alright! this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com!today we have another exciting episode for you and i'm on a field trip here outside austin,texas, actually at a buddy of mine's house that i've known for many years now. and whatwe're going to do in this episode is not going to talk about how he's actually catching hisrainwater here off his cob house that he built, actually he has a galvalume roof so if you'regoing to catch your water to drink, especially
light roast coffee caffeine content, you want to make sure you don't get rust orcontamination or any kind of leaching. he's using a galvalume roof, or galvalume sheetingfor the roof, which is something new to me that i just learned about today. he catchesthe water in here, he then ozonates the water, and besides ozonating water, then goes intohis house, goes through uv filtration, and
then it goes through carbon block filter,and let me tell you the water that he's making off the rain water is some of the best wateri've ever tasted, and this is the water you could also use to water your plants. the plantslove the rain water, they're going to grow better, and probably if you drink your ownrain water, you're probably going to grow better too, provided you filter it, becausethere's a lot of crappy stuff in the rain that we do not want to drink so he has a reallygood filtration system to do just that. now we're not going to talk about all that. we'renot going to talk about all these different gardens that he has, you know over on hisproperty. what we're going to talk to you guys about is something even more importantthan that. it's the wild foods that are naturally
growing here that's growing without him havingto plant, harvest, and do all this kind of work to each and every day. so i see him overin the yard, let's go ahead and meet up with craig and see what he's looking at right now.so the reason we're here today is not to look at some of the cool water that you guys justsaw and drinking rain water or the gardens here. we're going to talk about somethingthat many of you guys may have on your property which are wild foods and we're here with afriend of mine, craig sommers, who is a naturopathic doctor and nutritionist. he's really intothis one plant in here, check this out, i mean if you guys didn't know what this is,oh! poison berries! because we're all taught from such a young age that if you see berriesand they're bright colors on the tree or the
plant, don't eat them! because they're poison,right? this could, yeah, save your life, but it could also get you into some trouble becauseyou're missing out on some of the spice of life, or nutrition of life, as he's goingto share with us. so craig, what do we got here? this is american beauty berry, and thenative americans have been eating this for hundreds, maybe for thousands of years. it'snot particularly tasty, it's a little bit bland, i guess some people would say, buti personally kind of like the way it tastes, and the color tells you that there're antioxidantsin there. every time you see colors, that's antioxidants. now even the leaf of this planthas its use. the leaf has a pest repelling smell, so you can take the leaves, rough themup, rub them on your skin, and mosquitoes
will not want to bite you. and it's been usedby the americans who settled this area a few hundred years ago, they would put it on theirdonkeys and horses around where the saddle and the things around their neck, harnesses,would go to help repel bugs out of their face. one thing i do with this plant, because youget so much out of it for just a month's shot, i take it and i strip them off, i put theminto zip lock bags, and i freeze them. and then i use them in my smoothies year round.usually i’ll harvest enough to last me till next season. one interesting phenomenon aboutthis is when you freeze them, their color fades. they don't have that bright purplecolor anymore, which is a really interesting thing. i see john has helped himself to someover here. he's got a pretty good mouthful.
