Grandma Made Lemonade From This Tree — Now Everyone Cuts It Down

It starts with a word. The word scares people; scared people reach for a saw; the sawing leaves a thicket behind; and the thicket settles the argument — obviously a weed. Five steps, each one following properly from the last, and the whole thing collapses because a single step in it is untrue. Which step? Not the one you would pick. Working it out needs an eighteenth-century botanist, a map of where bogs are, and an unwelcome measurement of what happens to this shrub after you take a blade to it. Somewhere in the middle of all that is the reason anyone cared to begin with: those red cones make a sour pink drink, and the knowledge of how survived in country kitchens long after the need for it went away. In this video: • Why the poisonous one is not a sumac at all, and has not been since the eighteen hundreds • The single feature that settles the identification before you look at a leaf • Where the sour actually sits on the fruit, and why boiling ruins it • A vitamin claim repeated everywhere that turns out to run backwards • A warning about drinking it that belongs here even though it complicates the story • What cutting one down does, measured — and why the convenient season is the worst • The same species: native cover in one country, illegal to handle in another Subscribe if this was useful. New videos every weekday. In the comments: your state, and whether these red cones show up along your roads. Its poisonous namesake keeps to eastern swampland exclusively, meaning huge stretches of the country are afraid of something that was never there. #foraging #wildfood #sumac #gardening #nativeplants #homestead #wildedibles