 Hey everyone, Rob Greenfield here and I'm with Sam Thayer and a lot of you who follow my channel think that I'm some sort of like expert forager and you really look up to me. Well this is who I look up to, this is where I've gotten my knowledge. Almost, I mean so many of the plants that I have eaten have come from his books and what I've learned from him along with many other foragers. So it's really exciting to have Sam here today. He's going to teach you and I'm going to learn a little bit at the same time. So yeah thanks for being here Sam and glad to get to spend some time together. Thanks for having me on. So we're here in an unused horse corral, pretty small area just outside of Lexington, Kentucky and some people think you need to travel far and wide to find wild edibles but you don't. I mean this is the kind of environment you can find just about anywhere. Even if you're in town you're going to see most of these plants. So we've got a whole bunch of lawn plants, edible lawn plants right here. Now I like to look for things that are not just edible but in the optimum stage to eat. So we have things like common plantain, you know this isn't my favorite green but it's edible but I like to find a big plant with a newly emerging young leaf. You know I'm picky. So I wouldn't eat that but actually that's the right leaf right there. I mean the leaf is still curled up, it's kind of a lighter green. You know and I said common plantain is not my favorite, it's not bad. Here we have common blue violet, normally I show people these while they're blooming but you get a few young leaves where they're still curled up, they're smaller, you can see that one is a lot smaller than this one. So this one is like a great stage for eating common blue violet, the stem is good, the leaf is good and I'm going to be eating things raw today but I eat most of my greens cooked. I eat a lot more raw greens than most people but I eat even more cooked greens. I don't know if I've had this one before. All violets are edible, this common blue violet is in lawns all over the place and it's one of the better violets, it's one of my favorites. We got this creeping Charlie, what do they call it, gill over the ground, ground ivy. Many different names or if you're in England, Jenny run up the hedge. This is the mint family, it's got a strong aroma, people smell that a lot when they mow their lawns, it's kind of the smell of July from childhood to me. And I don't like this that much as a green, a tea sometimes, it also was one of the main herbs used in beer centuries ago. I also made a salad with greens of this, too many greens of that when I was in sixth grade and lost a friend that way. So you don't want to overuse that flavor, it's a strong flavor. When you say friend, do you mean this became not your friend or someone- No, no, neither way, I lost a friend as in he did not want to go. He did not want to hang out with me anymore after I fed him this. I fed him, yeah, great question, that sounds worse than it was, a little more dire. Although it was pretty traumatic for me. I convinced this friend to eat a wild salad with me and I put way too much of that in there and I was a little overzealous when I was 12 and I didn't like it either but he was like, I ain't eating that stuff anymore. This would be considered by a lot of people a weed that they're dealing with in their gardens, right? Yeah, yeah, or lawn weed, you know what I mean. And then we've got, so this looks like a strawberry leaf. But it's not, it's false strawberry. And so here's, looks like a strawberry. This is a close relative of strawberries, Dukesnia indica. But it actually is, I wouldn't say it's flavorless. Because if you have a whole handful, there's some flavor there and the flavor's good. But there's not a lot of it. So it's really mild. So if you hear people say wild strawberries, they're flavorless. They're talking about this. But it's related to strawberry and it's structurally nearly identical. The flowers are yellow unlike strawberries which have a white flower. Here is another plant I really like. This is common chickweed. But we're past the ideal stage. It's already blooming, actually some of these have mature fruits or nearly mature fruits on them. But the chickweed has paired leaves and the stem has a row of hairs down one side of the stem only and that row often switches after each pair of leaves to a different side. It's hard to see that it's so small but it's very distinct in having just one row of hair. Now this tastes fine, tastes like corn silk like chickweed is supposed to. But it's a lot lusher and larger and more tender in late winter, early spring, before there's any flowers or flower buds. So that's marginally good now. So Sam said it tastes like corn silk and literally like the silk of a corn, like fresh sweet corn almost. Yeah, it's remarkable and you know, we have a whole bunch of species of chickweed. Only three of them have that hair on one side of the stem. So there's common chickweed and then there's two other scientific names that we call all three species common chickweed. But we have water chickweed which has hair either nowhere or all around the stem. And water chickweed, a