Forest Survival Food 

nettles are surprisingly high in protein. finding fats and oils is the hard one. i spent 6 months in in a tiny tent in the mountains back in my youth surviving on a homemade muesli. oats, nuts, dried whole milk, whey and dried fruit. i caught trout, ate a few grasshoppers, collected pig nuts, visited the coast for a day or two of silverweed, lush mussels, winkles, urchin roe. sand dabs roasted with wild parsnip, dulse, and samphire. still had to buy oil/fat to thrive

I was stationed in Northern Germany in early 90s, and the nearby city had a day of mourning for elderly man who passed, at the end of WW2 when there was no food, he knew about edible plants that grew there. He foraged and taught others how to so so, and identify edible plants. He is credited with stopping a famine.

When I was a boy in the 1940s and 1950s because of WW2 and the shortages that lasted until about the mid 1950s (officially in some places 1954), everyone foraged, grew gardens, hunted, reused virtually everything. I remember seeing tin cans made into useable items and vividly remember tin can lids used to cover holes in fences and walls when we went to town which was a rare event because of gas shortage. There was a saying, " Use everything twice or more than twice " and people did. Old junk piles were raided for parts and metal. Old clothes became rags, quilts, and more. People learned to live.

My mom grew up in post-war Germany and she told stories about accompanying her mother, going in the woods to collect stinging nettles whenever they had to cover a stretch of time where they didn't have enough food.

Foraging is my favorite thing. As kids we survived on a lot of cat tail shoots and crawfish, and dandelion greens. We were pretty poor. But we were never hungry.

1:12 "other times not so much" - that was put very nicely. My great grandmother lived through WWI and WWII and was so used to foraging for food that she wouldn't abandon the habit even when times got better. Often to my grandmothers and mothers great embarrasment who were ashamed and afraid that people might think we were poor.

Stinging nettles are one of the most nutritionally dense plants on earth. They are high in amino acids, protein, flavonoids, and bone-building minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc, and one of the greatest sources of vitamin K.

My Fiancee and I forage every warm season for food to save for the rest of the year. Our cupboards are full of mushrooms and dried plants like bayberry leaves for seasonings, and our freezer is full of blanched wild greens like stinging nettle and lamb's quarters. These things suppliment the venison from my hunts and the vegetables we grow in our garden.

Nettles- blanched and then sautéed with onion, and served with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar- are an INCREDIBLY tasty food. Don’t be deceived by the palates of people who thought lobster was disgusting and tomatoes were poison! Stinging nettles are a LUXURY on the table and if you’ve never tried them, you should. Super easy to pick using just a ziplock baggie as a glove. Pinch them off just where the stem starts to get bigger around than a chopstick. Blanch for two minutes in salted boiling water, and thank me later.

I once spent 2 weeks in the bush with just a pocket knife, flint stone and snare wire. Had to trap, forage and gather water. It was an all day event to gather enough food for 1 meal a day. It sucked so hard! Lol but was a great life altering event. And gave me great appreciation for our ancestors. PS Fireweed tastes like crap but high in vitamin C.

We have loads of plantain, dandelion, and nettles on our family's property.

In Poland major foraging herbs are nettles, sorrel, hogweed and goosefoot(lamb's quarter). My grandma often cooked green borsch from sorrel leaves, and my mom still cooks it from time to time. It can even be preserved for winter - chop young leaves thinly, salt them well to draw moisture, then tightly pack into small jars to pickle them. Pour some vegetable oil on top to prevent spoiling. I'm not really a fan, but it tastes well enough with potatoes and chopped hard boiled eggs.

My parents won't even try foraging beyond picking blackberries. My mother actually tried to dispose of a bunch of greens I had collected for my lunch recently, insisting I was going to poison myself. I live in western Washington, and foraging for food is only difficult when things are frozen hard. But a lot of people act like things are poisonous if they weren't planted or bought from the store. They will sadly learn the hard way if things go fully sideways.

Several years ago, I used to give a talk at some of the campgrounds on "wild foods." That is, plants in the local area that were edible, some needing cooking, but others that you could eat raw. As I told the people there, "this is not so you can go out in the woods and live off the land, but so that if you get lost, you can survive long enough to be found." Thankfully, these days it isn't absolutely necessary for survival, but I still enjoy doing foraging to add variety to the dinner table.

Foraging is my hobby, and stinging nettle was one of the first plants I learned to identify, so it has a special place in my heart. Loved the video!