when i walk by this plant, which is maybe10 times a day. i grab a small amount, more than this, and i nibble on them, pretty muchall day long while i'm in season. and i guess john has them in his mouth right now, oncehe swallows them he can tell you what it kind of tastes like to him. there’s tiny littleseeds in there, and if you look it up and read about it like on the usda website youcan read that the seeds have protein in them, and of course the berries themselves are goingto have minerals. minerals are in the structures of pretty much everything. vitamins, of course,are going to are going to be coming in there. and of course, proteins, because amino acidsall form by sunlight on plants. so, what do you think john? it's an interesting flavor,like i wouldn't say it's not astringent, maybe
a tad bit bitter, maybe like if you had likean unripe raspberries, like many of you guys buy unripe raspberries at the store, whenthey're kind of like pink and not even red. it kind of tastes like this. and the seedsare kind of small and crunchy, kind of like raspberry seeds actually. you can't reallychew up too well but if you sit there and chew you'd probably chew it up finally. yeah,very interesting plant, these grow all over the south eastern united states, from texasall the way to florida and all about up to tennessee. not north of that. so if you gotto make a positive id, don't get it confused with something else. other things can looklike this and may not be it. such as polk, polk is a purple berry, they're darker, andone of those berries can kill an infant, so
be careful, know what you're doing. so craig,why is this called beauty berry. if you have a lady in the house, would you give her someso she can be more beautiful? haha, well my guess is, gosh, this purple is really beautiful.it’s a beautiful berry, that's my guess. but i would also say the antioxidants in itwill probably help keep you young, so you keep your beauty. so craig let's talk aboutantioxidants for those of you guys who don't know out there. i mean, what do antioxidantsdo, there's a big buzzword, key word that's often used these days, and might go over manypeople's head, but i want to explain to people that don't know what an antioxidant is. okay,so if you go right down to the atoms. the atoms have these electrons sailing aroundand kind of like the sun has planets orbiting
around them. and they need to be balanced,to keep the integrity of your tissues, often times what's called an oxidant, let's sayyou eat fried food, potato chips or some kind of nasty stuff, or even, you know, sunlight,you get too much sunlight, that can damage tissue, so forth, so you kind of throw outsome of these electrons. now you have what they called an unpaired electron. it needsto kind of be balanced. so it's going to kind of bang around like a car going down a ziggystreet, banging off of cars on either side of street. that's when somebody's drunk, right?yeah. a drunk guy drives his car down a city street, bang, bang, bang. happened actuallyonce at my parent's house. i've seen that also, in brooklyn one time. some kid stolea car. anyhow, that’s kind of what a free
radical does, it's messing up and aging yourtissues. but then you get an antioxidant, which comes in there and bounces out on unpairedelectrons and now that car's just driving down the center of the straight. it’s notbashing into stuff, messing stuff up. wow, so yeah, all the different plants that i recommendyou guys grow, they all have antioxidants. craig, let's talk about some things that don'thave antioxidants, probably age you faster, than the plants that actually keep you young.well, typically the things that most people eat, such as bread, you know your white bread.i believe that pretty much all the meat products, so you know, beef, chicken, so forth, no antioxidantsin that. i don't believe that dairy products have any antioxidants in them either. i'mpretty sure they're free of antioxidants.
it's pretty much strictly plants that haveantioxidants, and the fresher the plants are, the better in their raw state, as you startto process them, as you start to heat them up, you kind of destroy the antioxidants inthere. so, freezing these berries if you can't eat them all in the few weeks that they'reavailable would be a really good way because you're not heating them up. yeah, absolutely.you know, freezing things does tend to dismantle some enzymes, there's at least one b vitaminthat will be knocked out, but still. the rest of the vitamins will stay intact, of coursethe minerals stay intact, the proteins and amino acids stay intact. i guess we have todo some tests on the antioxidants like i mentioned before, the color kind of changes when youfreeze them which is an interesting phenomenon.
