THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

jk0

My granny used to tell me not to touch dandelions, as they would make me wet the bed. Any truth in that?

GreyQueen

jk0 wrote: »

My granny used to tell me not to touch dandelions, as they would make me wet the bed. Any truth in that?

Sort of. Their French name is pis-en-lit (wet the bed) because they a mild diurectic. I think you'd have to eat quite a lot for it to be a problem. You could possibly also get cyanide poisoning from apple pips but you're pretty unlikely.to ever be able to eat enough to do you harm.

Lots of plants contain compounds which would do us harm but for certain metabolic processes which normally serve to break them down into less harmful substances. The amygdalin in apple pips (a cyanide and sugar compound) degrades in hydrogen cyanide when metabolised.

Stone fruit inc cherries also contains cyanide. I accidentally swallowed a cherry pit yesterday. It was intact and its extremely unlikely that my stomach and gut will be able to break through the pit before is passes through, so I'm not losing any sleep over it.:rotfl:

maryb

I suffer from puffy ankles in the hot weather. I find the blue and yellow packets of Water Balance tablets are reasonably effective over a few days. The main ingredient is dandelion root

greenbee

ooh... GQ... maybe you'll grow a cherry tree inside you and it'll appear out of your ears

GreyQueen

greenbee wrote: »

ooh... GQ... maybe you'll grow a cherry tree inside you and it'll appear out of your ears

Lol, I expect that it'll be hitting the great white telephone in the next 24 hrs or so.

Jesting aside, if a cherry pit has been broken open, please do not eat it, and don't eat the stones of things like peaches, either, and for the same reason. Mind you, you'd have to be a bit odd to even attempt to swallow a peach stone.

All this talking about cherries has made me nibblish so off to the fridge to get some. Got 3 punnets for £1 from the Magic Greengrocer as slightly over-ripe. Some will not be edible but, at that kind of price, I can live with that.

[Deleted User]

GreyQueen wrote: »

My Nan's first Xmas dinner as a married woman was rabbit

My parent's first Christmas dinner, as a married couple, was supposed to have been sausages, but the butcher had a tiny chicken that was too small to sell (think of a large pigeon ), so he gave it to them for free.

[Deleted User]

GreyQueen wrote: »

there are very few fatally-poisonous plants in the UK

Unless we're talking mushrooms.

[Deleted User]

Not strictly a prepping thing, but something to encourage the younger generation to take an interest in nature.

You clip it on your smart phone (which, nowadays, all kids have ) and it turns the phone into a digital microscope. :cool:

thorsoak

During the war, children were taken out of school, into the countryside, to pick wild rosehips - which were converted into rosehip syrup = which was dispensed to schools and clinics and children queued up for their daily dose of vitamin C (no oranges for orange juice).

Somewhere in one of my boxes I have a copy of Richard Mabey's 1972 book "food for free". It was republished in the early 2000s and I thoroughly recommend it to one and all.

fuddle

Please could you educate me as to why eating rabbit could be attributed to starvation?

GQ I haven't eaten dandelion leaves and now, tomorrow, I shall fight off my rabbit to replace the rocket in my salad with a few leaves. Owt else one can do with dandelions. What about dandelion root? I have oodles of them in my weeding bucket!