 It is springtime for many of us across the world and that means the snow is melting. The plants are coming up and it's time to get outside and start foraging. My name is Rob Greenfield and today I'm really excited to introduce you to my friend Kenton. He's actually up in northern Wisconsin, my homeland, and he's going to introduce you to 10, 10 spring edibles that are great for the springtime and many of them that last through the summer. And I'm really, really excited for this because I actually visited Kenton during my year of growing and foraging all my food and he's in my homeland of northern Wisconsin. He helped me out a lot. I was eating so many different greens after spending time with him, so he's got a wealth of knowledge and I'm really excited to be able to bring that to you. So here he is up in northern Wisconsin. Hello, my name is Kenton Whitman. I'm the founder of Rewild University, a wilderness awareness school in northern Wisconsin. It is spring and I'm surrounded by wild edibles. I wanted to share with you a few of these amazing plants and just take you foraging with me. So let's go see what we can find. This is dandelion, a plant that almost all of us are familiar with. For most people this is a weed but for us it is an incredible wild edible plant that is delicious from the root all the way up to the top, the dandelion flower, the head. The leaves of dandelion are sometimes a little bit too bitter for some pallets. If you get them in the spring the bitterness is not very pronounced but if you want to put these raw into a salad you have to enjoy that little bitter tinge. If you don't these are a cooked green. As we put all these together we'll be talking about making horta or just adding them as a green goodness to a soup or a stew. Horta is a Greek wild greens essentially it means and what we do to make horta is to gather some wild greens which is basically what we're going to be covering today and put them in and steam them or boil them a little bit then add some olive oil, some lemon juice, some sea salt that's all it takes and the amount of nutrition and flavor that is packed into this side dish. If you want to see it that way it can be a meal as well but into this side dish is incredible and it gives you so much goodness so much bounty for your health. The greens we're going to gather and because they have a little bit more of a bitter flavor they might not be the main element of our horta but what they do when they get into boiling water or they're steamed is that they lose most of their bitterness so don't be afraid of getting a fair amount of dandelion in there. The dandelion flower head is the one part that really doesn't have any bitterness. Now the stem that does so I'm going to pinch that off and then be eating the flower head this can be added to a salad raw we're going to be gathering them today and when we take them home we're going to make a french recipe that translates essentially as dandelion butter it's a dandelion jelly almost that can be spread onto things and it's quite delicious. The dandelion flower is sweet and kind of juicy it has a flavor all its own that doesn't compare to anything else than I can think of. Again so much nutrition in all these wild greens because they are often growing on soil that hasn't been depleted like our monoculture crops where in conventional farming everything's been taken out of that soil these are going to be found often in waste ground this is a farm that we're on you probably can hear the cows but it's an organic farm and all around the fringes of the fields we're going to find all kinds of goodness. This my friends is Virginia water leaf this is named because you can see on the leaves here there are these little water marks almost and these water marks are a great way especially when we go out foraging with kids for them to ID this and to know that they have the right plant also we have the older plant and you can see that those water marks they start to disappear but all of these even when they're older as long as it breaks off easily these make a really nice green the water leaf is not bitter so this makes a great base for your horta or any other greens that you're going to add to your food water leaf we pick a lot of it and we're going to take it and we're going to just break it up with some little pieces and it's going to go right there in the pot and along with the dandelion and all the other ones we're going to cover today and again we make that into horta and even the little kids love it doc is a favorite of our family there's a lot of different species of doc and they're not really easy to distinguish but they have uh hmm how would i describe this there's a sheen and a shininess that you'll see i'm not sure if it's going to come through on the camera but that that shininess once you see that it can be really distinctive in the sunlight looks like there's little sparkles all over it is the way that i would say it with doc we are looking for young leaves now these have a slime on them if you see that slime on there it's another great way to make sure that you have a positive ID that slime is all over the young leaves when they're curled up like this they are prime really really nice so these young leaves is what we're looking for doc has a rhubarb like sourness to it but that can sometimes be a bitterness so it's always good i think to taste the doc a little bit make sure that it has a pleasant flavor to you and then you know when you take it and you put it into your horta into your stew into your soup it's going to add a really good flavor there's these young leaves and this one still rolled up that is prime thus far i haven't really moved around a whole lot i'm just one little edge of a spring in a field here on this organic farm and all of these weeds are just growing abundantly you probably recognize there's the virginia waterleaf that we've been