so i’m not sure exactly what’s going onwith the antioxidants, but time will tell. someone will come up with a million dollarstudy and then we'll know. all right craig, so another way to preserve these if you didn'twant to freeze them or you don’t have a freezer, could you actually just sundry themand would they be dry and would they still be good and have some benefit dried? you knowi’ve never actually tried to dry them, but i was surfing up the internet, looking upbeauty berry last night and i found some recipes for making jelly with them. so that's oneoption, you can make a jelly, you can can it and you can keep that for quite a longtime. awesome, awesome. so craig, if someone's going to make a jelly, what kind of sugarshould they use, because i know you're not
a big fan of sugar because that's actuallya pro oxidant, it's going to age it quick you know and cause crosslinking and all thiskind of stuff. well typically all the food prep that i do is typically raw and if i doany cooking, let's say if i wanted to do a yam or a squash, i’d put it in a pot earlyin the morning on low, i’d let it sit in there, you can put your finger in all daylong, it's not heating it. at the end of the day it’s just like as if you cooked it.that’s about the extent of cooking i do, so as far as canning, i don't do it becauseyou’re typically boiling the crap out of stuff, so to speak to do it. but if i wasgoing to do it, i would not use the cane. i would try to use something like the coconutpalm sugar, which has all the minerals in
there and is a little bit less glycemic, typicallycane sugar is very high glycemic, makes your blood sugar spike and then crash, whereasthe cane crystals are little more balanced. you don't crash. perhaps there's other wayto do it with other sweeteners too, but that needs to be researched. awesome, yeah, i recommendalways you guys eat as much fresh, raw foods as you can, i mean they're coming out yourgarden here especially when you have them in season. if you can’t eat them fresh,you know, then i would freeze them, and then i would also try to dehydrate them beforei would ever can anything. alright craig, let's go ahead to another area of your propertyand check out three more edibles that are just growing wild. so now we're in anotherarea of craig’s property, and there are
actually three wild edibles in this area we'regoing to share with you guys. this one right here is actually the sumac, so craig, tellus about this sumac here. well, the native americans used to pick a bunch of red berries,that little cluster, and make tea out of it. they call it indian tea. now it's got pigment.anything with pigment has antioxidants, and if it's coming out of a plant, you know thatthere's going to be some minerals and there's going to be some vitamins in there, so typicallyi would drink that tea just as refreshing kind of antioxidant, and a little bit of nutritiontype of thing. these are little past their prime, these are little dried out, but typicallyi like to get them when they're younger and fresher. mostly i use the variety that growup in the northeast. this one here happens
to grow in texas, which is interesting. i'veactually never seen these grown this area, i didn't plant this. it must've come in witha bird and just sprung up on its own. so craig, on these guys, the sumac, even if they'redried, can you like harvest them off your tree and then save them inside and then usethem in the winter, like they’d use dried rose hips or whatever and make teas and whatnot.to tell you the truth, john, i’ve never actually done that but i don't see why youcouldn't do that. it seems like this one is dried pretty nicely, like i mentioned before.i pick them fresh and make a fresh tea out of them when they’re soft, and this one'sbeen dried out from the sun. but i don't see why you couldn't do that, i would like toexperiment and give that a try. sure, so would
you say that things are always better eatenfresh, instead of dried? absolutely. and why? of course, when it's fresh and it's alive,you have enzymes in there. the vitamin activity is much higher. there have been studies donewhere you've picked produce for instance, and tested the vitamin activity right away,test the vitamin activity within 24 hours, and it's dropped significantly. some studieshave even seen 50 percent in that first 24 hours, and then much more slowly from there.so of course, you're going to get higher nutrient content in that respect. as far as the minerals,it wouldn't really affect the mineral content. you’re still going to get good mineralsout of it. and as far as the antioxidants go, i don't know how many studies have beendone on the antioxidants, but typically if
you're going to get pigments, if it’s goingto show red, there's antioxidants in it. awesome, so if you didn't want to heat up water orboil water, could you just put this in water and just like leave it in the sun and literallymake sun tea out of this stuff to get the essence out of there and get some of the nutrientsin you? absolutely, i’ve made sun tea out of this particular stuff many times, i wouldtake a mason jar, put it in the sun for just a few hours and you see that water, it startsto change colors. i’m sure that would take longer once it's dried out like this to makesun tea to get more pigment. typically with sun teas, with flowers you need pretty muchthe shortest amount of time and you start to get more woody stuff like you know stemsor roots, you need much longer. some of them
you actually have to boil to get the medicinalproperties out of it. but flowers are very easy, those come fast. so would it be good,like, to maybe take this stuff and put it in some water in a blender, blend it up, andthen let it sit in the sun, to really mass raid it up and get those pigments and stuffout of it so it seeps up better. john, you have some really great ideas. um, i haven’tdone it that way, i’ve bend doing it the way have been doing the native americans havebeen doing it for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, so that's an experiment that hasto be done. it makes a lot of logical sense, you know, you get more properties out of it,but i guess we have to try to really see what it's like. awesome, awesome, yeah man. i alwayswant to encourage you guys to use some of
