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The Edible Lawn
One of the advantages of being an organic gardener is that you can eat any edible plant on your property – whether you planted it or not. Why not rethink your approach to weeds? Instead of cussin’ ‘em, why not eat ‘em?
Dandelions in lawn
Let’s start with the lawn. Dandelions (Taraxaum officinale) are the scourge of so many home owners that it’s a wonder they haven’t been driven into extinction. Thousands of tons of herbicides are spread on lawns each year– and millions of dollars spent – to kill dandelions, but still they persist. Maybe it’s time to try a new approach.
According to Just Weeds: History, Myths and Uses by Pamela Jones, dandelions have been used in Europe both as food and medicine for at least 2,300 years. It was brought to America by early settlers and those white parasols carrying seeds in early summer have dispersed plants in every state throughout the country.
A good spring salad can be made by slicing off the crowns of dandelions – that part of the plant between the fleshy tap root and the green leaves. Greens of dandelion can be steamed or boiled, and served with butter and lemon juice, or served in a cream sauce on toast, like creamed spinach. Once dandelions bloom, their leaves get much more bitter. If you want to eat them now, try them in a cream sauce that will balance out the bitterness, or boil them briefly, drain, and steam until tender.
A healthy drink can be made from the roots of dandelions as a substitute for coffee. Nancy Phillips of Groveton, NH and the author of The Village Herbalist, prepares it by washing dandelion roots, air drying them, and then chopping them into small pieces. She then roasts them in the oven at 250 degrees for 15 minutes. When she’s ready to make a pot of dandelion-root tea, she tosses a few dried chunks in a pan of water and simmers until she’s ready. She adds a little cinnamon and honey for a breakfast drink that is tasty and is said to have liver-cleansing properties.
Ground Ivy
Ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea), also known as Creeping Charlie, Jill-over-the Ground, , Cat’s Foot, Rat’s Mouth and dozens of other names (some of which are surely not fit to print), is a persistent pest. You may know it by its purplish-blue flowers and scalloped round, dark green leaves. It has square stalks and fragrant leaves – they smell minty when crushed or pulled. If you have it, surely you have identified it as the weed able climb over almost anything, even sending down roots through well mulched flower beds. It grows in lawns, and anywhere else it darn well pleases. Unless you change your attitude, you might go crazy if you think you can beat it. But hear this: the leaves make quite a tasty tea.
Before hops were introduced as a flavoring and preservative of beer, ground ivy was used by the Saxons to keep beer fresh and tasty. But for the busy gardener, tea is easier: just pick a few leaves, add hot water, and drink as a refreshing pick-me-up. Dry some of your weeded plants in the summer and save for winter.
Plantain (Plantago major) is another common lawn “pest” that has been used medicinally for centuries, and one that can be eaten. Plantain leaves are dark green, rounded, but longer than wide and ribbed longitudinally. The leaves all originate at a central point. Their flower stalks stand up in the middle and are loaded with small seeds. It can be eaten in spring salads, steamed and eaten like spinach, or added to soups. It is a mild laxative, so moderation is the key to its use.
Plantain, like many medicinal herbs, has been used for a variety of uses. Rub it on rashes, insect bites or wounds to alleviate itch or sting. Indians allegedly used it to counteract the poison of snake bites. It has been used in teas and tinctures to cure bronchitis, whooping cough, ulcers and diarrhea and more. Before you try it for those uses, you should check with a qualified herbalist, of course.
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is more of a garden weed than one found in lawns, but it is a low, fleshy creeper that can sneak into lawns, particularly along the edge of a flower bed or the vegetable garden. It has glossy green leaves, small yellow flowers, and reddish round stems. The stems all originate at the center, and radiate outward. It is quite brittle, which works to its advantage. If you try to pull it out, it breaks and re-sprouts. It can set down roots from broken stems, too.
Purslane can be eaten raw or cooked in a variety of ways. Like the others above, it can be eaten raw in salads, served like spinach, or added to soups or stews. It is most commonly eaten early in the spring before our vegetable gardens are producing all the greens we want.
