The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

I don’t know about you, but I like to have a salad at least once a day. For me, lunch is the most convieneint time to prepare may salad since my lettuce is right there for the picking in the garden.

This year with our mild “El Nino” winter, we really haven’t had to use the greenhouse for growing lettuce. All our lettuce harvested this fall and winter, has been growing under plastic covered beds. I’ll bet some of you are doing the same thing.

Every year in my covered beds, we get an extra bonus…Chickweed. That’s right, that common lawn and garden “pest” Chickweed ! ( Stellaria media )

By now you probably have guessed where I an going with this train of thought, I pick Chickweed along with my lettuce and use it in my salad. For example today my lunch was a mixture of Romaine and Buttercrunch lettuce, freshly dug carrots ( a real treat in its own right), spinach and chickweed. Now to some people the thought of eating “weeds” ranks right up there with eating road kill, but I assure you it really is tasty.

This time of year, under the protection of the hoop coverings, the Chickweed is especially good. It is very tender and has that wonderful “crunch” we like to have in our fresh salad greens. Even the stems are tender and not stringy as they are apt to become later in the spring and early summer.

Chickweed tastes sort of like spinach; plus it has a certian sweetness all its own. Maybe that accounts for the recipes of Chickweed wine that you see in references to wild foods. Heck, I even ran across a recipe for chickweed bread.

Fresh Chickweed is nutritious too; 100 grams ( about 3-1/2 oz. ) provides you with 49 mg of vitamin C. That compares very well with the 50 mg you get in a 100 gram serving of oranges.

The name Chickweed comes from the fact that chickens and wild birds love the stuff. If you keep birds as pets you can feed it to them as a treat as well. If you are unsure about feeding Ckickweed, ask Dr. Whiting over at Pet Talk blog about it. Like anything else, it would be prudent to feed this in moderation.

All of the above ground parts of this plant are edible, including the tiny seeds. Even though each plant produces hundreds of seeds, there is really no point in try to pick the seeds because they are so small. The good part ( in this case ) is that you don’t have to plant Chickweed, it seeds itself. The bad part is that it seeds itself ( as a weed in the spring ). If for some unkown reason you don’t have Chickweed in your garden, Johnny’s Selected Seeds offers them for sale in their catalog. Buy some and you will never have to worry about having enough Chickweed ever again!

The plant itself has some very interesting behaviors…. that’s right, I said behaviors. For one thing it likes to close up its flowers at night as if getting ready to go to sleep. Then, when it wakes up in the morning, the flowers open back up. ” So what” you say, ” lots of plants do that “. Yes, that is true, but Chickweed adds another wrinkle to this behavior; it closes its flowers before it rains! How it knows its going to rain is a mystery to me!

As with any plant harvested from the wild, be sure you know what you are picking before you eat it.

Later on this winter, as the cold temperatures return and finally kill our lettuce, there will still be Chickweed there in those beds waiting to be picked and enjoyed.

With apologies to Euell Gibbons,*

Bob

* the late Euell Gibbons was the author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus and many other books. You may remember him on TV as spokesman for ” Grape Nuts” cereal.