lot of people collect it and use it just the same and call it common chickweed. But it's, in Wisconsin where we're from, water chickweed is the common one. You know, this one's not as common. So there's a whole bunch of native and non-native chickweeds. So he mentioned Wisconsin just so you all know. So we are from about two hours from each other and we met at Little Caesar's Pizza about 20 years ago and then we re-met at the Earth Scales Gathering three years ago. Yeah, believe it or not, we've eaten Little Caesar's Pizza before a number of times. Especially me. Well, yeah, you probably ate more than I did. All right, what's next? Well, here's some dandelion which, yeah, I keep saying everything's out of season. And actually that's important. It's important to be picky if you want forage food to be good. You've got asparagus in your garden, you know, you don't just eat it any time. You eat it at the right time and only at the right time. So the dandelion's okay now but when they are, they're optimum about two weeks before they bloom, it's one of my favorite greens in the world. Dandelion fried with onion and olive oil, a little bit of salt. It's so simple, so good. That's quite bitter. Yeah, yeah, but it won't be earlier. And here's a trick for dandelions when they're in season. I just clip off the outer two-thirds of the leaf and I've done taste tests with people. People way prefer this to this. The bitterness is concentrated in the mid-vane. And so when I'm harvesting dandelions, I'll just grab and just clip the top two-thirds of the leaves. So that's a great tip for people that have sort of an aversion to bitter that are trying to get started with foraging something like dandelions. That could be really helpful. Yeah, and the scissors, man, makes it just faster because then you don't pull up whole leaves and get the dirt at the bottom. OK, so we've worn out this spot. But that was quite a bit right here. But there's a lot more behind us. Within this little armspan, that's five different edibles. And we actually haven't talked about every edible in this spot, probably. All right, because we've got white clover. They're probably not very into clover. Well, mostly what I like on clover is the flowers. Clovers are edible, but they're one of these things that people learn early in their foraging experience. But I find people tend to move away from them that in plantain even, because they're not they're not fabulous edibles. But it's nice to know because they're all over the place. Very nice to know. All right, shall we move a few feet? Yeah. And these urban areas, most suburban areas have a lot of trees. And a lot of those trees are food-broozing trees. This one's black walnut. I love the smell. You know, the nuts ripen in the fall. And you need a big hammer to crack them. But I love black walnut. It's one of the first wild edibles that I learned. And we also got hackberry. Now, the hackberry fruit also ripens in the fall. Not as well known that you can eat hackberry leaves, but it's not as well known because they're kind of marginally good. So on that note, I think, did you say this weekend that there's three trees in North America with edible leaves? There's three primary ones, I say. This is a kind of a marginal one, right? But the three ones are, there's mulberry, sassafras, and basswood in eastern North America. And then there's, I consider kind of marginal is hackberry and beech leaf, right? All of them just when they're young and tender. Well, I have to say, that's actually pretty good. This is a new one for me. So I've foraged about 200 or so species from the wild. Sam, we were talking about it, about 900 or so species. So I'm standing here and just, I already know there's a lot to eat. And just walking around with Sam, I'm realizing even more how edible this green pasture is. It's pretty great. So what I love though is the fruit on the hackberry. There's some more hackberry trees around, so maybe we'll get to show some unripe fruit on there. And then we got black cherry, our most common native cherry, and our largest native cherry in this region. They'll start fruiting when they're small trees, but they can get up to 150 feet tall and four or five feet in diameter. So here is the raceme of cherries. They're small, juicy. They vary in flavor a lot from almost like a domestic black cherry to a pretty bitter. So just taste your black cherry and decide if it's worth your time. But- Is this about the size? Well, they'll get bigger than that as they ripen, but the biggest ones will be like a half inch cherry, so smaller than a domestic cherry for sure. But when you find a loaded tree, you can fill a five gallon bucket in a half hour sometimes, I mean, they can be loaded. And I like, they dry into like a, not really a leather, but like a sticky paste, like prune butter kind of. But yeah, so that's a, that's another nice edible. So this is poison hemlock. This is one of the most dangerous toxic plants in the temperate world. So my strategy for dealing with it is don't eat it. And so it doesn't jump out and attack you or anything like that. And it's in the carrot family. It's got a resemblance to carrot, but it has no hair on the