Don’t Fear the Weeds
Several years ago, I reconnected with an Old Friend that I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Another Friend discovered that we knew each other, and dropped over with Old Friend as I was weeding my garden. Being Friends, they joined me for tea and weeding out in the garden, and it was a lovely and companionable afternoon. As could be expected, memorable events from the past were recounted, laughs were shared, friendship rekindled. The thing I now remember the most from that day, was when Old Friend mentioned all the things they felt that had been learned via our friendship. “Well,” noted Old Friend, “You taught me not to be afraid of weeds! And I’ll never forget that.”
Ah yes. Weeds.
Anathema to many who love gardening, the common wild plants of our ecosystems are often burned, poisoned, dug up, cursed and cried over. Blamed for ruining the lawn, out-competing the lettuce and simply, well, succeeding so very enthusiastically, there is hardly a farmer or gardener around who can claim to love them. Yet their potential services and benefits to us are so well-known. Maybe not well-known enough. Maybe a review would be a good thing.
Weeds remediate the soil.
Normally, weeds appear in places where the soil has been disturbed, distressed and left bare. Till up a garden plot and then ignore it for a season if you would like to see nature’s soil healing system in action. Low growing and spreading plants such as chickweed and purslane help to shade the soil and keep it in place; deep-rooted plants such as burdock, thistle and dandelion do a great job of reaching down into deeper soil layers to bring up minerals closer to the surface and anchor the soil. A complicated, intertwining system of life starts to take over and make things better every time humans plow through. And although most weeds are simply extremely opportunistic and successful, there is some truth to the science of “reading the weeds”. The aforementioned purslane and chickweed, for instance, really tend to prefer soil that is very fertile. If you spot some chickweed really loving a place in your yard, maybe that is a place that would be excellent for growing some lettuce. Maybe poke some lettuce seeds into the ground there. Use the chickweed as a nurse crop, helping to keep the soil moist and cool until the lettuce germinates. And, oh, don’t forget to harvest some of that chickweed and put it into your salad, because it’s delicious! Which brings us to the next point.
Weeds are almost always more nutritious than the garden vegetables you’re trying to grow.
I know you’ve heard it before. But seriously, why aren’t we eating more chickweed, plantain, and redroot pigweed? Or how about my personal favorite: lambsquarters! A plant so nutritious, that there is literally no commonly cultivated garden leaf that can beat it when it comes to Vitamin A, C, and a bunch of the B’s, and — take note vegans — is the best plant source of “complete” protein, with an amino acid score of 129 on nutritiondata.com. A score of 100 or higher is considered complete protein, and this puts lambsquarters right up there with many animal protein sources. Bonus: it’s delicious, and can be picked and eaten raw right from the garden, tossed in a salad, or lightly sauteed and served on pasta along with some toasted sunflower seeds and a squeeze of lemon the way my Fancy Chef Friend served it in his high-end restaurant that time I picked several pounds of lambsquarters for him. If we paid half as much attention to plantain, purslane, nettles and burdock as we did to our spinach, tomatoes and peas we would be far ahead nutitionally. Not to mention….
Weeds are good, safe, effective medicine for many common conditions.
The logical next step in self sufficiency from growing our own food, is making our own medicine. It’s easy enough to make a cup of mint tea to sip if you’ve got a headache or a dodgy tummy. You might have even heard of pressing a squished (or chewed up) leaf of plantain on an insect bite or sting. It’s a fairly simple matter to have some of your go to plants in dried leaf form in some jars in the pantry, to use as teas and infusions for remedies such as these. Several years ago, I had managed to collect so many dried leaves of dandelion, nettle, lambsquarter, plantain and chickweed that I knew I’d never use them all up while they were still reasonably fresh. So I ground them all together in the blender into a fine powder, and then used this tasty and potent Wild Green Powder to season salad dressings and sauces, and add nutritional punch to everything from soup to bread that I cooked all winter. Superior to many health food store supplements, and really just a byproduct of walking and gardening.
The next step in medicine making is learning how to make a simple tincture. Almost any plant part that you want to harvest for it’s medicinal qualities can be chopped or torn, placed in a clean jar and covered with a menstruum, a solvent liquid that will extract the active ingredients from the plant material and preserve it until needed. The resulting liquid is called a tincture, and they are often made with an alcoholic base that serves to preserve as well as provide an efficacious delivery system for the medicine. As anyone who has had a martini on an empty stomach will tell you, ingested alcohol carries it’s effects directly into the bloodstream in pretty short order. Two of the tinctures that I regularly have on hand, and that I encourage you to try, are dandelion and hawthorn. The dandelion is made from whole dandelion plants, when they are in flower. Clean lightly, chop it up, put into a clean jar, cover with vodka or everclear or whatever alcohol you have at hand. Put a lid on, give it a shake, and leave it for 4–6 weeks. People will tell you that you need to use a high proof alcohol, but any hard liquor that’s 40% alcohol or higher will give you some useful results. Strain off the alcohol and bottle it, and it will store for two years or more. Dandelion tincture is especially useful for any kind of digestive trouble. I occasionally suffer from acid reflux, when I eat certain foods too close to bedtime. I keep a bottle next to my bed, and when the indigestion wakes me in the middle of the night, it usually takes a dropper full and about five minutes until I can go back to restful sleep until morning. If you have this problem, you will appreciate how amazing that is!
Another menstruum for extracting the medicinal properties of plants is vinegar. The shelf life of a vinegar tincture is not as long as that of an alcoholic tincture, but it is less expensive, and good to use when alcohol is to be avoided. My favorite vinegar extracted medicine is stinging nettle. To make it, proceed exactly the same way as you do for an alcoholic tincture, only using a good quality — preferably organic and unpasteurized — vinegar such as apple cider in place of the alcohol. Nettle vinegar is used for seasonal allergies, and I have seen it decrease symptoms in the suffering individual after only one dose. If you suffer from these kinds of airborne allergies, it’s definitely worth a try, and you might need to make a large batch, because you’ll be wanting to use it on a daily basis to avoid sneezing, runny nose and watery eyes when the pollen is flying about.
Weeds are not to be feared.
I’ve definitely been an ally of weeds for many years, as Old Friend has attested. I’ve eaten them, fed them to baby chicks, harvested them for medicine, and appreciated their beauty. I’ve used them as a nurse crop, a mulching material, and a honeybee food source. I’ve put them in my CSA baskets, sold them to restaurants, and harvested their seeds. Just so that, you know, I could make sure to have enough nettle, chickweed and lambsquarters everywhere I go.
