Green Thumb
Foraging weeds can make quite a salad
Some weeds are desirable, and some of them are good enough to eat.
When it comes to battling weeds, I tend to end up on the losing side.
That’s why I was eager to learn about some worthy weeds when Phyllis Williams spoke at a meeting of the Memphis Herb Society.
“If you have weeds you want to get rid of, find out first if they are edible,” she said. “If they are, you will want to have more of them.”
I took her advice and did some research on the weeds I f ight most often — mulberry weed, chamber bitter, Florida betony, nutsedge and prostrate spurge. They do not appear to be anyone’s list of edible weeds.
Ah, but wild violets are — the leaves and the flowers — and so is henbit, the purpleflowered lawn weed almost everyone encounters in early spring.
Naturalist Euell Gibbons, author of “Stalking the Wild Asparagus,” popularized the idea of foraging for weeds from the 1960s up until his death in 1975.
Billy Joe Tatum, who lived in the Arkansas Ozarks before her death in March 2012, took the baton in 1976 with the publication of her “Wild Foods Field Guide and Cookbook.”
Williams, a nurse who lives near Hardy in Evening Shade, Ark., got interested in the hobby about 10 years ago after stumbling across a copy of “Feasting Free on Wild Food” by Bradford Angier in a used bookstore.
She learned even more about recognizing edible wild foods by hanging out with Tina Marie Wilcox, the herbalist at the Ozark Folk Center, and Susan Belsinger, an herb expert and frequent speaker at the center.
“You need to pick where there are no pollutants and no herbicides have been used,” said Williams, a member of the Ozark Unit of the Herb Society of America and a volunteer at the folk center. “Avoid roadsides because they are frequently sprayed, and backyards with treated lawns.”
To identify the plants, she recommends using resources such as Tatum’s book and the Peterson Field Guide “Edible Wild Plants, Eastern/Central North America.”
“If you don’t recognize a leafy green, wait until it flowers so you can be sure of what it is,” she advised.
So why bother with foraging when our supermarkets and gardens can provide all of the lettuces and leafy greens we could ever want?
First, it’s free food. Second, many green weeds are incredibly rich in vitamins and minerals.
Curly dock, a tall weed that is bad for grazing farm animals, is good for us. During the Great Depression, many people ate the curly dock they found growing to ward off hunger.
Its leaves are high in vitamins A and C and zinc, and the seeds are rich in calcium and fiber. Here are some others:
Chickweed, which is often the first new green we see growing in early spring, is a tasty addition to salads and may also be cooked as a green.
It’s considered a “sweet” green, so it softens the flavor of more bitter greens like dandelion. You can sometimes find it in the winter, too, when temperatures are mild.
Dead nettle, a common spring weed rich in iron and fiber, is edible except for the roots. Its leaves are a little tough, so it’s best cooked.
Henbit is the familiar early spring weed with tiny purple flowers. Use small, tender leaves in salads, and cook the larger ones, which are also “sweet.”
The small tender leaves of violets are great in salads, as are the blue flowers. Bigger leaves can be cooked. The rhizomes are poisonous, so leave them in the ground or pull up and discard.
Cleavers, which is also called catchweed bedstraw, is a mat-forming weed with seeds that can be roasted, ground and brewed to make a caffeine-free coffee-like beverage. Williams once collected enough to make two big cups and attests to the mellow flavor.
Pokeweed or poke sallet is one of the most commonly foraged weeds in the South, even though it is toxic unless properly prepared.
What does that mean? Leaves must be boiled at least three times with fresh water each time before eating. The roots are never safe to eat.
Described as tasting a little like asparagus but with the texture of cooked mustard greens, it’s most commonly combined with scrambled eggs and bacon.
Dandelions are not native to America, but they sure seem to like it here. European settlers brought them here so their honeybees would have their nectar.
All parts are edible, including the flowers, which are torn apart and sprinkled on salads and used to make wine.
I picked small, tender leaves from my lawn early one spring as recommended by the experts. I sautéed them with olive oil and garlic and then took a bite. Just one because the greens were so bitter I almost choked.
While writing this column, I learned parboiling them might reduce the bitterness. Throwing in some chickweed might do the trick, too.
I probably won’t be harvesting them again, but I don’t want to discourage others. Their roots can also be ground and brewed into a coffee-like beverage.
Dandelions are full of vitamins A, B complex, C and D as well as iron, potassium and zinc.
Watercress isn’t exactly a weed, but it can be found growing wild in cool-water streams. Don’t we all wish we had one!
Williams does have a stream, so she picks watercress in spring, fall and sometimes winter.
“It’s my favorite wild food,” she said. The leaves, which are peppery and mustard-like, can be used on sandwiches, in salads and in soups. You could throw some in a mess of other greens but I would hate to see it lose its own identity.
Watercress adds significant amounts of iron, calcium, iodine and folic acid to our diets as well as vitamins A and C.
Because it is also a source of phytochemicals and antioxidants, it is believed to have anti-cancer properties.
Now that’s a weed worth eating!