Foraging in the early spring is so much easier now than in those olden days. Today, so many of the plants we can harvest in the late winter and early spring are not native (like the dandelion and wild field garlic you showed). Instead, they were brought over as garden plants and have escaped cultivation, and have even become weeds that dominate native plants and places. Those European plants have such an earlier season because they are from farther northern latitudes, so our late winter daylength seems like springtime to them. And with warmer temperatures now, compared to the older days, even the native stinging nettles have an earlier season now. So it's hard to appreciate how tough those folks really had it, without the specialized knowledge and access to productive places. Stinging nettles were so important to people -- and are still one of the most delicious and nutritious wild greens out there. Happy foraging!

When spending summers at my grandmas farm in my youth she always made nettle pancakes. Just absolutely delicious. She also made nettle soup. In fact, I think most things had nettles in it as long as they were somewhat in season. Even in the middle of summer you could still find good nettles to eat in shaded places.

Every year during this time I think of foraging at granny's home place. In the spring we'd gather nettles, fiddle heads, dandy lion leaves and early mushrooms. At the same time lettuce, beets and radishes would be planted. Before long the asparagus shoots would come up as well as the rhubarb. Peas would be planted. And so on. Easter was always a celebration using the last ham, the last of the root vegetables and lots of foraged veggies always cooked with ham hocks.

Foraging is still completely normal in european countrys today (i love wild garlic soup) but 50+ years ago you done it to survive. you coudnt just go buy exotic fruits in markets people dependet on preserved fruits and foraging. Here in germany my grandmother collected sorrel, nettle, goutweed, dandelion, woodruff. wild garlic, various leaves and berries for tea like blackberry-leaves and rose hip some as medicine (+a garden full of veggies appletrees 2 sows rabbits and chicken) After work, it was work again at home they even had a field for wheat that they brought to the bakery for bread coupons

I would give a lot to eat another morel mushroom. When I was a child in the late 60s/early 70s, my father had a coworker who provided morels. What a heavenly flavor

Early spring was frequently called "the starving time." Nettle tea is pretty good, I've had that.

Can't say it enough..this man is a national treasure.

One thing that has changed in my lifetime is the dramatic increase in Autumn Olive trees in Kentucky. They aren't native, but they're suddenly everywhere in the past decade or so. They have berries that make a decent jam, but there's still way too many of the trees. Another modern development is it's much harder to find ginseng now because people in the last several decades overharvested all they could find to sell, which sucks because it's a great little plant.

Any time my kids tell me about what they would refuse to eat I tell them, "That's because you've never really been hungry." The closest I've ever come to being hungry was when I was in the Army and we ran out of MREs and didn't get a meal for a couple of days. They brought us powdered eggs. I asked for seconds.

Stinging Nettles are delicious. They should be added to your kitchen, even for weekly fare.

One of my favorite spring traditions is making a dandelion green curry or stew. Ideally accompanied by a saison (farmhouse ale) flavoured with dandelions (Fantome Pissenlit). Nettle stew is good too, and I've had some great nettle-flavoured beers. When I was a child, the house we lived in backed onto an overgrown valley filled with nettles, but we never ate them.

It is still too cold here in Canada for things to be growing - we still have snow on the ground. But in a month or two we will be able to go foraging.

Thank you Townsends for another great slice of history!

My grandma's family had forage during winter when they had to escape to the mountains when ustaše came to her village during ww2, they had to forage tree bark, plants and struck gold when they found a goat(used it for milk). When she went to the doctor two or three years ago, he asked her if she was a refugee because she was soo malnutritioned when she was 5 she developed osteroporosis at 80.

I buy bulk bags of nettle for making tea. It is excellent for people that suffer from respiratory issues. Dandelion greens make a great tonic for spring detox from those winter blahs. After eating dried or salted foods all winter I'm sure fresh greens would have been heavenly.

Many wild greens are special ingredients for traditional spring dishes

Nettles is an interesting plant, the soft fresh tops are good for eating, the stem has some decent fibers.

My great-grandmother was an excellent forager and she passed her skills onto her children. My grandfather, also an excellent forager, passed his skills to my mother, who passed the knowledge on to me. We have all gone beyond foraging for wild greens with berry collecting, nut gathering, trapping the occasional snapper turtle, crayfish, crabs, fishing, or even hunting for small or large game. As was explained, early Spring was the most critical time for needing food supplies and nutrients for a rural-dweller. In our generational family of foragers, Spring greens were the focal point. Cress, both water and land cress, is one of our favorite greens. Dandelions, too -- with all of the various species. Foraging for wild Asparagus is very rewarding, although quite a bit of caution is needed since a great deal of them are found near roadways where chemicals are sometimes sprayed. My favorite foraged 'weed' is Purslane which is found in Summer. Typically cooked in liquid for a soup or 'tonic', many of my foraged greens are made into sumptuous dishes like quiches or creamy-cheese skillet meals. Even with my foraging abilities, and as delicious as foraged foods are, I seriously doubt that I could survive off of foraged foods long-term.

