Eat Your Weeds In Early Spring

"Weed" - such a mean word, rife with anger and judgement, with a healthy dose of disgust. "I have to weed! Look at all these damn weeds! My lawn looks like crap because of all the WEEEEEEEEEDS!!!" But what makes a plant a weed, as opposed to a flower, vegetable, or natural remedy? Only you, my friend, only you. Wouldn't you enjoy gardening a bit more if you could look at the view out of your kitchen window and think "Ah, look at that lovely expanse of medicinal and edible wild plants that I didn't have to do any work to sow or produce! Good thing that I am under no obligation to do anything about removing them due to their many health benefits. I think I'll have another cup of coffee and watch 'Househunters International' for the 450th time." Well, you're in luck. I'm going to spend the next few months exploring the many uses of these volunteer plants so you can consider them a crop, and save yourself the time and trouble of eliminating them with chemicals. Let's get started learning about zone 6 spring time edibles. Our next post will have a few fun recipes created by the husband and designated garden chef, Tom DiGangi!

Garlic Mustard - alliaria petiolata 

spring garlic mustard before sending up flower stalks

We have lots of this growing in the moist shady areas around the edges of our yard. This biennial will be 2-3 feet tall if left to flower and produce seed. At this stage in spring, it's a low growing clump of triangular to heart-shaped leaves with toothed edges that smell like garlic when crushed. Like most wild greens and herbs, the leaves are mildest and most edible when young, before the plant bolts and produces flowers. We use this like a strong flavored cooked green, although it's also tender enough to be eaten raw and fresh in salads. Make sure you check out Tom's garlic mustard recipes in our next post!

Wild Garlic - allium viveale

a lovely wild garlic portrait by Tom DiGangi

Also called field garlic and wild onion, this bulbous perennial looks like small clumps of tall thin grass. When crushed, it gives off a strong garlic/onion odor. In May and June, it will flower and produce little
bulbs, which are also edible. We use the wild garlic grassy leaves just like you would use chives - to sprinkle on top of any finished meat, vegetable, or soup dish to add an extra burst of flavor and freshness.

Dandelion - taraxacum officinale
Do I even need to describe this one? Dandelion, the most hated of lawn invaders, produces yellow flowers, white puffy seed heads, and has a tap root that goes from here to China. All plant parts serve as food and are rich in vitamins A and C. Flowers can be battered and deep fried, leaves can be cooked or eaten raw, and the root can be roasted and used as a coffee substitute. Since I married one of those Italian types, we've been eating dandelion in various formats for quite awhile, so I won't repeat the recipes here. Instead, check out the following old blog posts for some inventive dandelion applications created by Tom:

• why you should eat dandelions
• soup recipe
• pasta recipe

Chickweed - stellaria media

chickweed running up a raised bed

Also called starwort, starweed and satin flower. Chickweed has a variety of external and internal medicinal uses that I will get into later, since we're only talking about wild edibles in this post. This prostrate annual pops up every early spring and furiously takes over my sleeping vegetable garden. After years of cursing up and down about this thing, I finally determined what it was and learned about it's positive properties. I believe this year I finally made peace with this little creep(er), although I still wind up pulling up and composting more than I save. Chickweed is chock full of vitamins, and has a fresh grassy taste good for eating fresh in salads. The leaves, stems and flowers are all edible. I created a pesto using it along with garlic mustard, since its milder flavor tempers the stronger tones of the garlic mustard. I'm also going to dry some, and steep fresh parts in alcohol to make a tincture. Multiple generations can grow per year, so if you want to limit the amount of chickweed you are harvesting, get it out of the ground before the flowers produce seed.

chickweed running amok in my strawberry bed

FOILED!

This SHOULD have been a post about springtime wild edibles in New Jersey. I had full intentions of traversing my weed filled lawn and surrounding wooded areas to harvest wild garlic, garlic mustard, chickweed, and dandelion. My finds would be thoroughly washed and prepped, and then dramatically handed to Tom so he could use his innate food nerd skills to whip them into something delicious. The result would be an informative blog post written by me, including Tom's experimental recipes. Instead, I spent a beautiful weather week cooped up in the house, bouncing between a demanding infant and a sick nine year old, hence the name of this post. If the above topics intrigue you, consider checking out some old blog posts of mine about why you should eat dandelions, and how you can eat them in soup and pasta. And you can find detailed info about these plants, as well as many others, from wild food expert Wildman Steve Brill.

Instead of providing you new and interesting information about eating your lawn, this post will mostly be a note to myself about all the work I need to do in the garden in the next few weeks. Down with runny noses and hacking coughs! Onward!

