Eat your weeds

I’m slowly learning about eating weeds. Here on the wet coast, this buddy was already offering up leaves weeks ago in early February and I finally got out to harvest some for salad yesterday. It has a lovely, peppery flavour that reminds me of arugula /rocket. You may know this guy as snapweed, or pepperweed. It can be a bit of a bother if it gets established in your garden. If it goes to seed then you will see why it’s also called shotweed - if you disturb the mature seed pods, they will literally shoot tens of hundreds of seeds up to 4 feet away. Kind of amazing. Cardamine hirsuta: “commonly called hairy bittercress, a plant in the family Brassicaceae, and is edible as a salad green. It is common in moist areas around the world”. Why harvest wild greens (aka weeds) when you can just buy lettuce at the grocery store? Partly it appeals to me because I’m a natural scrounge, and partly I just love learning everything about plants. Also, I am someone who likes to know where my next salad is coming from. To be clear, at this point I am harvesting these fresh wild greens in season and then adding them to my store bought salad mix. The more I learn about eating wild greens, the more intriguing it becomes to me. Cultivated foods like lettuces have been selected for size and hardiness on grocery store shelves rather than their nutritional value. And I have read that wild edibles tend to contain more beneficial nutrients on a per-weight basis than cultivated foods. They also come with a whole host of good microbes that are great for gut health. This guy is an easy wild green to start with, it seems to grow everywhere in disturbed soil like planters, our gravel path, and probably your garden soil. I saw some in a planter at my Mum’s the other day and pointed it out to her. I asked her if she wanted to try some as I popped a leaf in my mouth and she looked horrified and said an emphatic NO! There’s definitely a mental “weed” hurdle to get over. 😝