 Hey everybody Rob Greenfield here and today I'm going to teach you how to forage in your own backyard or if you don't have a backyard your neighbor's backyard. If they don't have a backyard somebody's backyard and I'm going to introduce you to plants that are growing freely and abundantly all around us. A lot of us think that our food has to come from the grocery store and that we have to buy it but the truth is is there are thousands of species of foods that are both nutritious and delicious and medicinal and free growing right in our yards often that we think of as weeds. So I'm going to start first with the dandelion one of my favorites right over here and a lot of people are probably familiar with this plant this is this is the dandelion this is the flower right here and then these are the leaves right here and the flower turns into a seed head afterwards and these are the seed heads that have already gone but right here are the seeds still and it's a beautiful thing just to blow those so dandelion is a very bitter plant it's very nutritious and it's a medicinal one and I want to say that this yard that I'm in is basically a random yard I'm in southern France I've never been to France before up until a few weeks ago and this is just the yard of the host family that I'm staying with so I don't know all the plants here this is new foraging to me but I'm going to introduce you to about 10 plants that there's a good chance you'll be able to find in your yards as well so that's dandelion now I don't have to go very far and what I have right here coming up this looks like sorrel to me a lot you know plants around the world can be they can come in many different shapes and sizes and colors for example this looks like sorrel but check this out right here this plant also looks like sorrel to me oh wow check that out there's this yellow spider that probably came off the dandelion flower because it's camouflaged right in with that color so back to the plants so this is sorrel and sorrel has a nice sour flavor and there's another type of sorrel that I'm going to show you in a bit so just walk a little bit more see what we come across okay this is right here one of my absolute favorite plants it's very small right now in a month or two this plant could be possibly four four feet tall but right now it's a small plant and this is called lambsquarter so lambsquarter is a relative to quinoa and the leafs of lambsquarter are often described to have sort of a nutty flavor I don't know if it's nutty but it's got a different flavor and I like it amazing thing is a lot of you would look at all these green plants and you would think they all taste the same but they definitely don't lambsquarter is a relative of quinoa and you can also eat the seeds as well as a nice grain this is one of my absolute favorites and it grows into big shrubby like greens that produce incredible amounts of food so you'll see where I am I'm right next to this family's garden and what you'll see is there's almost nothing growing in this garden right now but there's food growing all over in the yard tons of people have gardens and they're pulling up the weeds thinking that they're a problem but it turns out that a lot of these weeds are more nutritious than what they're trying to grow in the garden this is a perfect example it's spring it's early April the garden doesn't have food yet but there's food growing all over in the yard so let's walk down here a little bit now this is a beautiful plant right here everybody is most everyone is probably familiar with mint there's different types of mints and how you can identify something that's in the mint family is it has a square stem so I'm going to pick a piece and when I spin it in my fingers you'll see it's not it's not rolling as a round tube it's actually a square stem so there's lots of different mints out there I don't know exactly what kind of mint this is but when it smells really nice and minty we've got yourself a good mint for making tea for putting in your lemonade for just munching for breath mint a natural breath mint and mint is very easy to plant you can take a piece of the stem a woody piece poke it into the ground and you can propagate mint and spread it all over that way so this is a really nice mint that's growing I see more of it over here I'm not sure what this plant is I'm very curious about it something that I'd like to learn actually this plant right here I was in the Netherlands about three weeks ago and someone told me that this plant is called cleavers and they told me that before it is two before it gets to the point of being it sticks to you they said before it gets to that point it is um it's edible and I don't know how to use it but again I'm I'm in a I'm in a yard that I have never foraged before arriving here two weeks ago I'm in a climate in in a region I'm in south France I've never foraged here so I'm I've done a lot of foraging I've foraged over 200 species of plants in my year of growing and foraging all my food but right now this yard and this environment that I'm showing you this is uh this is new to me this plant right here this looks a lot like um a plant that I forage when I'm in Florida and that would be oh now I'm blanking on the name but I'm I don't think it's it it's just something that looks a lot like it and I want to say picopa but I'm not sure so we'll pass on that okay let's see so okay oh here we have a little more mint beautiful mint but right next to it we have yarrow and now yarrow is not so much of an edible it's a medicinal and so yarrow has been used as a styptic to stop bleeding so if people got a big cut you could actually pack the wound with this stuff and if I've also heard of it being used for horses as well in the field so this is a really wonderful plant to know and I I see it around the world so that's called yarrow right here we have oh more of more of the the cleaver so this is the leaves of the raspberry bush and you can in a thorny it's sticking to me and you know raspberries are great blackberries are great most people know about those but a lot of people don't know that the leaves actually are really great to make a tea out of so you can make tea out of raspberry leaves and this woods line is is covered in um in actual raspberry bushes so this is just a little bit of the new growth from this spring so raspberry leaves another dandelion head and you can also just have fun with the plants too nature provides not just food not just medicine but also entertainment enjoyment