In zone 6, it's time to:

• Direct sow carrots, beets, turnips and cilantro
• Plant broccoli, kohlrabi, and cauliflower plants
• Freshen up mulch in landscaped beds

In my veg/herb/medicinals garden, I need to:

• Plant quinoa, calendula, carrots and cilantro seeds
• Plant onion bulbs among potatoes
• Layout new tomato/pepper beds and put out Wall-o-waters
• Harvest and dry chickweed
• Up pot seedlings
• Lay out paths with cardboard and hay
• Buy more lavender and perfume roses
• Start basil seeds

In my landscape, I need to:

• Transplant helleborus volunteers to the woods
• Weed beds that need wood mulch
• Build new front of house bed (?)
• Consider weeding/mulching medicinal bed

My Seed Planting "Schedule"

In most areas of my life, there's usually a large difference between what I Should do and what I Actually do. For example, I Should just pay the stupid money and get the DVR box. Instead, what I Actually do is memorize the time and channel of my favorite shows and plant myself in front of the TV, like I'm from the 60's or something. I even have to watch commercials! The horror! And then when life gets in the way and I miss my favorite show, I loudly and adamantly complain about it, as if no solution exists.

My refusal to have DVR power doesn't really stem from my inherent cheapness. OK, it mostly stems from my inherent cheapness. But as I see it, it's also a Buddhist lesson in non-attachment. So I miss a program or two (or an entire series, or a complete pop culture revolution). It's just a freaking TV show, right? It's not really the end of the world. And if I catch it the following week, I can pretty much figure out what I missed. It's somewhat more important that I Actually take care of my kids, spend time with my husband, and enjoy life in the moment it's happening.

The whole Should/Actually process works the same for me in the word of gardening. I Should plant seeds in the garden according to this schedule (and so should you, zone 6'ers):

• Mid-March: peas
• Early April: radish, spinach, lettuces, onion, potatoes, cilantro
• Mid-April: beets, kale, greens, carrots, parsnips, turnips, chamomile
• Early May: basil
• Mid-May: beans

I Actually am planting seeds in the garden according to this schedule:

• Mid-March: peas
• Sometime In April: everything else, on a day or series of days when the weather is nice/baby is sleeping/Sophia is being babysat/we don't have visitors/we aren't visiting anyone/important body parts are injury free.

So maybe I'm not the most detailed gardener around. And I'm sure I'd get better output if I would actually get a plan and stick to it with no exceptions (for those of you who love a plan, you can get your own customized seed starting/planting schedule here) . However, I feel I can take seed planting liberties for a few reasons. First, I generally do my spring gardening in well-draining raised beds with soil that's been amended. This soil heats up faster and is ready to work earlier than normal. Because the drainage is good, I don't worry about the seeds sitting around rotting if the soil is still a little too cold. I also don't worry about planting seeds too late. If I get a smaller harvest than I should, eh, no big deal. I can always let the crop bolt, produce flowers, go to seed, and then let the seeds naturally dry and fall where they want to. When the soil cools down again in September, the seeds wake up and produce the crop that I should have had in the spring. This happened to me last year with a delicious lettuce called mache. Not only did it produce plants in the fall, but somehow the seedlings overwintered and we are NOW eating fresh delicious salads from the lettuce bed (and pathways and other beds and everywhere else the seed went, as evidenced in this picture). My point is, don't get hung up on schedules. Just get out there and get dirty!

Specifically, my current outdoor seed planting accomplishments to date are:

• Peas, Super Sugar Snap & Burpeanna Early: 3/22
• Raised bed #1: Brassicas (Cabbage Family) 4/6
• Turnip, Golden Ball
• Kale, Dwarf Blue Curly & Lacinato
• Radish, Watermelon, Salad Rose, Easter Egg II, French Breakfast
• Raised bed #2: Chenopodiaceae (Beet family) 4/6
• Beets, Chiogga, Touchstone Gold, Cylindra
• Spinach, Avon Hybrid, Salad Select
• Swiss Chard, Burpee's Rhubarb
• Raised bed #4: Solanaceae (Potato and tomato family) 4/7
• Potatoes, Red Norland & Kennebec
• Underneath the grapevines: 4/6
• Cilantro
• Chamomile, German
• Fennel, Bea

(grapevine beds on the left, four 10'x4' beds on the right, pizza box pathway down the middle. still looking for hay to cover the cardboard!)

Veggie garden to-do list:

• Manure on asparagus bed
• Plant onion bulbs asap
• Plant lettuce and carrot family seeds at some point
• Lay out garden paths with cardboard then cover with hay
• Set up soaker hoses

That's all for now, but that's plenty. Quick, you have five minutes before the kids get home - go plant something!

Laura

Computer Gardening - NOT Farmville!

