Identifying And Harvesting Edible Weeds In The Garden

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Identifying And Harvesting Edible Weeds In The Garden

Mellow June 22, 2012 38 Comments

Lately, whenever we want some greens-- at least once every day-- I take a big bowl out to the garden and snip leaves off any weeds that look tasty. The best ones come right out of my raised beds: they grow in great soil, they're clean, and snipping them makes room for my more intentional and delicate plants. These same weeds go for a few dollars a bunch from my CSA. Be resourceful: harvest your own weeds!

Dead nettle: The name, while ominous sounding, is meant to be reassuring. The leaves are nettle-shaped but don't have a sting. Edible leaves & flowers.

Most of the time, I don't pull out the roots unless the weed is in a spot where it will disadvantage a more needy plant. Most weeds are so hearty that you can clip all or most of the leaves and they will come back nice & full in a few days. Why pull up the roots, when these weeds provide a great source of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants? Weeds are free, abundant, and best of all, they want to grow everywhere!

A poultice of plantain will help draw out infection from a wound, and it also makes a great green vegetable! Its tough leaves can be cooked or blended raw in a smoothie.

In one sample harvest I gathered a large bowl of the following weeds, from a small section of a raised bed: Chickweed, borage, nipplewort, plantain, fireweed, dock, and dandelion. I deveined the dandelion and dock leaves and removed the larger stems from the fireweed. While the stem and midrib sections are edible, they're much pithier and sometimes more bitter than the tender leaves. I also made sure all the leaves were clean and free of slugs and grit (usually only a problem with leaves that were resting on the ground), and they're ready to use! 

Fireweed has a sharper taste than most of my garden weeds, so I use it in smaller quantities.

This combination would be great for a garden salad, but I generally prefer to toss everything in the blender, along with a couple of bananas, some chia or flax seeds, some kombucha and water for an easy, amazingly healthy and surprisingly delicious green smoothie. All of these weeds have a very mild flavor except the dandelion and fireweed. I made a smoothie once with a ton of dandelion greens and quickly learned it's better to mix them with other, milder, greens. For more smoothie ideas, check out my posts Wild Harvested Nettles Smoothie and Drink Your Veggies.

Ox Eye Daisies: The leaves & flowers are edible. I personally think the flowers reek, but the petals are alright, and the leaves are tender and taste very interesting- my kids love them!

Other weedy greens I commonly use from my garden in smoothies include raspberry leaves, daisy leaves, and bedstraw. Bedstraw should only be used when young and tender, because older leaves produce high levels of silica. 

Bedstraw: the mature plant contains too much silica to be palatable, but young plants and leaves are tender and mild. We call it "cat tongue" because of its raspy texture.

I've been very happy to discover that, after getting a load of free compost from another local urban farmer, I have tons of nutritious lambsquarters growing. Would anyone else be so happy to receive a load of surprise weeds? Lambsquarters is supposed to be one of the most nutrient dense greens you can eat, and I'd been eagerly awaiting the day when I had a free and abundant source of them. I haven't got a picture of it yet, but they're widely available online if you want to know what it looks like.

Anyone else have a raspberry jungle in their garden? Thin out the volunteers occasionally, and use them in smoothies or cook them up like spinach.

Before I knew anything about edible weeds I eradicated all my purslane. It turns out purslane is an absolute delicacy, and all too easy to eradicate. Someday I hope to see some of this succulent green spreading over my garden beds again. Again, I don't have a photo of purslane, unfortunately. It's beautiful too! It really grows in a neat pattern.

Nightshade: not for human or animal. I try to pull it when I see it, but maybe some birds eat it and spread the seeds... more are always popping up here and there.

Weeds I would never consume, or give to my livestock, include foxglove, nightshade, buttercup, laurel, Spanish bluebells, and columbine. This, obviously, is not an extensive list; these are simply the most common poisonous plants in my Pacific Northwest yard. While I am working to eradicate the deadly nightshade, bluebells, and buttercups, I do allow the foxglove & columbine to thrive because the hummingbirds adore these flowers. We try to remember what other creatures besides ourselves need in a garden.

Foxglove before flowering. This is probably the number one garden plant that everyone recognizes as poisonous. Don't eat. Same with the Spanish Bluebells scattered throughout the photo (and my yard). These are two prolific weeds best left untasted.

Then there are the plants I won't feed our family but that the rabbits & chickens can eat, including morning glory (or, more aptly, bindweed) most grasses, rose, and blackberry. We also get a lot of random mustard-family weeds, which I'm sure would be safe for our family to eat but I generally, not knowing exactly what they are, toss them to the bunnies. The rabbits also get any mint that I find growing in random places, although if it's clean I'll harvest it for tea. I also give the rabbits many chive blossoms, on their long tough stems. We occasionally eat them in salads, but, like weeds, we get so many more than we can use.

