Wild Edibles & Medicinal Plants

Winter is a wonderful time of year to go foraging. Many of the summertime edible weeds and mushrooms of the north don’t appear until winter in the southern states.

Some of these medicinal powers are as simple as eating a leaf, while others take some prep work. In every case, all the steps needed to access these abilities can be done in the wild. Note I won't be covering how to identify them. That step will be left to the reader as good practice.

A key bit of knowledge carried by the OG bushcrafters, such as Nessmuck, Kephart, Hammett, and Jaeger, was wild edible plants. As many did back then, they knew that plants offered nourishment and flavor when cooking in the wild. Nowadays, most people lack this skill and assume every plant is poisonous, just waiting to fertilize itself with our dead body after eating a berry. What a sad opinion of nature!

When people hear about wild mushrooms, their first thoughts are usually ones of suffering a painful, messy death. This shows how far removed we’ve taken ourselves from Nature. The famous anthropologist Jared Diamond (Germs, Guns, & Steel) was in the wild with several bushmen who were excited when they found some wild mushrooms, but Diamond badgered them into dropping their feast because he “knew” wild mushrooms are poisonous. He thought he was protecting the bushmen. Talk about arrogance!

A common yet very true statement in bushcraft is the more you know, the less you have to carry. This really is our core belief, with the goal of many to be reaching the point of heading out a knife, pot, and wool blanket, then making it back home again days later! One thing key to this wild survival is fire. This has been a core skill, possibly dating back to 1.5 million years ago. Fire is one of the things that made humans human and played a huge role in our expansion around the world, even into the most inhospitable environments. If we could build a fire, we likely survived.

You may remember from school that vitamin C is a critical nutrient, but our body cannot synthesize or store it. We need approximately 175g of this multipurpose molecule to avoid scurvy and other health issues. Vitamin C, aka ascorbic acid, is the glue that attaches cells to each other, the signal flare the innate immune system uses to call for help, protects against cancer-causing free radicals, and much more. In plants, it helps redirect excess sunlight energy into non-destructive pathways. Pretty amazing! Granted, you could carry vitamin C tablets along on your adventure, but considering the ascorbic acid in these tablets is always synthetic, there are better choices for bushcrafters.

"An extraordinary bushcrafter knows how to harness the powers of plants and mushrooms, just as our ancestors did, to deal with common issues in the wild. Here are my top five medicinal plants & mushrooms, based on years of study and experience as a medicinal chemist, herbalist, and outdoorsman."