Weeds
I really didn’t know what to write about. It was a nice day so I thought I should do the Eltham walk, but I wasn’t enthused, so thought I would do some weeding instead - and the thought of doing something on edible weeds popped into my brain. Then David persuaded me I really should do the walk and this gave me a really interesting focus for the walk as I looked around at what was growing beside the path.
IT'S VERY FASHIONABLE TO FORAGE FOR FOOD
"What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left.
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."
Gerard Manley Hopkins
First of all define weed. I mean all plants must be indigenous to somewhere mustn’t they? So I would guess where they originate they are not considered a weed. I confess I have always had a soft spot for weeds - ever since my childhood when I saw a segment on some sort of magazine program on the tv which featured a dotty old English lady who had a garden that consisted entirely of weeds. She actually cultivated them - and they looked lovely. It’s a bit like the fashionable trend in English gardens to sow ‘meadows’. Seeds of various wild flowers are scattered around, mixed in with grass I think which is allowed to grow tall - I’m sure you’ve seen them on Grand Designs - and they also look lovely. Think poppies in the French countryside.
So going back to the question of what is a weed - I guess it’s a plant that has invaded a territory not originally its own to the detriment of what should be there. Now here we come to the other reason I admire weeds - survival of the fittest. Isn’t that supposed to be what evolution is all about? It’s when this fundamental path of evolution clashes with our desire to retain what is indigenous. I guess the latter says that the invading species were introduced and therefore shouldn’t be there. Is this true of all weeds I wonder? But I don’t have the time to research all of this. Suffice to say we consider as weeds plants that don’t originate where they are found and which are now taking over to the detriment of the native.
So back to what you can eat - this is supposed to be about food after all. I did a bit of research from the River Cottage people on hedgerows and what you can and can’t eat. But this was very English of course, and whilst some of the plants are found here too I also needed to find out about Australian weeds. So I had another look on the web this time - and found quite a lot of stuff there. In the end I decided to concentrate on the weeds that we actually have here in Eltham - most are not a surprise to you I’m sure - but some may be. I also find I am being very fashionable here - ‘foraging’ for your food (i.e. hunting and gathering again) is very urban hipster and chic. There are tons of websites out there if you want to know more.
“When life is not coming up roses
Look to the weeds
and find the beauty hidden within them.”
L.F. Young
“The strongest and most mysterious weeds often have things to teach us.”
F.T Mckinstry
So what weeds from our own garden and nearby can we eat?
Oxalis - The photograph below was taken on my walk this morning. They were growing at the edge of a building site - well I saw them everywhere on my walk and they are a real pest in our garden. Most of our back ‘lawn’ is actually oxalis. And it’s really difficult to get rid of. But yes - you can eat them - leaves, flowers and apparently even the berries. A citrusy tang is the taste. Best not to have too much though.
Blackberries - yum - need I say more really. In fact they are so delicious that they are also grown commercially. But they are a major pest in Australia - they don’t stay neatly in hedgerows as they seem to do in England. One of the joys of my childhood was to go blackberrying - and a favourite spot was in ‘the dell’ an abandoned sort of hole in the ground next to the church. But we also went out into the countryside too. Here we have them in our own garden - and in Adelaide we had a whole hillside. I even made some blackberry liqueur with them once. Goats love them.
Dandelions - the French have a nickname of pisse-en-lit (wet the bed) for them - they are apparently diuretic. But anyway - the leaves are perfectly edible in salads. I gather you can eat the flowers and the roots too. Pick a few for the variety.
A postscript - today (August 13) in the supermarket I noticed some tea made from Chai and dandelion root!
Fennel - I don’t think this is the same species of fennel that produces the bulb that we can eat. But the fennel you see growing beside the road or on abandoned plots of land is a very tasty herb. The French also add the stalks to barbecues to give fish in particular a different taste. For fennel goes particularly well with fish - in France I often scour the roadside to find some to flavour fish.
Nettles - yes the stinging kind. I made some soup with some once - it had a fairly delicate taste but was really quite nice. Obviously you don’t eat these raw - they do sting after all - so wear gloves when you are dealing with them. But the Italians love them - had some ravioli stuffed with nettles whilst in Italy this trip.
Purslane - I’m not really sure I know this one - it’s the plant at the bottom of the page with the plums on. It’s a very trendy salad vegetable. I think Delia Smith said it was her favourite salad green. It’s a succulent and all of it can be eaten.
Wild plums and wild cherries - not sure I can entirely tell the difference - they are both botanically prunus apparently. We have them in abundance on our block (well we do live in Wild Cherry Drive) and around and about. And I make jam with them. They make delicious jam because they are slightly tart. The problem is getting to them before the birds do.
Crab apples - we might have had one of these trees once. They’re just apples that are small and pretty tart. Good for apple sauce.
Wattle seed - to finish with an ingredient that is becoming increasingly trendy and is Australian. Apparently you can eat all the wattle seeds that there are. I think they can be ground into a kind of flour or presumably you can use them as flavouring.
Others that you might know are: hawthorn - apparently you can eat the berries but not the seeds in the berries, broom flowers - and also lots of other flowers - roses, violets, nasturtiums - scatter them on salads, chickweed, sorrel, rose hips, and horseradish. Now I did see some plants that looked like horseradish in the pictures I found, but I’m not really sure whether they are the same. That’s it below.
But you can’t eat agapanthus, ivy, or bridal creeper - which is a pity because we’ve got so much of it.
Then there’s mushrooms - but that’s a whole other story.
“He saw the kind of beauty yellow flowers have growing over a carpet of dead leaves. The beauty of cracks forming a mosaic in a dry riverbed, of emerald-green algae at the base of a seawall, of a broken shard from a blue bottle. The beauty of a window smudged with tiny prints. The beauty of wild weeds.” Michelle Cuevas
“Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” A.A. Milne