Each weed or wild-harvested plant has its own flavor and nutritional benefits. Many are rich in vitamin C – and hence a little tart for the average tongue. Others extract and concentrate trace minerals from the soil. It is a good idea to consult a knowledgeable person in your neighborhood before you consume any weed, just to be sure you have harvested something edible. Dandelions, of course, we all know – and they are free for the taking. You won’t have to plant them either. Those lovely white parasols will float in and deliver seeds to your lawn and garden – whether you want them or not.
Enjoying the Fruits of Our Labor
I’ve been doing some sort of garden work every day since March 1, when I planted my first seeds indoor (artichokes, leeks and onions). That’s nearly 6 months of effort. Of course, most of what I do is fun, at least for me. But now is the best part: eating from the garden every day and putting up food for the winter.
Tomatoes are my favorite vegetable (or fruit, if you want to be technical). Once they start ripening I eat them two, even three meals a day. I love eating them whole like apples, in salads, or eaten between 2 slices of bread. Tomatoes promote good health and give any cooked dish a tastier, juicier flavor. But you know that.
Here is how I avoid becoming a slave to my 40-50 tomato plants: I freeze most of the whole. No need to blanch or skin them, Just put a dozen in a gallon freezer-grade zipper bag and freeze. I like to use a common drinking straw to suck the air out of the zipper bag before sealing it. I insert the straw and zip the bag right up to the straw. Then I suck out the air, watching the bag snuggle up to the tomatoes. Finally I remove the straw and pinch the last bit of zipper closed all at once. No need to buy one of the machines to do the job for you. And a bag without humid summer air in it has less frost on your tomatoes.
Come winter when I need tomatoes for a stew or sauce, I run the tomatoes under hot tap water, rubbing the skin off with my fingers. I let the tomatoes warm a trifle, then chop and use. When fully thawed they have the consistency of canned tomatoes, so I can’t use them in sandwiches, alas.
Any flawed tomatoes I turn into tomato paste after cutting off any bad parts. I use a paring knife to cut out the attachment point, then squeeze out as many of the seeds and as much excess juice as possible. I halve or quarter the tomato, and toss it into the food processor. I blend the tomatoes into a puree, then transfer it to an enameled cast iron pot to slowly simmer. It takes a few hours, but eventually the puree gets thick enough for a spoon to stand up in, which tells me it’s done.
I also use less-than-perfect tomatoes to make sauce, and sometimes use a hot water bath process to can a few jars to store in the pantry. Most sauce I freeze, despite the fact that I like to look up on the shelves of my pantry and see nicely labeled jars all in a row. Canning takes a lot of time and effort, so I prefer freezing.
NESCO Dehydrator
I also dehydrate tomatoes. I cut cherry tomatoes in half, place them in a food dehydrator cut-side up, and dry for 24 hours. I use a NESCO American Harvester dehydrator, one called the Garden Master Pro. The dehydrator uses 1,000 watts of electricity per hour, but I can stack up 8 trays of tomatoes at once if I have them. Once dry, I could just store them in zipper bags on a shelf, but I usually store them in my freezer as I usually have adequate space. I also dry apples, hot peppers, pears, and sometimes garlic for making garlic powder.
Blanching pot
Some veggies need to be blanched, or slightly cooked in boiling water, before freezing. The ones I blanch include summer squash, kale, beans, broccoli, corn and Brussels sprouts. The reason for blanching is to stop the enzymes in the vegetables that would continue the ripening or aging process. Beans, if not blanched, get tough and stringy with time. I’ve never read a good explanation why tomatoes don’t seem to age in the freezer without blanching. Peppers don’t need blanching either.
Home-frozen vegetables seem to have a bad name with many gardeners because most books on freezing tell you to blanch longer than I deem necessary. Putting Food By by Greene, Hertzberg and Vaughan is considered the bible on how to store foods, but the authors say to blanch green beans in boiling water for 2-4 minutes, depending on size. To me, that’s cooking them, not blanching them. Cooked that long, they’ll be mushy when you eat them, and I want my beans to be crunchy.
To me, the key to blanching is brevity. Start with lots of water at a rolling boil, and don’t add too many veggies at a time. I have a special 2-piece blanching pot – it has an inner pot with drainage holes that fits into the (slightly) bigger water pot. I lower the beans into the boiling water, and then as soon as they change color – turning a lighter green – I pull up the inner pot, allowing the water to drain out. Using the lid as a saucer, I carry the inner pot to the kitchen sink and dump the beans into a full sink of cold water.
