When Life Gives You Weeds…Eat ‘Em

With all the rain out over the last few weeks and the challenges of getting the summer garden in, I’ve been grateful for food that sprouts with no effort on my part.

I might not want stinging nettles in my cultivated garden, but I like having a patch on a distant corner of our property. It’s a pleasant quarter mile walk from the yurt to the old hog pens where they grow.

Nettles in the hog sheds

I have vivid childhood memories of nettles, both bad and good. On one of our many family forest outings, I waded through a tall patch of pants and felt the sting of a thousand bees.  I looked all around and didn’t understand.  I screamed and cried at the mystery of it as much as the pain.  I was under siege from something I couldn’t see. My mom waded through the nettles to pluck me out.

My mother was a passionate mushroom hunter and taught me most of what I know about that.  But she also experimented with wild greens at various times.  Several years after the nettle trauma, I accompanied Mom on a nettle picking expedition on Orcas Island.  We wore gloves.  But Mom also showed me that, even with bare hands, you can avoid the toxic hairs on the underside of the leaves and the stem by only touching the leaf tops.  I marveled at how a quick steam or saute in butter removed all the sting.  The nettles tasted delicious too and spoke to some part of me that has always wanted to live a life closer to the land.

I am positively giddy at having my own private nettle patch now. If anyone ever threatens it with herbicide or a tractor, I might teach myself how to load and shoot a gun.

While living and working in Nepal, I learned from my mother-in-law, Ama, that one shouldn’t be too hasty to clear out the weeds among the desired vegetables. She pointed out amaranth, lamb’s quarters, and sprouts of mustard oil seed.  She urged me to wait until they grew to eating size and then pick them for a meal.

I now follow Ama’s wisdom in my own garden. I admit the amaranth seedlings I protect are not the local amaranth weed species (puny and not as appetizing as the Nepali amaranth), but are volunteers from the Love Lies Bleeding I planted last year.  But they are weeds in the sense of interfering with this year’s bed of winter squash.  I’ll let the amaranth grow larger and then thin some out, transplant others, and let a few grow where they are.

Amaranth seedlings

Lamb’s quarters is everywhere.  It would be easy to see it as a pernicious and frustrating weed, but I see it as free food. It’s a wonderful green that fills in beautifully for spinach in stir-fries or sag paneer and may actually be more nutritious.

Lamb's Quarters in the garlic bed.

I was thrilled this year to find that miner’s lettuce had begun colonizing shady areas in the garden.  It grows wild in the surrounding forest and makes a great groundcover beneath berries and fruit trees.  It fits in well with my permaculture plans to make my fruit orchard into a food forest (more on that later).  Miner’s lettuce is a charming plant and easy to thin out when it goes a bit too wild. It tastes delicious raw in salads or sauteed like spinach.

Miner's lettuce under the raspberries.