Would you guys like to read reviews of the weeds edible invasives I've been eating?
Yes?
OK, well here goes:
Creeping Bell Flower: ***** FIVE STARS, the Midwest MVP, constantly producing crunchy delicious top growth. I can fill my salad bowl in 30 seconds out of my back door. Then I pull up the whole stem, strip off the older tougher leaves and cook those. Nice texture to the top growth and no bitterness. The older leaves are a little tougher but sautee up beautifully. I usually don't bother with the stems because they tend to be a bit woody unless the plant is very young. I have been trying to harvest the whole plant before it flowers, to keep the seeds out of the yard. I have been letting the stems dry and chopping them up for straw for mulch.
Virginia Waterleaf: ***** Another Five Star plant this is technically a North American native that has gone beyond its range. Because of that it is absolute nectar to our local bees who LOVE these flowers. You have to cook the greens, but the flowers can be eaten raw and are delicious. Our yard is so full of this that I could basically eat the flowers every day and still leave plenty for the bees. One of the few edible plants that doesn't get disgustingly woody after it flowers. The leaves stay relatively tender, probably because this plant is very shade loving.
Dame's Rocket: **** Best caught in the early spring, this is on of the first green things that appears when the snow melts. The top leaves will remain munchable raw until after the plant flowers, then the whole thing becomes kind of woody and not worth it, even cooked. Bees ignore these flowers but you shouldn't. They are tasty and so pretty in a salad. When the flowers first come up the little fronds that hold the flowers are crunchable, but once the flowers open they are woody and won't even cook down to be edible. Ideally you should just harvest all of it and pull it out by the root BEFORE it flowers to keep the seeds out of your yard, but if you find these growing in a vacant lot and they are in flower, at least take some of the flowers home to eat.
Dandelion **** For years I tried to harvest dandelion by pulling it up by the roots when it was flowering. That is the exact opposite of what I should have been doing. The best time to harvest is before flowering, using a knife to cut the leaves off where the leaf thins out to a stem, that way you don't bring up a bunch of dirt and grass which take forever to clean out of your greens. Also the bitterness is mostly stored in the root, so the further away from the root, the milder the taste. You can find good edible dandelions all year long in long grass or in the shade. If they're already flowering you can harvest the greens and sautee them and they are decent that way. Also can break up a flower or two in a salad for a little color and sass. You can harvest the tap root and dry them for a super bitter tea that aids digestion. Personally would almost rather have a tummy ache I hate dandelion tea so much...
Broadleaf Plantain **** No it's not a banana it's a weed that grows everywhere, once you learn to recognize it, you will realize you've probably got some near you at all times. Mostly loved for its medicinal properties--tinctures and balms are great for bug bites and stings. (People recommend it for brown recluse bites, which I really wish I'd known ten-ish years ago when I got a brown recluse bite that sent me to Urgent Care.) I think it's quite underrated as an edible plant. The tender leaves that grow straight upward, usually only one or two on every plant are where it's at. They can be eaten raw and have a delicious, deep mushroomy flavor. It's a bit much for an entire salad but 3-4 of these little beauties will add some real complexity and interest to any mix of wild greens. The more mature leaves can be cooked but you have to pull out the strings which is a pain and frankly I think I'd need to be really hungry to bother. The little seed stems that they put up in midsummer can be fried and eaten. The seeds are similar to Psyllium which is what Metamucil is made from and contain a lot of mucilage, so they are sometimes used to thicken stews or porridge. I feel like if you are eating weeds from your yard, you probably already get enough fiber, but it might be worth drying some of the seeds as a backup fiber supplement for winter.
Helping gardeners get free mulch. Helping arborists empty their trucks.
If you have a yard and need mulch, the garden centers charge a fortune. But you can get mulch FOR FREE from Chip Drop.
If you are one of those people who think fancy, evenly chipped, dyed mulch is the only thing that will do, alas for you. That's not what you will get. And you shouldn't use dyed mulch anyway.
What you will get from Chip Drop is the detritus that arborists need to dump after they've done some tree clearing. I just got a pile of FREE mostly pine mulch over 6 feet high. It should be more than enough to meet my needs to suppress weeds on pathways and mulch around winter plants.
And it's FREE, though I paid the optional $20 fee.