your foods that are edible and you want tomake sure before harvesting anything, if you got something that looks like this, you gotto make sure that it is this before you start eating things, because you could get verysick by eating things that are not you think it is. so i want to recommend you guys outthere, if you're not familiar with edibles, take a wild foods class from survivalist peoplein your area, and get a good book and double check with others before eating anything thatyou're not sure what it is. yeah, positive idea is crucial, especially when it comesto mushrooms, which i don’t even deal with, but i know personally people who have pickedmushrooms for years, always fine. one mistake and they died, literally died. it’s notsomething to fool around with, it's a serious
mater. definitely not fun, so it's not goingto be an issue with this next time, because if you can't identify this next one then youprobably got a disorder or something, because the next one we’re going to look at righthere is the pine. you guys know the pine needles which are a great acidifier for your soilbut it’s also a great food. so craig, tell us about this pine here. so in this area oftexas we've loblolly pines, we have a few different varieties. the inner bark is edibleof pretty much all pine trees that i know of that grow in this area. the pine needlesare also edible; you can make tea out of, which i do quite often. it’s known for itspycnogenol, which is a very potent antioxidant, and john was telling me he was juicing theseneedles which i actually never even heard
of, which i’m going to actually try. verystrong, a little bit goes a long way. yeah, but it's a survival food, you could take aknife, peel the bark anywhere on it and even on the real big ones, peel off the hard outerbark, get the soft inner bark, and you can eat that as a survival food and help you getthrough rough times. so even as a non survival food, craig, if somebody had pine trees, wouldit be good to go out there once a week and eat some bark or some leaves just for theantioxidant properties and all the nutrients in there? absolutely, that's what i do withthe needles. i make tea out of the needles for its antioxidant properties, just likethe native americans did for thousands of years. i typically don’t do much with thebark because i don’t want to kill these
trees. this tree is less than 3 years old,and you see how big it is already. there was a forest fire that swept through this areaand killed all the trees that i had that were 60 feet tall, so these have grown back andanother reason that i like to have these here and not mess with them too much is becausewhen these needles fall, they form a blanket, and in texas we have fire ants. fire antswill not build their nests in pine tree needle blankets, so that's really, really importanthere in this part of the world. awesome, so craig, beside just making a tea and boilinga water once again, could you do this for sun tea and if i wanted to, could i just literallypick needles, chop them up, put them in a salad, and eat them? yeah, you know i do nibbleon the needles once in a while just like john's
doing there. they’re pretty strong; they'renot for everyone's palate. but you know as far as sun tea, this is one thing that i’veactually never made sun tea out of for some reason. my sun tea making days are in thesummer when it's the hottest, and then when it kind of cools off i go inside i put wateron the stove, typically don't boil the water, just bring so it’s almost going to boil,and then i put stuff in there and i let it steep for a while. it does great with pineneedles, let's try it, let's make a sun tea, and let's experiment and see how dark it gets.i think another good use of this, craig, after eating this, it’s really like eating hairs,but it’s like thicker, and you’ve got some flavor in there, actually using thisto make green smoothies. what are your thoughts
on that man, maybe put in some bananas andblend this up into a green smoothie to like really break up the fibers and get the nutrientsout of it? if you've got a good enough juice, you'd need a really high speed blender; iguess it would break it up. just chewing this one up in my mouth, it didn't break. oh, lookat that. come on, craig, you got to chew, man. you really chew. but i think the fibersare kind of strong, just for a regular blender. i don't know if it’ll work. yeah, for aregular blender, right. so yeah, high spend blender, for those of you guys that don'tknow, green smoothie, basically just take some water, take some bananas, and take abunch of pine needles and go to town. now, very important, but take a lot of bananas,a lot of water, and just a few pine needles
to start, because it’s going to be verystrong, and then work your way up to increase the amount of pine needles you're eating toget some nutrients in the pine needles that you're probably not getting from other things.yeah, and as with all plants, if, you've never had them before, you want to start off witha very little bit to see if you have a sensitivity, because pretty much anyone could be allergicto anything. you know, millions of people might be eating this food, but that one personeats it and they have an anaphylactic shock. so always start if you've never had it before,very little bit, make sure you're cool with it, and increase it to more. awesome. that’smy advice. so next we've got another cool plant over here. but it's not maybe necessarilyedible but medicinal so we do we got over
here. so here we have yaupon holly, and thisis a caffeine containing plant. it actually has the most caffeine out of any naturallyoccurring plant, in the north american continent. and if you've heard of mate, yerba mate, wellthis is a relative. what people in this area of texas do is they take this leaf and theyroast it and they make tea out of it. now, i’ve tried making tea out of it withoutroasting it, and perhaps, you know, i just tasted it, it was cool with me, but it maynot be right for everyone. for instance, holly family things tend to be poisonous, and iknow the red berries that these things grow are poisonous, so before experimenting withtaking this tea raw, you probably want to do a little bit more research with it. typicallyit's been used as a roasted tea. this leaf.
