Weeds Please
HappyEarth
in Vegetable Gardening, Vibrant Food
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6 Comments
A few years back, if you had of told us we would gather the greens for our salad by not only walking to the veggie bed and picking lettuce and parsley, but by scouring the garden looking for dandelion, chickweed, herb robert, plantain, nasturtium and other plants often considered ‘weeds,’ we would have given you a rather strange look! Well, they say 'never say never', and weeds have taken a central place in our salad bowl, as we’ve begun to appreciate:
- How nice they can taste in a salad
- That many ‘wild’ plants contain valuable nutrients in higher concentrations that cultivated varieties
- How helpful it is to have weeds fill up a salad bowl when there is little lettuce, parsley and other salad greens in the veggie beds
- That eating a large diversity of plants (especially leafy greens) makes for super healthy humans!
Michael Pollen’s book 'In Defence of Food', which we’re currently reading has reinvigorated our love of weedy salads, which was first sparked by Isabell Shippards brilliant guide 'How can I use herbs in my daily life'. Isabells book, written in Australia, is by far the best herb book we’ve come across and has lots of helpful, practical ideas about how you can eat and use these valuable plants. It’s also really good at explaining how to ID the plants, with detailed descriptions and photographs (you really don’t want to be eating petty spurge rather than chickweed!).
On the weekends, we indulge in a big salad for lunch – an eclectic collection of whatever greens we can find in the garden, plus some extra yummies thrown in. Today our salad was something like:
Garden Greens
- A small handful of parsley
- A small handful of lettuce
- A handful of chickweed
- 4 big dandelion leaves
- 5 nasturtium flowers and a couple of young leaves
- 8 Herb Robert leaves
- A few sprigs of yarrow
- stick of celery
Extras
- 4 cherry tomatoes (our cherry tomato bushes are still hanging in there!)
- Small handful of fried halumi
- Small handful of raw cashews
- Small handful of olives
Dressing
- 5 big sprigs of thyme
- Juice of 2 small lemons
- Drizzling of olive oil
Has anyone else ventured beyond the vegie bed to fill their salad bowls?
Reader Comments (6)
You bet! If you enter Purslane into search on my blog you will see one of my all time favourite weeds :)
The flowers in your salad look great! My kids love to eat sage flowers in particular.
Today's SMH has a liftout (Good Living, I think?) that has an article about edible flowers. Definitely one worth clipping!
I use nasturtium leaves in pesto -nice peppery taste. They are good in salad sandwiches and of course you can eat the flowers too.
Thanks so much for your comments Molly, Darren and Earthmotherwithin. Great to hear you are also making good use of your edible weeds and flowers! Thanks for letting us know about that article on flowers in the SMH Darren, will have to follow up on that one!
Cheers,
Ally and Rich
I have been eating the leaves from cobblers pegs of late. I started doing this after attending a weed talk at the July Brisbane Organic Growers (BOGI) meeting. I have found that just like other plants, the cobblers pegs tasted best when grown in rich soil. Plants which where growing in poor soil taste slightly bitter.
Hi Jason, its amazing isnt it how many weeds that are actually edible out there. One of my favorite is the foilage from turkey rhubarb. It tastes just like french sorrel with its tangy, lemony tart leaves.