Education in the woods

Yesterday a friend of mine came over. She is very knowledgeable about plants that you can eat and stuff. She actually teaches it. We went into the woods near our house to have a walk there and see what there is to eat out there, there was quite a bit that you can eat or work with.
Clover flowers - in your salad
Stinging nettle - new tips of leaves in your salad, tea from the older leaves, use the older leaves as spinach, use the branches to make rope of.
Black berry - eat the fruit, eat the young leave tips, make tea out of the older leaves.
Duizendblad - eat the leaves in your salad, use them on wounds.
Dandelion leaves - in your salad
Bilberry's - eat the berries
Goat's willow - make things with the branches
Prickly coconut smelling bushes - flowers you can make wine of and put in your salad, they taste like coconut, but they have to be prickly.
Pine - the bark was used to extend rye & spelt flour by the vikings, like they do with soya now. I think I prefer the pine bark.
Birch - the sap can be used to make a nice wine of - tap the tree for 2 weeks in the end of march, no longer, coz that can damage the tree. Use the sap to make wine with. The pink colour of the bark has also been used as dye.

She also talked about quite some stuff that wasn't supposed to be in our woods, as they aren't native and are wrecking the soil or something like that.
Rhodondendron - comes from Asia and wrecks the soil
Hypericum - comes from Japan.

We talked about the grey squirrel, as that is a native to the US and outnumbering the UK native brown squirrel.
Furthermore we talked about rabbits, came with the vikings for food.
And hares, came with the Romans for food.
Neither of them native here basically. In the meantime they sort of are though.
The vikings used to use rabbits like we do chickens now, which are actually also not native, they come from Asia.

The kids enjoyed the talking very much, it was quite hands on, we tasted various things and found most of it tasting quite alright. The berries were all very good!