wow, yeah, so i mean this morning i was hangingout in starbucks, not to get a coffee because i don't drink coffee and i don't recommendyou guys do it either, but i was using their wi-fi. but in any case craig, would this bea really good to drink instead? i mean you guys, especially if you're living in texas;you've probably got this growing as a weed. could somebody make this stuff, roast theirleaves on their skillet, and then make it into a tea and then drink this instead ofcoffee? would this give them the same or more of a caffeine hit than coffee would? you know,i would say that it's probably around the area of caffeine it might even be a littlebit less, more like a tea type caffeine alkaloid. i haven't actually compared to coffee or anything,so this is my guess. but definitely, definitely
someone could take this, roast it themselves,and make their own mate tea. they're going to get a lot more health benefits out of theplant that's harvested fresh and they’re having right away than something that's beenharvested somewhere far away, it's been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse for who knows howlong, and you know, then you're finally consuming it after, whatever amount of time. yauponholly, pretty cool stuff, if you're a caffeine person, you got to love it. alright, so craiglet's talk about caffeine for a minute since you are a naturopathic doctor here, is caffeinea good or a bad thing and why? well, i look at it as a medicinal and useful type of amedicine. so when i take long distance trips, for instance, i’m driving days on end, ipersonally use caffeine to keep me more alert
at the wheel, but it's not the type of thingthat i want to take every day and end up getting addicted to. as all of us probably know, coffeeand caffeinated teas can be very addicting if you have it every day and then you stop.a lot of people will get terrible withdrawal headaches, so the way i recommend using atype of caffeinated plant is you use it as needed. there was a night you didn't sleepgood, you need to be really alert, you're giving a presentation, whatever it is, that'sthe way it should be used, it should not be abused and used every day, and at that point,your body just gets so used to it that it actually needs it. yeah, i mean i would definitelyagree with that, craig, it's far a few days in between that i ever take caffeine, andif i need to stay up driving or i’m going
to fall asleep and crash i think caffeineis an excellent thing to take. i like to take some chocolate sometimes, cacao, and nosefor a caffeine hit and get me alert, so i don’t crash and get to my intended destination.now, craig, another use of this that you told me about, this stuff here, you know, unlikeoak leaves and other green leaves on plants, you could literally put this into the fireand this will burn, so you could use this as a fire starter and maybe other uses? yeahthis is actually a fire hazard to have yaupons around your house. we’re standing in a burnzone, if you could see the long that i’m sitting on, it’s an oak tree that burnt.this whole property burned, 1600 homes burned, and i’m almost positive that yaupon wasa strong culprit in causing this fire, because
this area grows a lot of yaupon, it grows10, 12 feet tall, it grows very thick, and like john just mentioned, you can light itup when its green, so, you know, you don't want to have it too close to your house. theyrecommend not closer than 30 feet to your home. awesome, awesome, all right so let'sgo ahead and look at one more edible that i want you to be growing if you're not already.so the last wild edible that we're going to share with you guys today is right here, thisis one of my favorites actually, known as the lambs quarter, and the lambs quarter actually,craig, brought it in, but it may also wild in this area, it's also known as a pig weed,i know it grows wild in california and many other parts of the country. so, craig, tellus apart the lambs quarter and how you use