stem and it's got a white powder covering the stem. You can see it wiped that off. It has a more prominent white powder than any plant I know. And that's a good identifying feature, but it also has that green with the deep purple spots. Now, the green part of this is not exceptionally toxic. Not saying you need to eat it. Absolutely don't eat it. But it's not exceptionally toxic. It's the root is the most toxic part. All the serious poisons and fatalities that I have read about all occurred from the root. Livestock will often eat the greens without any problem. You probably don't want them eating a lot of it, but if a goat finds this and eats those leaves off the bottom, that goat's gonna be fine. Can you tell people about the banana? The banana? Well, I tell people, if you're gonna eat a plant, it needs to pass the banana test, which means you need to be just as confident about eating that as you would be about eating a banana. Like you've probably never picked up a banana. We'll get that out of the way. We don't want that to go seed. That's an invasive plant. So I'm gonna pull it out. There's that dangerous root. So you've probably never picked up a banana and been like, hey, wait a second, what if it's a deadly false banana, right? Then you're ready to eat a banana because you have absolute confidence that it's a banana. So you're ready to eat any plant when you're that confident where, like, if you went to the grocery store and you saw a bunch of bananas and there was a sign that said, you know, red plums, 2.99 a pound. You'd be like, hey, they have their red plum sticker on the bananas. You're not gonna be like, hey, I thought those were bananas, but I guess I'm wrong. So when you're that confident, that's when you're ready to eat anything. Yeah. And on that note, I think one of the things that you recommend is kind of learning one plant at a time, getting confident with that plant. Yeah, I mean, I'm showing you a whole bunch of stuff, but what I'm not here to show you, you just eat what you're confident about and you can't get confident about 25 plants in a few minutes, right? So you work on one plant at a time until you've got it really solidified. Then you move on to the next one. And if you learn five plants a year, 10 years you've got 50 plants, and that's a lot, you know, I've been into this since I was a little kid. And so I've had that chance to accumulate a lot of knowledge, but it's not like I go out and learn 25 new plants in a day ever. I've never done anything like that. So. And what I did during my, you know, the one of the ways I looked at it, just in alignment with that, if you are really passionate about foraging and you really wanna get going, if you just learn one plant a week for a year, that's 52 plants, that's pretty. This fast. Yeah. And you can do that. If you apply yourself, it's not that hard to learn one plant a week. Yeah, absolutely. All right, what's the next plant? So, yeah, we got a lot of cool stuff over here. Polkweed, often poke, is called poke salad. It's important to understand that the word salad in the English language used to mean cooked greens. And around 1920, you started to switch to meaning raw greens. But that salad as cooked greens is kind of preserved in the name of this plant and a few other plants that do not eat this raw. You will get sick if you eat it raw. In anything but the tiniest quantities, you want the young and tender tips and associated leaves like that. That could be when it's knee high or when it's chest high. Here's a young one. And it's not about the height. It's about it being young and tender. We took those tops last night because we had the traditional poke salad, bacon, onions, poke greens, and two eggs mixed in for dinner last night. And did you die from it? Nope. I didn't either. It was good. And this is actually, this is my first time eating poke. I've seen it for years. First time actually eating it, having it for dinner last night was another wonderful plant to have a relationship with. So very few of the plants that we collect are, I would say this about, but you better do this right or you're gonna get sick. You boil it 10, 15 minutes in a generous dose of water and then drain that off. And then you cook it, you know, fry it or however you want to cook it using the casserole. And then it is mild and excellent. One of my favorite greens, but you better cook it. So we'll set that down for now. And we got one of my, also another one of my favorite plants here, mulberry. So what kind of mulberry is this? Red or white? Well, it's actually, this is the hybrid Illinois ever bearing probably or a seedling from an Illinois ever bearing. This is a hybrid between the native red mulberry and the Asian or white mulberry. Just starting to ripen, but you can see this tree is gonna be loaded. I'm kind of jealous that I'm not gonna be here in Kentucky for this because about 10 days, I mean, there's just gallons. Our native mulberry has a much bigger leaf that's not shiny on top. It's sand, papery, rough. And it has an even coating of hair all over the bottom, our native mulberry. And actually, we've been seeing more of the native when we've been out in the woods in this area, but