and love okay I want to show you one of my absolute favorites and that is right here this is stinging metal and the easiest way to identify stinging metal is it stings so I'm going to put my arm in here oh yeah that is stinging me good so there's these tiny little fibrous hairs on here and they break off and it stings you so there's plants that kind of look like this but if it stings you it's stinging metal or wood metal um you can wear gloves or the sting actually is beneficial for you because it's actually used to help with diabetes to circulate blood flow so I actually like to I like to rub it on me now you wouldn't eat this raw because you can imagine the stings in the mouth would be could be very painful but you can make nettle tea and you can also just boil the greens and then eat the greens and yeah I'm really feeling that so this is a a beautiful plant to use um and again you know a lot of people would cut this down to get it out of their yards because I think it's a problem but it's actually super nutritious I'm going to walk over here where there's um some some onion that I'm going to show you all along this there's food going all over okay here's another one now let's see a caterpillar right here oops fell off okay so as I said I'm foraging in a new place and I don't know the plants here I don't have a guide book I there's a lot of plants that grow throughout the world now one of my favorite plants is that I forage in the United States is broadleaf plantain also called plantago and I haven't seen that in this yard but just this morning I looked at this plant here and I think this is indeed a plantago but I think what this is is a narrow leaf and the reason why is because if you break this when you break this it's not doing it I'm going to find okay when I break this you can see the veins actually separating there and that's I think a pretty telltale sign I mean if this was broadleaf plantain I'd know for sure but this tells me that this is probably a narrow leaf plantain and this is a great medicinal and great edible as well and I'm seeing this all over here now now right next to this all over the ground you can see these little caps and let's see if there okay here's one with the this is acorn and so acorn is a majorly overlooked food in fact human humanity may not exist without the acorn many cultures 50% of their calories the food came from acorns so there is a process in order to be able to eat them but this is an overlooked food and it's growing all over here let's see so I mentioned this plant before that I said looked like a plant in Florida and I remembered it and now I forgot it again um go to cola so I don't think this is go to cola but this is a plant that I foraged in Florida and it's one of the most bitter plants that there are but it's brain food another one is dollarweed which looks similar to this but just round and these grow in moisture environments which interestingly um you can see down here they're growing down here where water would flow rather than up there in the driest part so they could be related but um not sure but again this video is not a identification it's really the idea of this is just to spark your brain I mean just in the last 10 minutes how many different plants have I found that are edible and medicinal just walking around this yard that I'm unfamiliar with this is really just about sparking your mind and realizing that your yard could be a great source of nutrition and medicine so there's a couple more plants I want to show you and uh we're just about done this is a beautiful plant I think maybe they would call this buttercup smells wonderful you don't have to pick the all the plants either to get a wonderful benefit from them you can just smell them too so many beautiful flowers okay here is something that I know is a mint because of the square stem I'm gonna smell it not a minty smell I'm not sure what that is but this is worth looking into you can see a lot more dandelion here dandelion is absolute one of my top recommendations so right over here I found a different plant I mentioned sorrel before well this is this is called wood sorrel and this has got a really nice like tangy lemony flavor looks like clover a lot of people think it's clover but it's not it grows like you know this is one piece right here so this is wood sorrel there's some dog hair on it perfect place to eat food that might have been peed on by dogs so just avoid that if you don't want that simple as that you know use common sense you guys start thinking I'm going to be putting out more foraging videos that will go into those sorts of things and help you with that okay one last plant and we're actually going to step outside the yard for this one into the little field next door and this is wild onions or leeks or garlic they're all in the allium family and I found them to be abundant in a lot of places so I just found these the other day I was actually out here to take a pee and I looked down and I was peeing on some onions oh I want to mention this plant right here in the mint family I believe not sure what it is but it's an interesting one that I want to learn and I want to show you some more onions over here so here um more onion right here and here here so I think if you if you've ever mowed your lawn and all of a sudden you smell onions it's because you're mowing onions same for mint sometimes you might mow your lawn and you smell mint it's because you're mowing mint now I think this might be leeks there's leeks and there's ramps and there's wild onion there's wild garlic and there's a whole lot of different varieties and I don't know them all but they all work great it has onions so hmm what's this right here okay so this would be clover I believe and clover is edible um and this grows all over the place you can eat flowers and leaves so that's just a little introduction to foods that can be growing freely and abundantly right in your backyard if you have a backyard learn the foods that are in it if you don't have a backyard talk to your friends and share learning with with your friends and uh when you do this you will find that food is growing freely and abundantly all around you I'll have a lot more videos coming on foraging to teach you some of the more basics of how to forage so if you got a lot out of this video please share it please like it and if you have questions post them in the comments and if you haven't make sure you subscribe as well so I love you all very much and I'll see you again real soon happy foraging