it. well, as you can see, it's dark greenand this leaf is kind of late season, as its going to seed right now. earlier in the seasonthe leaves are kind of fatter, they’re stouter, they’re not so long, and before they goto seed, they kind of a different taste than after later in the season too. typically theytaste the best in early spring when it first comes up. not everybody loves the taste, buti think it’s pretty good. being dark green, it’s got chlorophyll, it’s got magnesium,your changing sunlight into proteins, you got amino acids in there, you know it's, it'sa good survival food. if something was to go down and there was not a lot of food inthe markets anymore, not everyone going to go out and know what this weed is, but ifyou know it, you look it up, get to know it,
find it in your area to know really well,you got a survival food right there that can get you through a starvation period. and evenbetter, craig, than just finding it in area is getting some seeds, ordering some seedsonline, bringing it in, and then growing it and it's going to naturalize in your areaand literally you’re going to grow once, it's going to go seed, the seeds are goingto drop, and then you won't be able to get rid of it! which is exactly what happenedhere, i brought in like one plant, it went to seed, and now it’s just coming up inall different areas of the property which is cool, i’m happy. yeah, so if you wantto get this one, the one that it would recommend, you guys would want to look for magenta springslands quarters, it’s a really unique variety
that has like a purple-ish, new shoots asthey come out, so they have nice pigments which i really like, also the leaves tendto grow bigger, and i have had some of mine to grow to 6 feet tall, they don’t go toseed as quickly as you'll have a lot more green matter to eat. fantastic, and you canjuice it as well, why not. awesome, yeah and i want to mention this is also closely relatedto spinach, it’s in the chenopodiaceous family, and it's actually quite delicious,and craig you talked about this having protein and i want to stop there because i know alot of people want to get a lot of protein in their diet, they think they might needmeat, can they just live on plants alone, and will we get enough protein from that.absolutely! if you think about it, what are
the animals that have protein eating? thecows, they're eating grass, they're eating grains. in the ocean, it's starting in thealgae; the protein is moving up the food chain from there, it's all coming from photosynthesis.sunlight, coming down, hitting the green plants, creates amino acids. you can get amino acidsyou need from eating plants. in fact, i’ve been surviving just on plants for about 21years now, since 1993, and now it’s 2014. just plants. i’ve got plenty of amino acids.wow, so shit hits the fan, come out to your garden, eat the greens, get your proteins,and also get the phytochemicals, fiber nutrients, vitamins and minerals and antioxidants thatwe talked about earlier. so craig, if somebody wants to learn more about you and your work,how can they get a hold of you and actually
you wrote a book too, how can somebody geta hold and do all this stuff? well, my website is rawfoodsbible.com. and that's the plural,foods. rawfoodsbible.com. awesome, craig, so i want to thank you for allowing me tocome onto your property and share with you guys out there in youtube land some of thewild edibles and also share your wealth of knowledge with my viewers and also introducethem so they can check you out to learn more about your work and what you've been doing.i’ve known craig for a number of years, and he’s a great guy, and i was really gladto be able to see his property and hope to come out in future years, and share with youguys more of his garden, you know, non wild foods he's growing for healthy plant basebenefits, all right. there, i got it out.
so i want to encourage you guys, always toeat as many plants you can and always eat out of your garden before you eat out of agrocery store. it’s going to be much healthier than literally anything money can buy foryou and your family. i hope you guys enjoyed
this episode. once again my name is john kohlerwith growingyourgreens.com. we’ll see you next time and until then, keep on growing!all right, this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com! today is another exciting episode for you,and what we're going to do is give you guys the summer update garden tour here. we’reat my front yard here.