Thank you, Jon, and Happy Easter, all! Imagine this lemon is an Easter Egg.

Nettle soup/tea is pretty tasty (though a literal pain to harvest!) and dandelion greens make a pretty good pesto if you don't have basil. Thanks for this video, Jon.

As Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman famously said, “ Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

I'd really like to see a video on the Sierra Nevada mountain range during the gold rush, so much wild cabbage you wouldn't believe, wild carrots fallowing the streams, rabbits and deer . But also bears,wolves, coyotes and lions in those forests. With nothing but a metal detector and a pick we found 1800s square nails that were definitely made by a blacksmith ruffly around the area around black springs. I've seen the tracks of a mountain lion that had to be very large that walked right by our camp perfectly displayed in the fine dust of those old logging roads. The Forest is very quiet save for the birds and chipmunks. I love being far into the red woods and sequoias in the spring time when the flowers are blooming. All white and yellow flowers and new grass covering the forest floors and the meadows

Kinda lucky nowadays we have grocery stores to forage in. Although you have to forage some cash first.

Love the content. This is comfort food for the brain for me. Warm. It also helps his voice reminds so much of Metal Gear Solid's Otacon.

This is the one I've been hoping for. Foraging is one of my favorite things. Wild garlic, nettles, dandelion, plantain, and pokeweed are my most common finds here in Eastern Kentucky. Usually, the pokeweed is found around old homesteads, so it may have been planted by human hands.

The concept you talk about ~2:00 minutes in is called the hungry gap by farmers

To be honest, Watching these videos kinda gives me comfort and peace. Thank you for making these kinds of videos.

Up here in Newfoundland many of us still pick dandelion leaves in the spring and boil them up with potato and salt pork and sometimes other veggies. They are very delicious but can get bitter as they start to flower.

Uwielbiam tego typu materiały, w szczególności w waszym wykonaniu. Chętnie zobaczę więcej

Nice video townsends, absolutely adore the amount of historical accuracy and work that you put into your content on an otherwise unforgiving video platform.

Your channel is a balm! I'm grateful to be living in a time of advanced medicine and with so much free access to information, but I love the little break I can get from other modern pressures by watching your content.

Thrilled by this gem of a video, thank you kindly for featuring spring foraging-especially stinging nettle and dandelion greens. Those morel mushroom shots were truly marvelous too! What a gift it must have been to find hidden groves of forage-ables in the frontier when supplies were scarce and larders lean. Also, the stinging nettle porridge at the end reminded me a bit of the traditional Japanese New Year dish Nanakusa-gayu, or "Seven Wild (Spring) Herb Porridge." In all corners of the world after a long winter, cheers to the arrival of spring greens!

Here in Finland, nettle pancakes are a fairly common food. Similar to spinach pancakes you eat them with lingonberries. Delicious and nutricious :)

I love nettles! They can make a great spinach substitute, and people even replace basil with them and make pesto. I still haven't tried that yet.

I used to forage back in 2014 but stopped for a time; recently picked it back up, enjoying the abundance of london rocket growing in the yard. Basic foraging is something we should all learn tbh

I grow nettles in my backyard in a city. Usually I dry them for tea. Now I want to try some oatmeal soup with nettles and other greens. Thanks for a great experiment idea!

Happy Easter, Townsends!

If you have beef and oatmeal youre not in starvation mode

This early spring where things are just starting to sprout were called by the early settlers 'The 6 weeks of want' as all their stored food had virtually come to an end and it would be 6 weeks until things really started to grow and furnish proper sustinance. Now they had to forage and hunt hard to have food to eat.

I absolutely love nettle. You can make soup, you can mash it, and you can fry it. It's delicious and it's good for you.

Good morning from Syracuse NY brother and everyone else thank you for sharing this video and Happy Easter/Resurrection day everyone

My mother grew up during the depression. She gathered “weeds” her whole life. I always celebrate Spring with some nettles. They make delicious greens. 👍👍

My wife are an expert on what to eat in the forest. She is chinese and when she found a certain kind of celery that are very expensive in china growing in the wild here in Scandinavia she was very pleased.

Fascinating! Really cool piece, Townsends Team! 😃👍

Thank you for this excellent video! I heard mention of stinging nettles being edible. But nobody showed how to cook them like you did. Once again, thanks!

