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Meet Traute Klein, biogardener.

Related Articles

Don't fight the dandelions, drink them.
Wine from dandelion flowers and coffee from dandelion roots. Here's how and why.

Don't fight the dandelions, use them as medicine
for internal cleansing and to dissolve unwanted body cells like warts, corns, and calluses.

Don't fight the dandelions, enjoy them
as a companion plant in your garden and on your lawn.

Benign Breast Lumps
Strict abstention from caffeine, including in chocolate, dissolved the benign lump in my breast. Sorry, article not yet on this site.

Garlic, Wonder Food
Second in the series of three articles on the benefits of garlic.

Herb Teas from My Garden
and from the great outdoors. After reading this article, you will never have to spend money to buy herb teas.

Weed Salads from My Garden
and also from the great outdoors. You won't ever want to look at lettuce again after reading this article.

Taraxacum officinale at Plants for a Future
Exhaustive search results for Taraxacum officinale at the best plant data base on the web.

Dandelion
Magical properties and uses of dandelion.

Don't fight the dandelions, eat them.

by Traute Klein, biogardener

Dandelion salads are delicious if you pick the sweetest part of the plant, the flower, full of nectar. First article in the series on dandelions.



Series on Dandelions

This is the first article in a series of four on the benefits which we can derive from dandelions. The second one will tell you how to drink them, and the third one how to use them as medicine, and the fourth on how to use them as a companion plant. The others are linked in the left column.

Dandelion Salad

Would you like to know what I had for lunch today? A dandelion salad. No, not made of tender dandelion leaves, even though I have been told to eat them all my life. No, dandelion leaves are not really to my liking. I have, however, found a part of the plant which I really appreciate and which is much easier to pick, the flower. It has the advantage of being sweet with nectar, especially if I get to it before the bees do. A pint of dandelion flowers mixed with a little pot of yogurt is so filling that it takes me half a day to finish it.

Tomorrow, I may pick another pint of dandelion flowers and make another salad. That will be my health tonic for the day as well as a nourishing meal.

Are you a chocoholic?

If you are a chocoholic, I have bad news and good news for you. There is a connection between chocolate, coffee, and black tea and breast lumps. You can read about it in the article about benign breast lumps linked below. That's the bad news. If you are male, I don't know what effect chocolate may have on you. If you know, please tell me.

Now some good news. That article tells you that you can reverse the effects of the chocolate in a few weeks by abstaining from it. I have even more good news. The bitter taste of dandelions or of bitter herbs will curb the craving for chocolate, removing the temptation to indulge in the delicacy. After munching on dandelion flowers regularly, as I do every spring and summer, I can walk past the counter with all my favorite dark German chocolate without even taking a second look.

Ridding the Lawn of Dandelions

The first year after moving into our house, I worked all summer digging up the dandelion roots from the boulevard. (In Canada, the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street pavement is called boulevard.) What wasted effort! For every dandelion plant which I removed, the wind blew over a zillion seeds from the neighboring boulevards.

I have never worried about the dandelions on our property. They are easy to pull out of soft soil by the root, especially after a rain. To get rid of dandelions in a lawn on clay soil is as good as impossible, but my property has no lawn.

I like what they are doing on the boulevards in Vancouver where they are allowing people to plant gardens on them. Not so in Winnipeg! Inkster Boulevard is a four-lane street with a wide boulevard between the lanes. There, a kind resident used to teach the neighborhood children to garden, right in front of the school where I was teaching. The program was very popular and was featured in the daily papers. Unfortunately, those gardens contravened city bylaws which do not allow boulevard plants to be higher than 4". The city therefore demolished the gardens and replaced them with sod. Inkster Boulevard is once again seeded in grass and dandelions, and so is every other boulevard in the city except for the ones which are sprayed with ample amounts of weed-killer.