eating and looking around me i can see dandelion i can see the nettles all these plants are right here there's one that's hiding underneath and might be a little bit tougher to see that is violet right underneath here is a beautiful plant and violet is edible both is a flower and a leaf what makes this really nice is that there is nothing unpleasant about the violet it is delicious has a slight muciligenous quality to it and the flower itself is much like the leaf but just has a little hint of sweetness because there's some nectar in there violet is a great one to add raw so if you are looking to make a salad and you don't want to be cooking up your greens this is a wonderful one to add in even more hidden is this familiar weed again of lawns this is gill over the ground it is beautiful little flowers and this has a really strong flavor you can you can eat it raw and that's how we usually do we put it into a salad as a flavoring but you can also add it into hortar any other greens this is in the mint family it doesn't taste minty but it does have a lot of those oils and so it tastes quite strong and you know taste a little bit and see what you think of it and then decide is this going to be a tea or am i going to add this as a flavoring as a flavoring it's outstanding because it just adds a little of this unique flavor of gill over the ground to whatever you're cooking nettle is arguably one of the most nutritious plants in the world and it has a great flavor sometimes when we make a broth out of nettle's people will almost think it's a meat broth because of the just richness of flavor that's in this plant but a lot of people are afraid of it because of course nettles have little tiny hypodermics on there that have a poison essentially that injects into us and creates a lot of itching it's advised to wear gloves when you harvest these although you can do it without if you want to try harvesting these without gloves the key is to think upwards on the plant if i let my hand go downwards onto the plant that's the direction that the needles are facing my fingers are going to encounter those and i'm going to be bitten but if i scoop upwards then i can harvest these without gloves and you will not get bitten the oh my gosh these are such a delicious delicious and nutritious plant and those needles the things that we're so afraid of here as soon as these hit heat and a little bit of liquid they're going to wilt the little hypodermics they plop down the poison is first of all it won't hurt us if we ate it it's only something that causes an itch but it is negated again it's disrupted its chemical properties is completely disrupted by the heat so when i take this and i steam it or i boil it there's no worries i'm not going to be stung by it anymore and it's going to add so much again there's no bitterness the flavor is something that almost everybody enjoys so this can be the bulk of your horta or any wild green that you're going to add into anything unlike the dandelion it's not going to bitter people out i'm just taking the tops of these you might notice as the nettle gets bigger these lower leaves they're going to become just more fibrous and not as pleasant to eat but these tops if it snaps off easy just with your fingers then you know that you have the maristam it's going to be very very tender and delicious behind me is watercress this is an amazing plant it is in the mustard family and you can eat it raw it has a very uh peppery taste that some people love and some people feel that it's better if it's milded down a little bit by cooking it you can make it into watercress soup by pureeing it and we just add it to our horta and to our wild greens this plant grows in springs so it is always aquatic you're not going to find it growing up in a field or anything it's actually in the water before this was here this was all an open spring and it started out with a few plants within three years it turned into this abundant bed of watercress and you cannot keep up with harvesting it some people are concerned about a liver fluke especially in europe this can be more of an issue that can affect you if you eat this raw so that's why it can be a good idea to cook it or to make sure that you're waiting until it grows up and then you're only harvesting above the water line that liver fluke it needs to live underneath the water and won't be on any of the higher stuff up here i recommend a good knife a long knife like a filet knife to harvest this because you can grab and just slice and it's a much easier way to harvest the watercress i'm gonna wait out there and get some when we look at the watercress leaf we can see a distinctive mustard family pairing of the leaves as they come up the stem and then an end leaf up there really really beautiful plant and oh so delicious yeah peppery and again this one has a unique flavor that is all its own you can see in a short amount of time we can gather a lot of nutrition oh my gosh so much goodness all right let's head off into the woods and we're going to find some more incredible foods to forage and the woodlands the bounty can become even more ridiculous all the screen that you're seeing behind me this is all prime incredible wild edibles and too many to show but let's hit a few of the really good ones this is wild leek this will often grow in huge colonies in the forest if you learn to recognize this particular color you can be driving along and you'll see carpets of it in other places it has trouble really establishing good colonies so we'll be talking about a way to harvest this it is really gentle on the plants now underneath there is an onion like bulb often people will pick that bulb and they just discard the leaves and they're after that that little onion bulb it has a flavor that is sort of half onion half garlic but still its own thing however for us we're after the leaves these leaves are they have an