Wild Plant Identification Pt 1

Wild Plant Identification Part 1

One of the really fun things that we've gotten to do over the past few weeks is get out there and spend some time hiking and doing a lot of things outdoors. With our idea of doing as much as we can to homeschool our son, it's certainly proving tricky sometimes to come up with things that we can teach him. What has been great though is when we go on an adventure and the things around us do the talking!

When we went on a hiking adventure to the White Mountains area a few weeks ago, we saw all kinds of awesome plant life just on the ground. We see it all the time but what is tricky is being able to identify what we are looking at. I love the different things we see but I don't always remember what I'm looking at. Thankfully there were some botany experts or whoever studies this, that helped us out!

There were a few kinds of things we saw. One was a sign like this that has a picture of what we are looking at and the plant right behind it. I think this was helpful for me personally because it gave me a good idea of what the plant was when it was growing as well as flowering. Some brief info on it is certainly helpful as well!

Then we had this kind which the little man loved. The signs were everywhere! We saw about 30 or 40 of these signs on the ground and we photographed every one that was new. I don't know if I will go and explain every single one of them since it was a lot but it was really fun to figure out what some of these things were.

There were quite a few ferns around us which I didn't realize. We can see ferns of course all over the place but there were so many varieties!

One of the reasons I want to get better at the local plants is so that we can work on figuring out what the wild edibles are. I know it's very risky to even foray into wild edibles unless you have great knowledge of it but I find it fascinating to figure out what the different things around us are. If I was braver, and the little man was older, I would have loved to try a bit of this wintergreen that was growing just to see if I liked the wild plant as much as the wintergreen flavor you find in things.

We saw quite a few of these great things on the ground and I will have to figure out what is edible and what isn't. It's always good to have some knowledge of this type of stuff since you never know what situation you could be in and need to look to what's around you to survive.