The king of wild vegetables at 48 yuan per jin, the aralia sprout: only one shoot is picked from the top of the tree, and its nutrition rivals ginseng

Nowadays people do not care much for rich meat and fish, but rather enjoy wild mountain vegetables, and the aralia sprout is just such a premium wild mountain vegetable, a famous king of wild vegetables in the rural mountain forests.

The aralia sprout is rich in nutrition and unique in flavor, and in some places it is also called cilaoya or cilaobao. Nowadays many mountain villagers go home to pick it and sell it online, and demand exceeds supply, with it selling for about 48 yuan per jin.

The tender shoots of the aralia sprout are the edible part, and there are many ways to eat them: they can be eaten raw, stir-fried, made into soup, used as filling, or processed into small pickles of various flavors. They are delicious and sweet, fresh, tender and mellow, with a rich wild flavor, and can truly be called a "delicacy of the mountains."

It contains abundant araloside (ginseng-like saponins) as well as protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals and other nutrients essential to the human body. It is even richer in plant fiber, and its vitamin and mineral content is dozens of times higher than that of cultivated green vegetables.

Although the aralia sprout has strong adaptability and the advantages of cold resistance, drought tolerance, tolerance of poor soil and tolerance of waterlogging, and it grows fast and has low requirements for environmental conditions, with the increase in picking, wild aralia sprouts are now becoming fewer and fewer.

The name aralia sprout is not for nothing: this short thorny tree is covered in thorns, and even its tender shoots are covered in thorns, and what we eat is precisely the tender shoot at the top of the tree. This season is exactly the time to eat aralia sprouts, and generally from March to May the tender aralia sprouts can be picked.