In article , "Lynn Coffelt"
wrote:

Do you know if there
is any nutritional value lurking here? If it was something I tried to grow
to eat, I know it would rapidly develop a disease and the slugs would
suddenly find it attractive. But I digress.
Old Chief Lynn in NW Washington State

As a "useful" plant horsetails are also called scouring rushes because
they have an abrasive juice good for scrubbing pans.

The common horsetail's tender spring shoots are edible, though reportedly
not tasty (tasty would be the peeled shoots of fireweed). The raw shoots
contain thiaminase which inhibits the body's use of vitamin B if eaten in
quantity (& can be toxic to horses & cattle if they get into too much of
it as forage), but if cooked the thiaminase breaks down & is harmless.

Also if you dig down deep you'll see the rising shoots have black nodules,
& those are supposed to be edible. Digging them up would take more caloric
energy than they would return, but among tribal peoples of Greenland &
northern Europe these nodules could be gathered easily by digging up
lemming nests, because lemmings stockpile the best parts of horsetail
roots in their rodenty larders.

There are also an array of medicinal uses such as for urinary tract
problems. A lot of its supposed uses are hooey, but there is good evidence
for Equisetum arvense extract works as a sedative & anticonvulsant, &
experiments on elderly rats showed heightened problem-solving abilities
with E. arvense extract in their diet, due to strong antioxidant activity
(if someone came up with a great recipe for Wild Blueberry & Horsetail
Cakes that didn't taste like crap, all us old people could regain a couple
lost IQ points by gobbling some of those down each day).

One of the more novel uses of horsetails is to extract the juices for use
as a fungicide treatment of blackspot on roses & rust on several other
sorts of plants.

-paghat the ratgirl
--
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"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
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