COURSE DESCRIPTION

The Ethnobotany 101 course is our course on learning the uses of wild plants. We will teach you how to harvest plants for edible, medicinal and utilitarian uses and then what you need to do to prepare them for their appropriate use. This course is designed to narrow the list of tens of thousands of plants into a handful that are most useful in a survival situation. The plants learned will be highly variable based on location and time of year.

Wild plants are an extremely important subject because without the availability of modern remedies, a good outdoorsman can substitute these remedies with nature’s medicine or tools. Nature provides a plethora of resources, one only has to learn how to identify said resources and know how to properly process them to maximize their uses. Being able to identify wild plants and use them for food, medicine and tools can literally save your life. Increasing your knowledge on plants will only increase your comfort in the wilderness and allow you to succeed in many tasks, where your average outdoor enthusiast would fail.

​In this course, we will teach you the basics of plant identification and what resources are best to use in your area to learn what grows around you. We will then move on into advanced subjects and show you how to actually use the plants that you identify. Once you learn your plants you will be able to more freely scavenge for food and medicine in your own back yard or anywhere you choose to go in the world.

In the first part of the course we will take you on a wild plant walk and help you learn how to identify plants and then we will harvest these plants to use for either eating, making medicine or tools.

​Plants can be categorized as utilitarian, edible, medicinal, poisonous or a combination of all four. Some of the most useful plants to learn are typically the ones that combine all three positive features. With so many plant species growing in so many different environments during different times of year, it would take a person several lifetimes to learn them all.

Edible Plants – There are edible wild plants all around us. One just has to learn about them and have the confidence to know they are identifying them correctly.

​Medicinal Plants – Just about every plant has some medicinal property to them. You can find plants that have skin healing properties, to plants that will stop bleeding, even plants that will stimulate your liver or stop you from having an asthma attack. We will show you these plants and how to effectively use them.

​Utilitarian Plants – Besides food and medicine, plants have a plethora of tool based uses.

​Poisonous Plants – Alongside the useful plants, grow the poisonous ones that will make your life not so pleasant. We will show you all the ones to stay away from!

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

• Identifying useful plants for tinder, kindling, and sustaining fuel
• Best plant choices for friction fire sets
• Plants that are useful for shelter construction and insulation
• Plants that make strong natural cordage
• How to identify and create improvised containers from plants
• Identifying easily recognizable edible plants
• Medicinal and First Aid uses of plants
• Best plants for personal hygiene
• Poisonous Plant Identification
• Once we show you all the skills you need to know to identify plants and process them, then you can take that knowledge home and start using plants from your local area.