Weeds! and Some crop seedlings.

This morning I went to the garden with the goal of building a few more beds and checking in on the seedlings.  It's been dry for more than a week and I had been concerned about water as I don't have an irrigation setup at the Garden, or even a very good watering can. Luckily it rained some last night, enough to drench the seeds and so I didn't need to water this morning.

I was able to build a couple more beds, bringing the total number to 12, with 5 left to go. It's a slow process but satisfying in its way.  I also walked down the 5 beds that I have already planted and checked for seedlings.  There were just a few popping up, and also plenty of weeds.  So I wanted to devote this blog entry on weeds in the garden and what they mean.  Below are (clockwise from top left) henbit, common geranium, and field bindweed or morning glory.

What is a weed?

My favorite definition of a weeds is a "plant out of place".  Most of the weeds we know do have their own uses, if not to say the intrinsic value of being a living organism. The weeds that emerge in a garden or farm plot also tell the history of a place, what has grown there in the past and laid down seed or roots that we then see in the present as that amazing nuisance, the weed.


Probably the most persistent and pervasive weed is yellow dock or curly dock, Rumex crispus, shown below.

It is a perennial weed with a large taproot. Dock can survive for months (I've tried this) under a black plastic tarp, getting blanched and leggy but surviving finally to bounce back. This garden has been tarped pretty extensively and the dock continues to multiply.  Dock is also an edible plant and a medicinal one.  I believe I have some dried dock root in the bathroom cupboard as an element of a postpartum bath tea blend.  The leaves, especially the tender spring shoots, are edible as a cooked or soup green. The greens contain oxalic acid (this is a member of the Polygonaceae family) and should be cooked in a couple changes of water before eating.  The photo below shows - sort of - a dock plant with its beefy taproot that I excavated this morning.

I've eaten dock leaves exactly once. I would cook them again if I had no alternatives, but this was pretty slimy and not that tasty.  As a friend says "Edible and forgettable."  

Another weed, that I seek out and try to eat in the spring, is stinging nettle Urtica dioica, shown below. There is a stand of nettles right next to our garden and I've harvested some to eat this year.

Stinging nettle stings when you touch it, because of formic acid in the trichomes or hairs that cover the stems and leaves.  So I harvest with gloves, and should have worn sleeves!  To prepare the nettles I blanched them for a minute in boiling water which taks out the sting. Then I stripped the leaves off the stem, and sauted in olive oil and garlic, and finished with some pork broth.  A real heatlhful spring tonic!

Oddly enough, according to wikipedia, curly dock root is often combined with stinging nettle to treat anemia, as it has high iron levels.

On another note, we did finally get a few seedling emerged, I beleive helped by last night's rain. Here's beets and some mustard greens just germinated.  Hopefully we'll see more of that soon.