in town in Lexington, in a farm country, it's more of the non-native. You got a lot of both in Kentucky, but they're very different trees. The native mulberry has a bigger fruit. And so they kind of bred some of the characteristics of the big-fruited native one and a little better flavor in the native one and the high productivity of the Asian one. Mulberry leaves are also edible. These are a little bit, it's a little bit late in the year to get them. And also, again, the native mulberry, the leaves can be giant. The leaves can be that long. People think I'm exaggerating. That means you don't know the native mulberry. And you can have like a salad of three leaves. I mean, they're that big. And nettle, sorry, mulberry leaves taste like nettle leaves, but they don't stink, especially when they're cooked. High in protein. Really one of the most special trees in the continental United States, I feel like. I love them. And if you can plant the native mulberry, they are absolutely gorgeous with these giant tropical-looking leaves. Pretty good. And hey, have you ever dehydrated the leaves and ground them up into a powder so that you could travel? I have not done that, but you can buy those in Asian markets sometimes. I mean, that's a common traditional practice to gather the young mulberry leaves and dry them and powder them. Then you can put them in soups or smoothies. I like to do that, so that way when I'm on the road, if I'm not able to get really healthy food, I have this like multivitamin in a jar that I've made that I can add in with my food. And supposedly mulberry greens are supposed to be hallucinogenic, some people say. The greens? I've heard this, or the unripe fruit. I've heard different things, yep. I've never had any mulberry hallucinations. Me neither. I do have mulberry dreams though. Sometimes in the winter, I think about mulberry trees and I get all excited. All right, they're just starting. All right, what's next? This is the hotspot right now, lamb quarters. This is the perfect stage of growth. Lamb quarters is related to spinach, high protein, mild, high in calcium, delicious. It's good raw, but it's very good cooked. If you're gonna make cooked greens, I like to have a bitter green, a hot green and a mild green. That's my mild green. I will say that this is actually one of my favorite greens on earth and you find it in urban environments a lot. Like Chicago, Minneapolis, all the major cities that I go through, you see in huge quantities. I mean really, almost any major city in the world, you're gonna find this. And quinoa is a species of goose foot or lamb quarters and the common lamb quarters, you can use the grain and I use my wild rice processing equipment to do lamb quarter seeds and it is incredibly efficient. It's actually easier than processing wild rice. So you can get a bushel of that seed and you can get gallons of finished wild quinoa. Wild quinoa, so I may as well ask you this because everybody says they often say it has a nutty flavor. Would you call that nutty? No. That's just something that people say. What do you say nutty? All kinds of stuff, like as if there's only like three types of flavors in the world. There's like asparagus and there's nutty and there's sweet, you know what I mean? I don't know. That's one that I caught myself. Numerous people called it nutty and then I found myself saying it's nutty and then I'm like, is that nutty? I think it's a lamb's quarters flavor. Yeah. But I mean this is top notch. So this is one of the most commonly eaten leafy greens in the world. Not wild leafy greens but of all leafy greens in the world. It's one of the most commonly eaten things. Probably not as commonly eaten as black nightshade greens or amaranth greens but it's up there, you know. Hey, can we talk about one little thing? I feel like the lamb's quarter is kind of a perfect time but when we're picking the lamb's quarter as we're basically pruning the tops, a lot of people think that foraging is, it's inherently killing or it's damaging and I wanted for you to, you know, maybe say something about that. Well, you know, with each and everything you forage, you need to think about how you're affecting the ecology of the area you're foraging. What's great about weedy urban plants is that they are generally, there's not a conservation concern with these weedy urban plants, not a native plant to begin with. If you have a patch you wanna make sure you don't eliminate it if you like to come back but what lamb's quarters needs is disturbance of the soil. Each plant produces thousands of seeds so as long as there's soil disturbance and high nutrient levels it's going to come up but it disappears from an area when the soil is not disturbed. So like with any plant or any animal it needs its proper habitat and it needs access to the habitat. If you, there's no way you could get rid of all the lamb's quarter seeds in the soil here. So that's kind of the limiting factor. Human harvesting is gonna have virtually no effect. It looks like a goat or something got in here and took the tops off of everything over there. They're gonna recover, they're gonna seed out just fine. Nature produces in abundance and there's a