Hello everyone welcome back to the epic gardening

hotcast we are joined again by Rosalie de la Foree she is an herbalist she's the

author of Wild Remedies, which is publishing April 7th.

So it's coming up pretty soon here. She's also the author of the book that's already out.

It's called Alchemy of herbs, about how to use herbs in your everyday life.

Now we've talked about dandelion nettles and chickweed and we're going to talk now

about plantain and what I know from my experience with plantains my

grandma used to use like the cooking bananas right and so she used to use those

and she would fry them in a brown sugary type of thing.

It's like a Filipino dessert that the name is blanking on me right now.

But that's how I have experienced Plantains.

I haven't grown them and really that's the only experience I have so I would love to

hear from your perspective you know what they are and how they play a part in your

herbalist approach. Yeah so planting is a special one in my heart because it's one of the very first plants that I ever learned and like you I was most familiar with the tropical banana like fruit. I lived in the Dominican Republic for a while and I loved

Platinos and so when I was in my very first weavy class and the the teacher

kept talking about plantain and we're up in Washington State and I was like,

really? They grow here? And she said, oh yeah, they're all over the driveway. And she took me upstairs to the driveway and

showed me Plantain, which is a completely different plant, and this low growing weed.

And that is something that I will never forget and is something that's often confusing because it's a similar name for the same common name for very different plants.

And so the weed that we're talking about is the genus is Plantago and then the plantain of the fruit is a

moosa genus so right right the banana genus yeah yeah so plantain is a really, really common plant and it grows everywhere and it loves to grow in trodden soils and it's so it's like loves to grow on trails, loves to grow where there's a lot of traffic and so it'll it's and it's really great for that because it

it forms a bandaid on bare soil protects the soil and you know helps it from hard panning breaks up the soil etc so it from hard panning, breaks up the soil, etc.

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