All you have to do is sign up, and when there is an arborist in the area, you get your mulch. You can add your preferences as well, but if you are too picky, it will take longer to get what you want. It took me about a month to get my free mulch, and with a spate of warm weather coming this week, I'll have plenty of time to make use of it.
I use the Back to Eden and no dig gardening methods, and mulch is essential to my needs.
i hate that concerns about urban gardening/foraging safety is often met with "What are you, a cop?" scorn. I believe it's a suspicion of anything that hinders the punk/anti-system urgency to jump in immediately and do whatever feels right.
Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.
I know anti-intellectualism is viewed as activist these days, but like, surely you don't want to literally eat lead, right?
Requisite Yearly We Do Not Buy from Baker Creek post
It's seed catalog time! One of my favorite times of year, honestly. While my garden mostly sleeps, full of dry leaves and fluffed-up birds and cold breezes, I'm indoors contemplating tomato varieties and telling myself that *this* will at last be the year I get the peas in on time.
As it is that appointed time, my usual yearly reminder: don't buy from Baker Creek!
Baker Creek are racist, fascist assholes! They intended to platform Cliven Bundy at their yearly conference, and Native seedkeepers have said that Baker Creek stole from them (and sell the product of that theft). They did a For Ukraine fundraiser that actually went to a far-right Ukrainian organization invested in obliterating LGBT rights.
Baker Creek might have some fun varieties of seed, but I can very nearly guarantee that if you see something there you want, I can find it or an analogue for you somewhere else.
Here's a selection of seed companies I personally have bought from, or people I trust have recommended; there will be a secondary and possibly tertiary reblog, since Tumblr only allows me to do ten links at once. If there's a company you've bought from and liked, please leave a review for them in the comments! What did you get, what did you like, how was the germination?
Native Seed Companies: (please, please feel free to add more in comments to this post)
Discover unique heirloom and non-GMO seeds at Alliance of Native Seedkeepers. As a Native American-led store, we specialize in over 1,500 va
Native Seeds Search is a non-profit that conserves and sells heirloom seeds, foods and Native American art and jewelry from the Southwest. W
Companies Specializing in Native Pollinator Plants and Seed:
Butterfly Plants and Seeds for your garden by Joyful Butterfly, native, always safe for all pollinators! Attract butterflies. Shop Now!
New to me last year, but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED seed preservation company (they have an incredible selection! My 2023 germination of their seed was like 98%! But they only accept paper order forms):
Heirloom seeds, organic sweet potato slips and heritage poultry. Sandhill Preservation Center has over 2500 varities to choose from.
Cool weird nightshades, I got a bunch of dwarf tomato seeds from them last year and THEY didn't suffer from peppergate because they're a small company that does a lot of their own seed:
Many new Heirloom Vegetable Seeds are available: Tomatoes, Peppers, Kohlrabi, Pumpkin, Lettuce, Cabbage, Corn, Beet, Herbs, Carrot, Onion, B
A list of ten more companies or so, which I buy from every year, will follow in a reblog in about two minutes; please share that one instead of this one.
It's not a bad idea to get in on Autumn and Winter seed sales--things are pretty rough right now, planning a garden can give you the feeling of a bit more stability and control--so I'm reposting this a bit early, this year!
Look through the notes for other people's reblogs with comments for other seed companies, too! Some great stuff in there.
having a good laugh about this beautiful, balding, federally-protected lady I met today. Native plants are the best but goddamn, if you're a celebrity bee, why not go for the trashy sugar rush ornamental cultivars?
Someone literally got in an argument with me over if rusty-patched bumblebees will nectar on hydrangeas and, well....