lot of that abundance that we can share. Yeah, this is a very abundant patch of lamb's quarter. We didn't notice this earlier but we've got smart weed or something that's called lady's thumb and at this point I don't know which species this is. This would be the genus persicaria and all of them are edible, they vary in quality. Do you know these smart weeds? Yeah, I ate these with Kenton up in Northern Wisconsin that's how I learned about them. Some are hot, this isn't one of the hot ones. This could be persicaria, maculosa or it could be pensilvanica, I'm not sure which one but that's a nice mild one. Yeah, very mild. They're all edible. Some are definitely better than others though. That's one of the best. Pretty good. We've got chicory. Now we know it's not dandelion because it's getting a leafy stalk. When there's just the base of leaves it can look almost exactly like dandelion but the way to tell chicory from dandelion is to flip it over, there's erect hair all along the bottom of the mid vein whereas the dandelion is either hairless or it has soft, woolly hair that lays down flat on the mid vein. And so that's actually, it's pretty, if you remember that, it's kind of foolproof but they're used almost interchangeably. It's another bitter green. I like bitter greens generally fried and however, sometimes chicory is mild. It really varies from place to place. We'll try that. That's actually pretty mild for chicory. I mean, I wouldn't want that as the base of my salad but I could put a little bit of that in a salad or I nibble that. Sometimes it's more bitter than that. But yeah, but as a fried green, I like that slightly bitter flavor. That one and a hot one and a mild one. So a lot of times I've misidentified chicory for dandelion but ultimately both edible, no problem, is there any problem with that? No, I mean, you wanna identify what you're eating but there is what we call the lettuce dandelion group and these are plants that have a kind of dandelion-like look and milky sap and dandelion-like flowers. There is literally hundreds of edible species in North America. I'm never even gonna learn all the species myself. I know probably 70 or 80 species in that group but it's huge. So there's wild lettuces and salt thistles and dandelions and celsophie and there's native dandelion relatives in the genus Krigia and there's just a whole bunch of them. A youngia japonica, which is a common weedy plant in the Southeast, they're all edible. And anywhere in the world where people still eat a lot of leafy greens, they collect the whole group somewhat indiscriminately and use them in mixed greens, either pot herbs or fried greens. This raw greens in large quantities, that's like a kind of a distinctly Western modern idea. Oh yeah, south thistle. This is a dandelion relative. It's got prickles, but they're kind of innocuous prickles. There's three species of south thistle in North America. You see there's common south thistle, prickly south thistle and field south thistle. And the prickly is the most prickly. The field south thistle is not prickly. And... Do you eat the leaves on this? Yes. Okay. Anything that's tender. This is prickly south thistle and it's a little bit prickly. Sometimes it's a little bit more prickly. But it's... I've never done that. It's a little pokey. A little bit, but then they just chew up, disappear. Yeah, very nice. And again, this is commonly eaten cooked, but you can eat it raw. I just saw this for the first time. Oh yeah. Come on, wood sorrel. So, one of our yellow wood sorrels, the first edible plant that I learned as a child and the first edible plant that many people learn, nice and sour and tangy. The fruit of many species looks like a banana. Um, we call them juicies, or we call them naners. And, you know, people will say that oxalic acid is what makes those sour, but actually they have a whole bunch of different acids in there. There's malic acid in there. It was oxalic. What? So many different flavors in this one patch. I mean, we've kind of hit all the, not all of them, but pretty wide variety of the green flavors. Yeah, the one we haven't found yet is hot. Okay. We saw some hedge mustard out in the pasture, but we haven't seen any mustards in here. But I'm not complaining. There's a lot of good stuff in here. So we were about to go to the last plant, but then we got distracted by three more plants in a matter of a few steps. Yeah, so we got red clover. And again, I'm not really fond of clover greens, they're okay, but red clover flowers, I like better than white clover flowers and they're great in tea. I know people who take the clover flowers, dry them and then chop them up in a blender and get kind of like a powder and you can use that powder like in like casserole as a really unique flavor. You can put that into teas. You know, you can put into flowers and baked goods like a lot of cool stuff that I haven't done as much cool stuff with red clover. I just eat them like that, you know. But I have some friends that are more creative than me and done some pretty cool things. And I love how the stipule of the leaf is like a butterfly with clear wings, isn't that cool? Never noticed that. And we got, we found