In chatting with some friends on Facebook about seed planting times, especially in reference to the act of remembering to plant said seeds, I recalled something as well. I wrote a blog post awhile ago with a link to an excellent online seed starting chart. In that same post, I talked about other online gardening resources. Since that was a whopping two years ago and a million things have changed since then computer-wise, a good old blog post rewrite is in order.

Seed Starting/Planting Charts: I used Organic Gardening Magazine's seed starting chart for years until I found this online version that calculates the math for me. Check out the "lazy gardener's seed starting chart" at You Grow Girl. All you have to do is download it, and enter the recommended planting date for your time zone. It consists of a list of common garden veggies, how long they take to grow from seed, and how many weeks before or after your last frost date that they should be planted. It also specifies whether the plant should be seeded directly into the ground, or started indoors under lights.

Another option is at "The Vegetable Garden". This site also does the thinking for you by allowing you to enter your zip code to get your USDA planting zone. After that, you can use their zone specific planting guide to determine when to get established plants into the ground. This guide will NOT help you start your own seeds, and you need to intuitively know if they are referring to planting direct by seed, or planting established plants. This one also gives a broader range for planting dates, whereas the You Grow Girl chart is more precise. Either way, it's better than guessing!

Online Garden Planners: Two years ago, I was claiming to "still love my pencil/graph paper/college rule notebook." Bah! Never again. This will be my third garden season using the Mother Earth News  online vegetable garden planner.  It rocks, and I'm hooked. I made a map of my garden, drew in the established raised planting beds and fixed paths, and perennial vegetables. Every season, I keep that layout and move around my annual vegetables in a new saved plan. In this way, I can manage successive sowing and crop rotation. The planner has extra features as well, including planting charts and email reminders.

You can try the service out for yourself for 30 days to see if it would be useful for your garden, and the demo videos show you exactly how to input your garden bed layout. After that, it's a subscription service of $24 per year. For a small garden, this planner is overkill. Also, the planner only includes vegetables, herbs and fruit crops. If your garden is mostly flowers and landscape plantings, the database is inadequate.  

Gardening Apps: I hung around on Google Play and tried out a few smartphone based garden planners and didn't like them much. Other planners had terrible reviews and I didn't even try them. I think I am personally not inclined to involve my phone in gardening, which is wise on my part. I garden like the Muppet Show's Swedish chef cooks. Things get thrown, tools get damaged, and I wind up speaking in foreign gibberish. My phone had best stay out of the fray.

However, if you garden more like Martha Stewart, in your pressed khakis and perfectly clean SPF 50 lightweight gardening shirt, you might successfully garden and update your phone at the same time. To that end, I am filching some app reviews from a recent article from one of my favorite publications, The Herb Quarterly.

Map it - "Garden Tracker" (Apple) - $1.99. This might be a good (and cheap) option for small gardens. The app allows you to lay out a rectangular garden up to 2500 square feet and fill it with 65 veggies and herbs. It includes info about planting, garden pests, and lunar phases. If you use this and like it, let me know.

When do I plant? - "Gardenate" (Android) - $1.99. Enter your zone, and get info on what you can plant each month.

For city folk - "Urban Gardening" (Android) - free. Get news from various blogs about container gardening on balconies.

Herbs for beginners - "Herbs+" (Apple) - $2.99. Gardening and cooking tips for 40 common herbs.

Name that plant - "Botany Buddy" (Apple) - $9.99 and "Landscaper's Companion" (Apple and Android) - $4.99. Botany Buddy has in depth coverage of about 2000 plants, while Landscaper's Companion catalogs 25,000 plants in 17 categories.

Name that tree - "Leafsnap" (Apple, Android in development) - free. This one uses visual-recognition software to identify a tree by a picture of the leaf. How freaking cool is that?? I can't wait for the Android version. Currently it only covers trees native to the northeast, but they're working on covering the whole U.S.

Name that shroom - "Wild Mushrooms of North America and Europe by Roger Phillips" (Apple) - $1.99 and "Roger Phillips Mushrooms" (Android) - $3.99. Go mushroom hunting with this app, which covers 1500 varieties of edible, poisonous and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Have fun, and bring snacks!

Name that critter - Apps from the National Audubon Society (Apple and Android) - $4.99. Decide between birds, butterflies, insects, spiders and other garden friends.

Name that wild food - "Wild Edibles" (Apple), $7.99. Naturalist and funnyman Steve Brill made this app. We followed him around on a local tour presented by our county park system, and when it was through, considered ourselves fully informed about the food value of our local "weeds." If Steve isn't coming to your town, you can get the app instead.

At this point in an ideal world, I would insert an image of my growing seedlings or some screenshots of my online garden planner. But I have yet to document this year's gardening attempts, and my garden plan is too big to upload to the web. In the meantime, here's a nice picture Tom took last summer of The Buddha, a grasshopper and a bunch of zinnias. Happy spring!