Your consistency is astounding. I could watch an episode from 8 days ago or 8 years ago and still be entertained and educated. Great stuff always

Happy Easter Townsends!! Love you guys!!

These skills are good to know with everything going on now

The closest I've come to foraging is selecting a nice bunch of collards from the produce section

Those days were the real test of survival. Thank you.

Love your channel. Few places you can find nostalgia, history and cooking and food together. What a magnificent mix.

The other day my husband foraged some mustard greens. I cooked them right up to accompany my otherwise colorless meat and potatoes, and they added a very nice touch! One of these days I'd like to take a local foraging class so I can identify more edibles.

I found nettles in my backyard but decided to go with better greens from the grocer. The family that built my house in the 1930s planted a lovely garden that birds and bees love.

Knowledge is power. Knowing what grows around you that is edible, the nutritional values, and how to prepare, is worth much more than gold.

I haven't eaten them, but I've made nettle tea and it really isn't bad. Not necessarily a go-to for flavor being kind of "grassy" like many greens, but certainly not a hardship to drink and it's incredibly nutritious. I usually combined it with ironwort, which is also nutritious, but is a milder taste something more along the lines of chamomile, though I wouldn't say they taste the same at all.

I’m so thankful I found this channel a couple years ago. It’s such comfort viewing for me. Keep up the great work Jon and happy Easter

I'd love more of these! I'm Gen X and it's fun to see my parents, peers, kids, and grandkids stuff being highlighted next to one another.

Here in Czechia I've had fish soup with nettles (delicious) so the mention of the fish and nettles together was quite amusing. 😅

I love your channel. You bring us history and cooking lessons in an exceptionally comforting way. Bless you!

Jon T. is the history professor that we never had in college, but, whom we wish we did have. Abundant passion, energy and deep knowledge from the teacher keep us students riveted.

That was such a fascinating episode. I loved hearing about some history foraging.

Thank You Jon for the history/food video. You're the Best!

I'm somewhat of a survival forager myself, I found $1.50 in change in my couch.

Goodnight, Em

Thanks for all the awesome content and great videos!!

Always so interesting and informative, much appreciated. In Joy

Thanks Jon and crew another great episode.👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼🏵

Whenever I go into natural environments in Australia, it becomes obvious why the pre-contact Indigenous Australian population for the whole continent was around 300,000. It is because while there are plenty of edible species in Australia, if not for fishing and hunting, you'll need to forage a lot to fill your belly. Also, a lot of people nowadays consider Australian native edible species to be an acquired taste.

My absolute favorite is wild garlic, usually called wild onions in my part of the world. Every time I mow my lawn, I come back with garlic breath. 😂

We have a ton of hackberry trees here in Texas. They're sticky and messy, but actually are quite tasty and calorie-rich.

Here in so. VT, our family forages a lot. Stinging nettles, plantain, dock, ramps (wild leeks), dandelion greens, morels, garlic mustard, wild lettuce, winter cress, burdock root, wild ginger, watercress, day lily and trout lily tubers, dentaria, spring beauty, violet leaves, cattail shoots and roots - you can eat well and have medicine at hand if have the knowledge.

Completely delightful! Thank you. ❤

We usually use nettles here as the key ingredient in various dumplings, and spring stuffing (like for a goose during Easter)

Americans severely underestimate how much of the plant life was cultivated by the native peoples. There are SO MANY forageable foods growing wild that we never bothered to learn.

This is so interesting. I just watched an interview earlier today by a North Korean who made it down to South Korea and she basically talked about how in the north, Spring is the season of death for most people for this exact same reason.

This is all kinds of interesting. I love this channel so much! thank you for the upload

if u have a nettle patch in ur garden always make sure to add some to ur compost heap before they run to seed they add a lot of nutrients

I was litterally cutting up foraged smilax shoots to cook for easter lunch when i saw you posted this video. I do it every year. I also pick mushrooms every chance i get.

love stinging nettles tea. so refreshing

appreciate your work in the new video - i can tell you're trying something new; it's good.

Another great video. Thank you

I haven't planted my garden yet, but the deer and rabbit are coming into the yard, all the time to eat my fresh, spring, weeds! So....

Thanks 🙏🏼 much needed episode As a Army Veteran near & dear to my heart ❤️ thanks 🙏🏼

Thanks Jon, good topic.

My Russian grandma sometimes still cooks nettle soup and sorrel soup. Just because it's part of the countryside culinary tradition. For her, because it's a good thing to eat, but 100+ years ago, it was a way to survive for thousands of people in these areas