some garlic mustard. This is non-native invasive plant which in native hardwood forests can take over astoundingly and out-compete native plants. And it does best in those really, really rich flood plain forests and lower slope of hardwood forests. So I, if I see this on my property which has happened three times, I've seen three on my property. I make absolute certain I pull it out. I come back every year to make sure that there's no more coming up. But if you are in an area with a heavy infestation of it you can eat some of it. And I have places where it's growing in the wild that I return to every year to try to weed it out. You know, it's got a faint garlicky flavor, not a strong garlicky flavor. But it's a fairly strong flavored plant, more of a seasoning. I like the young shoots. These are small plants. There's some big ones behind us that are, you know, four feet tall. And when those are about this tall and they got a thick, juicy stem, that's the time that I like to use them. The flavor's a little milder then to use in quantity. But this plant is extraordinarily nutritious. There's been analyses done. And this is a great example of eating, being an ecosystem service. If you can eat this, you're actually providing a service to our ecosystems. Another example of foraging being stewardship to the wild. Yes. So also, I put this here because it's growing behind this red piece of metal. But here's wild grape vine. You actually don't know which species of grape this is. There's several in central Kentucky. But right now, you can eat the tendrils and the stem tips. A little bit tangy. Did you eat these when you were a kid? No. There's one of the things that I started eating as a child early on, grape tips. You can use grape leaves, especially the younger ones, as a cooked green or for dolmas. There's certain grape leaves are better for that, but you can use, you can try any of them. And of course, the grapes in the fall. So, and that's very common in urban areas. With everything here. Well, there's other things around where we're gonna go to the last plant now. Yeah, for the sake of brevity, we'll skip a few. We've been, we were planted under like 10 plants, perhaps, I think we've done about 20. Oh yeah, that thistle right there is perfect. This is one of my favorite wild edibles. Now there's nothing to eat on this tree right now, but this is a black locust. Considered a weed tree, because it grows up in urban environments and it comes up in fence lines and stuff, but it is native to Kentucky and many of our Eastern states. The flowers, when the flowers are out, they are absolutely delicious. A tree will produce pounds and pounds of flowers. You can feel gunny sacks full. We just eat them as a vegetable. They're like sweet pea, vanilla flavored, but the shape of a flower. I mean, we make chicken soup with them. We make fruit salad with black locust flowers in there. I put them in my oatmeal. I fry them and mix it with corn, sweet corn. There's so many things. There's really nothing like it in the modern American diet. And what's great about it is it's in such abundance. It's available to almost everybody and almost everybody loves it. The tricky part is you have to get it when the flowers are just opening up. If you wait a couple of days too long, they start to shrivel. They lose their vanilla flavor. They lose their sweetness and their crispness and you could be disappointed if you collect them too late. You gotta get it at the perfect time. And they have those in Wisconsin? Oh yeah. All the way, I mean there's tons of them in Ashland on Long Lake Superior, all the way down through the deep south. You never know these things unless you're looking for them. I've passed by this for 34 years. So I wanna share Sam's books. There's The Forager's Harvest, Nature's Garden and Incredible Wild Edibles. These two books right here are the ones that I've used. These have been, I mean these were a game changer for me on my own, not necessarily. The best thing is having a forager with you to take yourself out. But the second best thing to that for me has been these two books. I haven't gotten into Incredible Wild Edibles yet, but I will. So I highly recommend these books if you're starting to forage. And Sam's website is foragersharvest.com. Just an endless, I mean as you can see from the last, however long we've been in this little quadrant, just an endless supply of knowledge. You will see Sam again on this channel and planning on visiting him up in Northern Wisconsin this fall, but thanks so much for taking the time to teach myself and everybody else all these plants. It's been a pleasure. It's been nice to see you again, man. All right, brother. Thanks a bunch. So what we see as just this sea of green now you know is actually an incredible diversity of edible foods. We just discovered over 20 different edible foods in this tiny little patch and this food is everywhere from the cities to the countryside. If you got a lot out of this video, I encourage you to subscribe. And if you want more people to be inspired and educated, make sure to like and share this video and comment to spread it out there and spread this information and this education.