Chicken bone grass is edible and medicinal use of commonly used herbs, the common way to eat is used to boil water as herbal tea to drink, and because of its soup flavor mellow, used to make soup is the best match, as for the medicinal value, can be processed chicken bone grass capsules and so on.

Chicken bone grass is good, but because many people do not know what chicken bone grass looks like, it is easy to confuse. Plus there are a lot of authors clearly have not seen the chicken bone grass, in order to their own selfish surprisingly in the online mess publish some similar plant photos hard to say that chicken bone grass to fool the netizens, this is simply in the harm. The key is with the chicken bone grass similar plants there are many kinds of plants, some of them are even poisonous, once accidentally eaten diarrhea, heavy coma and even life-threatening.

So how to identify the real chicken bone grass is very important, first of all, we need to know what are the obvious characteristics of chicken bone grass, which is the most basic.

Chicken Bone Grass

Chicken Bone Grass is commonly known as Hairy Acacia, Yellow Food Grass. It belongs to the genus Acacia in the family Pteridophyllaceae and is a climbing plant. Pinnately compound leaves, leaflets 8-11 pairs, membranous moment round, 0.8 a 1.2 centimeters long, 3-5 millimeters wide, rounded base, sparsely hairy above, the back of the tightly adhering to the coarse hairs, with very small stipules. Flowers light red in summer and fall, in axillary racemes, the flowers are campanulate. Fruit a pod, rectangular, flattened, sparsely hairy. Seeds rectangular, flattened brownish-black with dark spots.

If the above introduction is not good enough to identify, we summarize the following five points must be remembered.

Cocklebur

The first point: the real cocklebur is downy, so also known as "hairy acacia", including the leaves, stems, fruit pods have obvious downy. Be cautious if there is no fuzz on any of these three parts, as in the picture above.

The second point: the chicken bone grass leaves are all relatively thin, the back is slightly white, the front color is green. And especially soft, if you find that the leaves are thicker hard and shiny, you must be careful, it may be a fake chicken bone grass.

Chicken bone grass

Third point: chicken bone grass is climbing plants, favorite climbing in a variety of short shrubs above the growth, the key is the chicken bone grass vines are also particularly soft, thick and thin is also more proportional, there is no thick below the top of the thin obvious characteristics, and toughness, even if it is hard to bend repeatedly will not break. So in the eyes of rural people, chicken bone grass vine is still a very good natural rope, such as the picture above.

The fourth point: the chicken bone grass flowers are light red, and is a series of flowers, flowering time is usually in the summer or early fall stage, as shown below.

Cocklebur Flowering

Fifth point: the immature pods are greenish color, after maturity the brownish color, the seeds inside are brownish with dark spots, the average ranges from 6 to 8, if the pods do not split, the seeds can be kept inside the pods for a year and still be viable.

Note: Because the seeds of chicken bone grass have a certain degree of toxicity, remember to remove all clean beforehand to prevent accidental poisoning.