The cold water stops the cooking process. Some people add ice to the water, but I just change the water frequently to keep it good and cold. I then drain the beans in a colander, spin dry in my salad spinner, and pat them dry with a cotton tea towel. Then into zipper bags and the freezer.
So I eat from my garden all year round. Yes, it takes some effort to put food in the freezer, but I take great satisfaction in being able to eat my own produce, especially since I know it has never been sprayed with chemicals.
Biological Controls
It’s not always easy to be an organic gardener. Even committed organic gardeners sometimes long to spray herbicide on gout weed or that pesky poison ivy. There are times when Japanese beetles or rose chafers arrive in throngs just before your garden party and you want to nuke those nasty critters. There may be times when you have an urge for the good old days, the time before you understood that spraying an insecticide kills beneficial bugs along with the bad, aggravating your pest problems. But there are also problems that are more easily addressed with organic solutions.
Purple loosestrife
Right now purple loosestrife is blooming in swamps and along streams and roadsides. It is a tall, beautiful weed with small purple-pink flowers growing on square stems. So who can object to such a pretty plant? Biologists know that it is a plant that came from Europe and has few natural predators here to keep it from taking over wetlands. It has an amazingly robust root system and can elbow out native plants, in part, because it produces huge numbers of seeds. Not only that, the plant offers little of food value to our wildlife. It’s pretty, but worthless. A thug.
Purple loosestrife came from Europe in the early 1800’s –probably in soil used as ballast in ships – but it is not a problem there. Why not? It evolved there, and over time some 120 species of insects learned to eat it. Of these, 14 are host specific, meaning that they eat it – but nothing else. A few of these insects were brought to quarantine labs to test the following: Will they eat related species of the target plants, or plants that share a habitat? Will they attack any of our major crops such as corn, wheat and soy? Beetles have been found to help control purple loosestrife.
If you’ve ever tried to dig out purple loosestrife, you know that it has an amazing root system that will challenge even the strongest back. Scraps of roots left in the ground will start new plants. Not only that, each mature plant produces many thousand tiny seeds every year, so even if you did poison or pull one, the soil if full of tiny time-release capsules – seeds – that will start the process all over again next year, and the year after that, and so forth. But it can be kept under control with the use of introduced beetles.
Since 1994 beetles that eat purple loosestrife have been successfully reducing stands of this exotic. They reduce the numbers of plants to around 10% of pre-introduction levels; as the numbers of plants drop, so do the number of the predator beetles.
Dr. Casagrande and his colleagues at the University of Rhode Island have been working on finding and introducing biological controls for major plant and insect pests. But it is a slow process. They have introduced 3 parasitic wasps to control the dreaded lily leaf beetle, that red pest that devours our Oriental and Asiatic lilies. When I asked him recently how the wasps are doing, he told me that they are well established in sites in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. That some have spread as much as 10 miles since introduction. However, the predator insects are not for sale – so we just have to wait for them to slowly make the way to our gardens.
So what can the home gardener do? First, realize that help is on the way – in the form of biocontrols. Second, recognize that herbicides for plants and insecticides for beetles ultimately don’t work. Yes, you can kill lily leaf beetles or loosestrife with a spray, but you can’t eliminate them. Patience is required as Mother Nature, with a little help from scientists, will eventually restore balance.
I have purple loosestrife near my stream. My control? I cut it down with my pruning shears, thus preventing the plant from producing seeds. When small plants appear in my flower gardens, as they have done, I dig them out before they establish a big root system.
Angel's Trumpet or Datura
I have given up planting Oriental and Asiatic lilies. Dr. Casagrande told me that there are a few cultivars of lilies that are less attractive to the pest beetles, such as ‘Black Beauty’. But instead of those lilies I now grow a lovely unrelated plant called angel’s trumpet (Datura spp.). The flowers are big white trumpets not unlike the lilies, but they bloom in sequence all summer, sometimes a dozen or more at a time. It’s an annual here that I re-plant every year. One note of caution: the seeds are poisonous if eaten.
As an organic gardener, I have to accept that I am not in total control of the environment and that sometimes I have to endure some losses. Biological controls do work, and have made some exotic pests such as birch leafminers into nothing more than minor annoyances. There are already places where purple loosestrife is no longer a problem. I urge you to stay the course and be organic.