^ this invasive little shit made the most satisfying rrrriiip when i finally pried it loose, which is important to know bc if you wanna kill these things, you gotta pull em out by the roots
That's easy to do when the plant is young, but if you miss the window and the roots get established, then it becomes an exercise in patience-- you're probably gonna have dig the bastard out several times before you kill it for good
Look at this bitch. I had my first go at it last year and it was so entrenched I couldn't even get a spade under the roots
I've read that clipping off the all the leaves and stems 2 or 3 times in a growing season makes it easier to remove the roots the following year, and that seems to be true--I clipped it twice last year and then let it start its spring growth before i tried again. Clipping the leaves means the plant wastes a bunch of energy growing new ones so it's not building more roots
This time i did manage to pry the roots out, but I still had to get a clippers and snip the rhizomes, which means there's probably enough plant still in the ground that we're in for at least one more season of this war of attrition
Honestly though? It's fun. The effort-to-reward cycle is really interesting bc each task is only maybe 30 minutes long and then it's done and you've killed the plant a little. And then in 2 months you come back and do it again and kill the plant a little more. I think this is what grinding down a video game boss must feel like, idk. All I know is, there used to be 3 buckthorns at my in-laws' place and now there are 2
Mosquitoes actually are not replaceable in any ecosystem that naturally has them and that includes replacing them with any of the non biting species because these are the traits that make them so core to food webs:
Tiny
Can use every single pool of moisture to raise generations no matter how dirty and stagnant and low in oxygen
Can fly
Males get by on just sugars
Females take protein from larger animals to manufacture thousands more eggs
All these things combined allow thst ecosystem to make huge volumes of insects from conditions barren to most other macroscopic life. You might think there are other insects that seem to make huge massive swarms out of nothing but there's really nothing that hits all the same qualities *except other insects that also suck blood.*
It's the precise combo of being able to "prey" on things millions of times larger and breed in nothing but a few drops of filthy rainwater or the moisture in a rotten log. That's the most efficient combination for anything that size to multiply that rapidly where nothing else can even survive, except of course the things that can move in because they eat them :)
A lot of people ask "could they just not be itchy though?" and I regret to inform that isn't actually their doing, there's no evolutionary advantage to making you itchy. That's your own body detecting the intrusion of another creature's saliva into your skin, where it doesn't belong, and reacting with histamines.
If you've ever been bit hard enough by a cat, dog or even human you may notice a similar effect!
I remember having a conversation with someone about my hummingbird banding volunteering and how the data went toward support for conservation efforts among other things.
They were all for that, and loved hummingbirds and supported it!
And made a quip about how the only thing they wanted to see extinct were mosquitoes and small biting insects/fruit flies.
40 to 60% of a hummingbird’s diet, and their main source of other nutrients, is small, soft bodied insects.
Including mosquitoes and fruit flies.
They had a massive struggle not wanting to accept that no fruit flies and mosquitoes = no hummingbirds.
I've also added this on other big threads about this topic but I should add it here:
Being INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS to larger animals, even when they aren't spreading any pathogens (and again, most mosquitoes don't!) actually is another vital purpose. Ecosystems need biting and stinging things to keep big, stompy, hungry beasts from getting too cozy.
Mammals are the most resource-hogging animals in almost any biome but parasites can inhibit their growth a little (a good thing), discourage them from spending as much time in the same area or ward them away from whole areas to begin with.
Mosquitoes in particular breed in filthy, stagnant bacteria-rich water. You know what leaves behind conditions like that? ANIMALS! Animals eating all the plants, wallowing in the mud and shitting everywhere! A herd of ungulates can turn a lush and healthy marsh into just a cesspit if nothing stops them.
But it's mosquitoes that find a cesspit an appealing nursery. And then you get a cloud of mosquitoes so dense that the ungulates move on! There used to be a great BBC documentary that actually showed "mosquito season" driving a mass migration of African megafauna but the shittified search engines right now are only showing me articles about mosquito control no matter how I try to find this again, gee thanks, maybe someone else can find it?
So while the "mosquitoes are bad" all the big animals leave for months. Months of the plants growing back, months of the water clearing up until it's drinkable again (and the mosquito larvae themselves are filter feeders!), months of the mosquitoes becoming food for tiny birds and lizards and arachnids and amphibians, and the beautiful wetland is back again strong enough to survive the repeat of that cycle the next year.
Everything you hate in nature - the ticks, the territorial wasps, the stinging plants - are pretty much nature's immune system.
Obviously this doesn't mean the big mammals are "bad" either. The cycles of destruction are themselves also something ecosystems come to rely on as a regulatory force :)
deep enough in the carex trenches, they just start naming them whatever. looking through North Carolinian sedges I saw listed Carex molesta (troublesome sedge) and Carex misera (wretched sedge) which really speaks to the kind of psychological state one descends into when classifying sedges
The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), also known as the spotted touch-me-not. When the seeds mature enough to start a new generation, their pods develop a nastic response and explode, dispersing the seeds in the environment. When the time comes, the cells of the seedpod accumulate and store mechanical energy based on their hydration level. Any external stimuli then overloads the system and the walls separate and quickly coil up on themselves, transferring energy to the seeds and launching them outwards. | Journal of Experimental Biology
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