hey guys this is josh here with trillium: wild edibles, i'm out here doing a little hike today doing a little bit of scouting. the plant that you see in front of you is cut leaf toothwort. there are a couple ways that you can tell this. first and foremost you'll notice these white flowers with four petals. the petals are kind of long as you can see here. cut leaf toothwort has a palmate leaf structure as you'll notice here the leaves are kind of shaped like a palm. the reason it's called cut leaf toothwort is because the leaves are very deeply cut, just like you can see here. you'll also notice that the leaves have these little bitty teeth on them. when you look at the leaves you are going to notice three leaflets. it looks like there's five maybe even seven,
however there's actually only three. you've got this middle one and then you've got these two ends. if you look carefully around anywhere you find cut leaf toothwort you're probably going to find more. the reason for that is, it's a colonizing plant. a lot of the early spring wild edibles and plants in general are colonizing. here next to this cut leaf tooth wort you can see some more spring beauties. here on these flowers you'll notice these little stripes. which you may not have seen in the other psring beauty. there are some variations in the flowers of spring beauty. just like there are some variations within most plants. cut leaf toothwort is edible it's the root that you're after or the rhizome.
which you can see this rhizome here. i'm not going to tear this plant up however you can see it right there there very very shallow. so that's really nice you don't need to use a trowel to get to these and you don't really need to too much. you can take this little bitty rhizome here and you can actually take it and crush it up and use it as a horseradish substitute, if you really want to. it tastes delicious and it tastes just like horseradish. it's got a good mild spicy flavor, it's very delicious very juicy. like i said it really only takes a couple to make a decent amount of horseradish for a couple number of people. so you won't really have to do a whole lot of work, to get to these. i thought i would show you this. but there you may be able to see how much dirt i had to remove. i didn't really have to remove a lot. so this is kind of nice and these are one plant that doesn't take a lot of work to get to.
however you're not going to get a lot of calories from it either, so it's kind of a give and take relationship. cover this back up with layer soil and humus here and leaves. now i'm going to go about my way. i thought that was kind of cool and i wanted to show that to you guys as well.