Mid Summer Blahs
August can be a tough month in the flower garden. Generally it’s hot and dry. Even the annual flowers that are supposed to bloom like the Energizer Bunny are tired and moody. I pulled some muscles in my back (foolishly moving big stones as if I were 25instead of 65) so the weeds in my garden got ahead of me, too. But now I am back at it, and trying to perk up my gardens.
The front walkway at my house is flanked by 2 flower beds, each just over 2 feet wide and about 8 feet long. In the spring I had Forget-Me-Nots (Myosotis sylvatica) and pansies providing color and verve, along with daffodils and crocus. But all those are long gone – or dormant.
Persian shield
I planted a variety of annuals along the walkway including nicotiana, verbena, salvia, cosmos and a lovely plant called Persian shield (Strobilanthes dyerianus) that I grow for the rich purple and silver foliage. The verbenas were a fancy new variety but they have proved too tasty to some ambitious insect. The nicotiana (also called tobacco plant) is still blooming quite nicely in lime green and a brownish red. The cosmos are in bud, but currently flowerless. Annual poppies have come and gone. My salvias are showing just a few deep blue/purple blossoms.
The problem now is that most garden centers do not have a wide variety of blooming flowers for sale. Geraniums are still for sale in fire engine red, pink and white. And some places have expensive hanging planters, but my budget for $25 planters has run its course. So what can I do?
Daylilies, one of mid-summer’s heroines, are in their glory now. I could dig up a clump from elsewhere on the property and move it to the front walkway. Or I could visit a garden center and buy a potted daylily in bloom and move it into an empty spot left when I pulled weeds and the dozens of annual poppies that show up each year.
I realize that the common orange daylily has prejudiced some gardeners against the breed. They are so common that they are considered trite. We like the new, the different, and once I suppose the orange daylily fit that description. Another problem is that orange daylilies have roots that spread, and a small clump turns into a big clump in just a year or two. And they are hard to dig up. Not only that, even a small scrap of root will generate a new plant.
Not so the fancier daylilies. They are “clumpers” that stay in one place. They are easier to dig and move, and can provide color for a few weeks each summer. There are early bloomers, mid-season bloomers, and some that bloom well into the fall. Colors? Clear yellow, rich yellow, various shades of pink, red and even lavender are available. Tall ones with scapes (flower stems) over five feet are available, as are tiny ones with scapes barely 18 inches.
If you want to dig up or divide a daylily, you will need to dig from at least 4 places – thrust a drain spade or transplant spade into the soil at a 45 degree angle on each side, each time trying to get under the center of the clump and tip the spade back to lift it a little. A big clump will give you a good workout. You can divide the clump by slicing through the root mass with a spade or a machete. Even a long serrated knife will do the job. Cutting is much easier than trying to tease apart the roots with a pair of garden forks, which is recommended by some garden authorities. Yes, you may damage a few bits of root when cutting them, but daylilies are invincible.
Daylily blossoms only last a day (hence the name), but most scapes have 6 or more buds that bloom in sequence. I pick scapes with flowers in bloom and put them in a vase. The buds open in sequence for a week or so. So don’t hesitate to use them in a vase. By the way, golden rod is a wildflower (a.k.a weed) that is starting to bloom and does well in a vase. It is unjustly accused of causing hay fever – the real culprit is ragweed (with inconspicuous green flowers), which blooms at the same time.
Great blue lobelia
Other flowers in bloom for me right now in other places on my property include cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) and its cousin great blue lobelia (Lobelia syphilitica) that is showing nice blue spikes. The first needs a moist, sunny site, while the later does fine in hot, dry places (or any sunny spot, really). Black-eyed Susan is in full glory, too. Bee balm (Monarda spp.) is finishing up, and obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana) is just starting to open. Later the fall-bloomers will be along, so I have plenty to look forward to.
So what did I do? I didn’t move a daylily, I dug some annuals that were growing in moist, rich soil and moved them up to the front walkway where the soil is drier. I used my CobraHead weeder to get under a short zinnia (Profusion series) and a big, juicy marigold. They reminded me that I need to water the plants in afternoon sun along the walkway daily – and I’ll give them (and all my potted plants) some liquid fish fertilizer for a mid-summer boost.