Geums, supposedly edible... if you like eating paper. Perfect for the rabbits & chickens ;)

It's worth learning about the volunteers & weeds in your garden. We've gone from spending about $15/week on greens to freely harvesting all we need right outside, absolutely fresh and organic, and often so much more nutritious than anything you can buy. Plus, they don't take up any valuable fridge space! Here's one more way you can use weeds: Lacto-Fermented Dandelion Soda, this time using the flowers.

These fish shaped leaves belong to Sorrel. The leaves are absolutely tender and easy to nibble. Add to salads, soups, sandwiches, or smoothies.

For more info on identifying and harvesting edible plants, check out my earlier posts Wild Foraging In April and Edible Weeds.

Clover, in addition to being a beneficial nitrogen-fixing plant, has edible leaves & flowers, and they're super nutritious. We're pulling out all the grass and letting the clover take over!

I'm posting an ad link below to my friend's book on eating weeds. Using my link to buy her book will help support our family as well as the author. Thanks in advance!

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If The World Gives You Green Bananas, Make French Fries!

Dairy Free DIY Gluten Free Health Paleo Recipes

If The World Gives You Green Bananas, Make French Fries!

Mellow June 17, 2012 45 Comments

We made a large purchase of green bananas one week, and were dismayed when our investment sat green, green... green still for several weeks. They never went bad, they just never got ripe. Finally, I decided they were going to mummify before they ever turned yellow, so as a last ditch before composting them, I decided to research if there were any uses for our ten pounds of green bananas.

It turns out there is a ton of stuff you can use them for, and basically it all comes down to this: treat them like any other starchy vegetable, ie, potatoes. Now, I don't know if you can boil and mash them, but roasting them seemed to be pretty common, so we decided to make french fries!

Green bananas don't peel as easy as nice ripe ones, so the most time consuming part of salvaging these bananas was slicing them open and working the peels off.

A friend of mine stopped by as I was preparing the bananas, and from the crunchy sound of cutting through them, he assumed I was chopping potatoes! They look deceptively soft in the photos. They were actually as crisp as a raw potato.

After peeling, I simply cut each quartered banana in half again, to make a nice wedge shape for roasting. Then I melted coconut oil on a couple of baking sheets, probably a tablespoon on each pan, and spread the bananas out in a single layer. Bake in a 350 degree oven for maybe 20-30 minutes. Honestly, we cook them until they seem done. In our family, we preferred the banana fries that were softer, less on the crunchy side. For more even cooking, we flip our french fries halfway through so both sides brown lightly.

The kids liked theirs with ketchup, and I had mine dipped in homemade guacamole. I know it seems strange, but it ended up being a delicious way to use our green bananas!

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Keeping Rabbits: Our First Litter

Unschooling Urban Farming

Keeping Rabbits: Our First Litter

Mellow June 11, 2012 48 Comments

Just A Handful Of Bunny

We've been keeping rabbits for about 6 months now, and just got our first litter 2 weeks ago. Baby bunnies, adorable little things, are called kittens. When they're first born they look neither like kittens nor like rabbits. In their first days they look something like tailless newborn mice, then they progress to looking like miniscule, furred baby hippos. At last, after a couple weeks, you see the rabbit in them. They don't open their eyes for almost 2 weeks, and are born hairless but super soft.

A Healthy Kitten At Ten Days Old

We've all heard the myth that you can't touch baby rabbits or the mom will abandon them, but fortunately a friend of mine refuted that one, letting me know that she makes it a point to handle her kittens from the beginning so that they are always comfortable with people. 

Now, like all myths, there might be some truth to this one. I would not let anyone handle kittens that the mama rabbit is not super comfortable with. If the mother trusts you, she will not consider your smell strange even on her babies. Rabbits can be very feisty though, and mother rabbits that have just kindled are especially protective and suspicious of activity around their babies. Azula is such a good mother; even though she is friendly with us, she did actually bite Nik once when he pulled his arm out of the nest too fast. We learned it's best to be slow and calm around a new mother!

Azula, looking out for her babies- or maybe just waiting for some fresh greens.

Since kindling, Azula is always ready to eat, so whenever we want to check on the babies we give her a bunch of fresh, wild greens to distract her. While she calmly nibbles, we can reach into the nest box to count the babies and check how they are doing. One thing that must be checked for is dead babies, or babies that are separate from the rest because, especially before their fur comes in, they need to be close to each other to stay warm.

One day Nik discovered that the tiny runt of the litter was cold and stiff. We had naively thought that since he had made it to 10 days old, he would be OK, but all of his brothers and sisters were 3 or 4 times his size, and he was just not keeping pace! Nik thought this baby, who we called Runty, was dead, but as he carried him, Runty moved his head very slowly. Nik tenderly brought him in and we cuddled him and gave him drops of warm goat milk. 

Many gentle hands cradled Runty.

He responded well to the food, at first eating very slowly and eventually eating more and more quickly. He revived, warmed up, and had quite an appetite! To keep him warm and still have my hands free, I carried him around inside my shelf bra. He slept quite comfortably there.

