one here is probably more mistakable with wild carrot simply because it bears a lot of similarities but wild carrot is very hairy on the stem and it'll grow in a completely different environment. You're most likely to see wild carrot by roadsides than you are out in the wilds to be quite honest with you these days but let's have a closer look at it. So already we can see a distinct difference in the appearance there's no flower head there's no sort of dominant stem that's very distinct coming up through this plant and this this one won't be spotted like hemlock that you find further inland this one is effectively very bare in some respects it's almost like a pale green the stem and you can see the leaflets are far more apparent it's got lots of leaflets very finely toothed kind of ruffled almost you can see these new leaves coming through they're really distinct nothing like alexanders a lot more leaflets on an actual leaf stem very feathered very full the flower head again white not yellow or green like alexanders and it's going to flower a lot later in the year it's still very young at this moment in time but again not something you want to want to eat to be quite honest with you foraging for fauna or flora on the coastline or inland is a fantastic practice and their skill sets that greatly reinforce every other aspect of bushcraft when you're out practicing skills just enjoying time with your friends camping and you can prepare meals with alexanders that we found inland and various other plants and whatever's out here that we can find there are crabs you could fish you can collect mussels limpets and different types of seaweeds and you can prepare a very good meal even adding it to supplies that you bring with you in the field but it takes a great deal of time to learn these things and persistence as well you need to want it you need to want to learn it it doesn't just come and a lot of the time i find myself constantly going back to various plants and making sure that i know everything about them and i've been studying wild edibles for a long time i'm no expert i'm just self-taught like a lot of people out there and i always listen to that part of my mind that instills doubt in me i don't get too cocky or complacent when i'm out doing various things because that's when mistakes start happening if i'm not sure about something i leave it alone completely because you can't afford to make mistakes and your ego will always try and lure you down various paths and then you make a mistake and you reset yourself again and it's a great way of learning but sometimes it can be fatal and it's not really the right way to go about wild edibles you need to be 100 110 and the more you familiarize yourself with them the more you'll have that reinforcement and confidence that you really know what's what it is you're touching and eating and that really just comes with time and exposure and lots and lots of ventures out in the field seeing things in different environments you know you're seeing something in a city where it might be pale in really acidic soils and then suddenly seeing it out in an environment like this where it's green and rich and far different you know these these plants can take different tinges and they can look very different and especially on the side of fungi and they often don't play by the rules but i hope you've enjoyed this video and i hope you found it useful it's going to take a lot more than this video alone to educate you on alexander's and on hemlock hemlock water drop and hemlock alone it's best to really familiarize yourself with the apiaceae family or umbelliferae family it's a family that can catch you out but thanks again for watching and hopefully i'll see you soon again in another video take care guys