Fleabane, the best wild tea you've never had!

Have you ever seen these beautiful white wildflowers growing everywhere even popping up in your yard and wondered what they are and maybe if you can eat them? Technically yes you could eat it but I think that there's another way of preparing this plant that makes it shine even more. What's up everyone my name is Jesse you're watching Feral Foraging and in this video we're learning all about fleabane. I'm going to show you my favorite way to use it that I look forward to every single year plus we might find out if this thing actually repels fleas or not and finally I'm going to show you how to positively identify it because I can imagine there's another medicinal plant that looks quite similar to this one that some of you may have in mind. Fleabanes are actually in a group of many similar plants in the genus erigeron. The one that's most common in my area is called common or daisy fleabane. Its scientific name is erigeron philadelphicus but other similar members in this group can be used the same way as this one as well and don't worry I'll show you how to distinguish other plants from these ones. Fleabanes are actually in the aster family so though what you're looking at here may seem like one single flower with one center and many petals around it it's actually a compound flower with white ray flowers that look like petals and yellow disc flowers in the center. The ray flowers are very thin almost thread-like on fleabane that'll be important later on. Some species will have slightly wider or slightly smaller ray flowers but they generally have between 50 to even up to 150 of these petal-like flowers per compound flower head and sometimes they also have pink tinges in them as well. Those ones are really pretty. Young fleabane starts off as a basal rosette before sending up a flowering stem. Along the stem the leaves are alternating and where they attach they're clasping to it and the stem itself is very hairy. Although fleabane can grow quite aggressively most of them are native to North America and they're beneficial to native bees and they play host to several other moss species. Here's where we question the validity of the whole bane of fleas thing. If you smell the flowers and the rest of the plant they do have something of a resinous quality. Resinous aroma so I think that people imagine that this would keep fleas away but at least according to this Audubon Society book they're claiming that that is not the case. However they may attract predatory insects that could feed on fleas and other pests so there are a lot of reasons to keep it around and I've personally seen them visited by many different insects. Because they are so abundant it would be difficult to overharvest them. What I generally do is I'll take no more than about a third of what's around me and I usually gather just the flowering tops. That's the part of the plant that I like to use the most so why don't I show you exactly how I do that. I gather the top flowers into a basket by either snipping them with scissors or just plucking them by hand. Either way works. When you're looking at the flowers if you ever see some that are a little bit more dim in color I generally avoid those. I'm looking for ones with a bright yellow center and then I dry them with my dehydrator which really improves the flavor and it allows me to store them long term. From there we are ready to make a wild flower tea. It should be noted that fleabane should not be consumed if you are pregnant as this could potentially cause issues. To make tea I simply steep the flower heads in boiling water for about 10 to 20 minutes stirring up everything to really increase the flavor and then after that I'll strain everything out. I love the taste of these and because it really isn't bitter or astringent or anything like that I don't even think that it needs honey to sweeten it. The flavor is somewhat resemblant of that resinous aroma and to me it is really really pleasant. Like I said before I look forward to this one every year. When doing research for this video I also looked into fleabane and saw that the Cherokee used it as a poultice for headaches. In the spring I often get allergy related tension headaches so I thought that I would give this a try. I gathered some of the leaves and stems and then chopped them up extra fine and I pressed them all with my hands. What I'm making here is really just a quick poultice. We'd probably want to crush them up even more with something like a mortar and pestle if we were making a full poultice but nonetheless I got a cloth and I put the herbs on it and then I applied that directly to my forehead. So did it work? Well it's always hard to say with these things but either way I found the cooling feeling of the plant to be quite relaxing and I needed it a lot. But what about lookalikes? To me the closest looking plants in terms of the flower structure are what are called true asters. They're in the genus Aster or Symphotrychum which is a North American aster. But these they're usually going to be different in color and they're going to bloom much later in time than fleabane which comes out in the early spring and in addition a lot of those have more of a bushy form and fleabane tends to come out from a single stem. Then we have a set of plants that look much more similar just based on the color at a first glance. They're also in the aster family and they have white ray flowers and yellow disc flowers. But here's a detail that's going to separate them all very easily. They have much wider ray flowers and here's that one plant that comes to mind when people see fleabane. Of course they think of chamomile which in addition to having those wider ray flowers also has a much more three-dimensional flower heads. It's a really easy way to tell them apart. But this next one it doesn't look quite as similar but I want you to know about it because it grows in the same area as fleabane and it blooms at the same time and it's actually toxic and it looks like a different group of edible plants that I want to make sure people know how to differentiate. I made a whole video dedicated to the subject which you can watch right here. I really think it's going to be helpful to you and I hope to see you there.