I noticed he never went potty, so I did some research and found that a mother rabbit licks the genitals of her babies after they nurse, to get them to urinate. An adoptive caregiver can use a warm washcloth or even a wet finger. When I tried this, nothing happened. Later, Nik tried it and got Runty to poop, the teeniest, tiniest rabbit poops ever.
 

We could only love him.

I put him back in my shirt, where he slept and occasionally wiggled against me, like a baby in the womb. Baby rabbits nurse only once or twice a day. I cannot even imagine how this gives them enough nutrition to survive and thrive, or why it's biologically advantageous for the mother to feed them so infrequently, but apparently that's all they need and all their moms will abide. We fed Runty more often than this; he was, after all, so very small. He had a lot of catching up to do.

Feeding him was a two person job. Nik would hold him in position, with Runty's mouth to the sky, while I controlled the milk flow from a needle-less syringe. It would have been easier with a simple eyedropper, but the syringe was all we had. It was hard to control how much milk came out. While I tried to feed him only a drop at a time, more than once I got him with a big spurt as the plunger jumped inside the syringe. We wiped him clean, and he seemed unfazed. It was glorious to watch him eat, to feel his tiny belly filling out.

With Runty being so very, very tiny we were at a loss for where he should spend the night. He seemed to need more warmth than his own fragile body could produce. If he were anywhere near the size of the rest of his littermates, we would have returned him to his family in the nest for the night, but we knew he'd just get pushed out again. Maybe rabbit moms know more than we do about what it takes to survive in this world.

He was too small to co-sleep with us giants, though I wanted to try. Nik set up a heating pad on the lowest possible setting, in a cozy nook on our floor. Runty did not survive the night. At least, I believe, he died warm, well fed, and feeling loved.

We knew his chance of survival was slim, small as he was, and nearly dead already when we found him. We buried him next to the garden, and the children placed some of their treasured safety glass fragments on his eyes, because they heard how in some cultures people send loved ones off with coins on their eyes. Little Runty never even opened those tiny eyes.

Odin & I hold one of our remaining 9 kittens.

Two weeks old now, the rest of the litter is hopping around their nest box, eyes open to the world, even nibbling on things here and there, like the burlap lining their nest, the wood frame, and the occasional leaf of wild greens. Their intrinsic need to chew is apparent. One brave little bunny frequently leaves the nest box to find his mother in the outer cage. When he finds her and tries to nurse, she hops away to the top of the nest box, her private area. Momma bunnies need their space. The baby doesn't seem to get his feelings hurt. He nibbles on things on his way back to his buddies in the nest.

Two weeks ago, we could barely see the babies under all their mother's fluff.

Does that are about to kindle will line the nest box with fur from their bellies. In the first days, we had to strain to see them as they slept under all their mother's protective fluff. After 2 weeks the babies have pushed the fluff out of the box and are hopping around the box, spending most of their time sleeping right near the opening of the nest. They are not hiding anymore! By 16 days, they have all ventured out of the nest, and the mom gets no peace unless she's up on top of the nest box. Soon they'll be eating solid food and she might catch a break.

Azula & Katara in their carefree, pre-pregnancy days.

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Roasted Asparagus With Mushrooms & Bacon

Dairy Free Gluten Free Health Paleo Parenting Recipes

Roasted Asparagus With Mushrooms & Bacon

Mellow June 07, 2012 35 Comments

This super quick, healthy, grain free dinner is so tasty, and smells amazing while it's roasting. I've been making it a couple of times a week lately, with all variety of vegetables. It's a great way to make any vegetables palatable to my children. They LOVE this meal! 

I use half of a pack of nitrate-free bacon, so each package makes two meals, and each time I make it I use whatever vegetables will roast up nicely together. Tonight, it's asparagus & mushrooms! Other great combos I've made include broccoli & garlic, cauliflower & carrots, and potato & onion.

First, chop the bacon. I generally prefer using scissors for meat; they're just easy to handle and then there's no cutting board to wash. Using half the bacon from a 1 lb package, separate the slices just so they're not stuck together, then bundle them and cut into 1/2" pieces, directly into a deep baking dish. Mine is about 8" x 13" x 2". Break up any clumps a bit so the bacon is spread evenly.

Bake in a 375 degree oven while you prep the veggies. If you're partial to crispy bacon, you might want to let the bacon brown just a bit before you add the vegetables, since the asparagus & mushrooms will cook relatively quickly. If you're using potatoes, they will need to cook just about as long as the bacon.

Remove the ends from 1 lb of asparagus. Instead of using a knife, you can hold each stalk with two hands and snap the bottom off. It should break off the tough ends at just the right place. Chop the stalks into about 1" lengths.

Quarter one 6 oz tub of mushrooms. Use portabellas, button, or whatever mushrooms you prefer. Add all the sliced veggies to the bacon, and stir to combine.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until your veggies are tender. Stir a couple of times during cooking so it cooks evenly and the flavors mix. There won't be any leftovers ;)

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