Getting Started Organically
start with the basics

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the law & the practice

Edible Garden
for food, drink & medicine

Trees & Shrubs
Mother Nature's way

Traute Klein, biogardener
Webmaster's background & work

Related Articles

Weed Salads from My Garden
A list of the most useful edible weeds which are found in my corner of the world.

Naturally Healthy Salad Dressing
Salads can be healthy and delicious and cost very little in time and money.

Don't fight the dandelions, eat them.
They taste great once you know what to pick, and they will curb your craving for chocolate.

Don't fight the dandelions, drink them.
Make the best coffee substitute. And how about some dandelion wine? It will knock the stuffing out of you.

Herb Teas from My Garden
Herb teas all around us are free for the picking.

Amazon Books

Illustrated Guide to Growing & Using Culinary, Aromatic, Cosmetic, & Medicinal Plants

More Edible & Medicinal
Weed & Herb Books at Amazon

Variety Salads Free for the Picking

by Traute Klein, biogardener

Is your family bored with your lettuce salads? Would you like to expand the horizon of your taste experience? Save your grocery money and don’t even buy seeds. Let Mother Nature grow some variety salads for you.

Who needs lettuce?

Is your family bored with lettuce salads? Would you like to expand the horizon of your taste experience? Save your money. You don't need to buy the ingredients at the supermarket. You don't even need to grow them in your garden. Let Mother Nature provide the ingredients for some variety salads for you.

Lettuce? What's that? I have not grown it in years, neither have I bought any. The extreme heat of prairie summers does not promote the growing of good lettuce. The same can be said for radishes. Our summer soils are much too hot for these plants. Unless they are sown before the winter to come up first thing in spring, you might as well save the money for the seeds. To tell you the truth, I sow only one salad ingredient, and that is peas. I use the greens as well as the pods for salads or I just pop them into my mouth. All the other salads in my garden are either perennial or self-seeding annuals, and they are not the kind of ingredients which you would find in the usual North American salad: mustard greens, giant German spinach, and borage.

I serve a fresh salad once or twice daily in the summer, and no two of my salads are ever the same, because I have a long list of ingredients at my fingertips. Many of those ingredients would be labeled weeds by most people, but I learned to appreciate them as real food in 1945, when my family, along with millions of other Germans would have starved to death under the Russian occupation. Foraging in ditches was our only means of survival.

To Weed or not to Weed

I don't have any weeds in my garden. Volunteer seedlings are either pulled out within days of popping out of the ground, or they are left to grow big enough to be eaten.

To Taste or not to Taste

Children are quite adventuresome when it comes to experimenting with new tastes, provided that they are allowed to pick the plants themselves. Give them the same plants on a plate, and chances are that they won't touch them. Many adults are terrified that they are going to die of poisoning if they eat something from their garden which they did not sow. The truth is that very few weeds are poisonous, and it is not too difficult to find out from the library or from your ag rep (in Canada) or your extension agent (in the US) which poisonous plants might be found in your area. Learn to identify them so that you can avoid them.

Even if a plant is poisonous, you are not likely to ingest enough of it to get sick, because most poisonous weeds don't taste good. Have you ever tried deadly nightshade? Yuck and double yuck! That plant is a cousin of potato and tomato If you have ever eaten potato leaves or berries, you will get the idea. Don't try it on purpose!

As for the non-poisonous weeds, be adventurous. Give them a taste test. If they are to your liking, watch out for more of the same. We all have our favorites. The article "Weed Salads from My Garden" (linked in the left column) gives the most common of these weeds. Unfortunately I have not had a chance to illustrate the article yet. That's a big job.



© Traute Klein, biogardener