excellent oniony flavor you can identify them just by smelling them scratch it a little bit and smell it or taste a little bit if you don't mind raw onion garlic flavor when we harvest one leaf from each plant we leave the bulb and the rest of the plant intact so that it can establish these big beautiful colonies and there is what our family calls uh leek bacon and what we do is we put a little bit of olive oil in a cast iron pan and we set these down into it if the heat is just right they're going to start to bubble they'll get huge bubbles in them which you can pop with a fork and we're trying not to get it to brown but to take on a translucent deep green quality so you have to get the the heat just right and you're going to fry it on both sides take that out let it sit and crisp up it should be just crisp tender and the flavor is out of this world our daughters love it we love it when i'm making these i'm taking them off the pan and i can't make them fast enough they are sweet oniony garlicky just an incredible incredible treat right out of the pan or you can crumble them and add them on the top of a pasta or over soup just super delicious so you can get all the flavor of the wild leek just from these leaves and it's a really sustainable way to harvest them another special woodland plant is this the trout lily the trout lily looks well it's really unique see that pattern on the leaf it's nothing else i know of that looks quite like this and the trout lily we use raw it's not really good cooked some people just do not enjoy the flavor of this leaf or the little tingle it can sometimes leave in the back of some people's throats however for a lot of us we eat this it's juicy it's sweet it's a really really delicious thing to add in moderation to your food there's some evidence that these are not to be eaten during pregnancy that they can cause miscarriages so stay away from trout lily if you're pregnant these beautiful plants this is cut leaf toothwort they are you can see a very distinctive leaf right on the surface of the ground you can find little rootlets they look almost like tiny bananas sitting there on the surface those have tons of flavor this is very very flavorful still and i prefer it because those rootlets can be overpowering in the amount of flavor that they contain this is very much a horseradish flavored herb and we will add this raw usually to sandwiches into salads and it adds oh such a delicious flavor when when added like that you can also add it to a horta you can add it to a soup or a stew and it's going to deepen and enrich the flavor with that no other way to describe it than horseradish this has such a nice i won't call it a mild flavor but a very palatable horseradish flavor that isn't going to be too strong for anybody but you get the the flavor without the heat of horseradish when you use these leaves really good what we have here is spring beauty this is one of the earliest spring wildflowers and beautiful to behold these famously have something called a fairy spud little teeny bulb way down there in the ground a root that is quite delicious but the thing is these are very long-lived perennials and taking those bulbs kills the plant however these leaves these leaves are one of the if not in my opinion the best raw green in the world these are succulent they have a beautiful mild flavor to them and you can select one leaf from each plant and that plant will go on to grow and enough of these and you will have a base for a salad that you will not soon forget you might already be a forager or you might be new to it in either case there's always more to learn if you're just getting started it's easier than ever there's so many groups there's online groups and resources there's some amazing new wild edible authors out there so many ways to get started and it's such an amazing way to add good powerful nutrition to your diet we all know that the conventional food is so degraded we can hardly call it food but this is so enriched the soil out here in the forest is so filled with nutrients and goodness and all that comes up into the plants it becomes so bioavailable and and the tastes the flavors things that you just cannot get at a grocery store we at our wilderness school we will have students that will stay out for oh four to eleven months at a time so they really learn to forage and they all come back sometimes with baskets filled with chanterelles and wild leeks and oh fiddlehead ferns all these amazing foods that are very expensive if you try to go buy them at a specialty market but it's all out here in nature not only do you get these foods but you get to be outside in the forest in the fields rivers all these places that you go to harvest these amazing foods and get this experience this goodness of the outdoors as well as so much flavor and so much nutrition for your body for your friends for your family for your community cannot urge you strongly enough to take up foraging if you're not doing it now or to expand the range of your foraging if you're already doing it marvelous way to connect with people connect with nature and connect with your food thanks my friends happy foraging i hope that you got a lot out of that time with kenton i know that i did and i hope that you now have some confidence to get out there on the land and find the food that is going growing freely and abundantly all around us but make sure that you work with the land and not against it practice good ethics you can go to robgreenfield.org slash foraging for more information and to make sure that you're working with the land if you got a lot out of this video make sure to subscribe to this channel as well as kenton's channel rewild university and make sure to leave a comment below and kenton can answer it and i might answer it as well and hit the like button to help spread this across youtube i love you all very much and i'll see you again soon