My weed books refer to the white part of the dandelion that connects the root to the leaves as the “crown”, but the term is confusing. Crowns are at the top of things, where the blossom on a dandelion is. As I was picking dandelions this afternoon for both this post and for a side dish to tonight’s Cassoulet-style Chicken dinner, it occurred to me that this part of the dandelion is the dandelion ‘heart’, just like the heart of celery, or the artichoke heart.

So, from now on, I’m calling them “dandelion hearts”.

Pick, trim and clean as many dandelion hearts as you wish to serve. I halve or quarter the larger hearts so that they are all a uniform bite size.





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I’ll start this weedgeek post by saying that I know hardly anyone can pick dandelions the way I do. For most people with uniform yards of Kentucky blue-grass, extracting the yellow flower with an intact tap-root is a futile task. I’ve seen those screwdriver-like weed pickers that are sold in hardware stores described as ‘weed-breeders’ because they always break the root and any dandelion root fragment will just grow another dandelion.

Because I have no grass, I pick my dandelions with a pitch-fork.



There are plenty of reasons to celebrate the dandelion. People eat the greens and crowns. Make wine and fritters from the blossoms. But for me, dandelion-root coffee is the real prize. Because organic, fair trade coffee is pricey, it’s easy to quantify the value every scoop of dandelion coffee that I brew.

Here’s the how-to:

Pick dandelion-root by whatever means you prefer. I’ve used those ‘weed-breeder’ type pickers and gathered the top inch and a half of lawn-bound dandelion roots, but picking them from my garden with a pitch-fork has far more satisfying results.



Trim and clean the roots like any other root vegetable, and cut into matchstick sized pieces.



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From an educational perspective, this post doesn't count for anything. I imagine people saying, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. You can eat lamb's quarters."

But I made this recipe for lunch with lamb's quarters as the green. Man, was it good.

Eleanor has been giving me Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey for the last three gift giving occasions (my birthday, Christmas, my birthday). I used to think I liked bourbon when I drank Jim Beam White Label. And I kind of appreciated the Wild Turkey: Rare Breed that The Fed gave me for Kitagawapalooza, but Woodford Reserve is really the best stuff. Good medicine for rage headaches. I feel much better. Well, I feel medicated, at least.

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So, you know I'm a weedgeek. Here's something that makes weedgeeks happy: when normal people ask you for seeds.

Can you believe that? If that isn't a weedgeek badge of honor, then I don't know what is. Twice ~ in as many days ~ after hearing me talk about, or being fed, a weed growing in The Vacant Lot of Eden, a non-weedgeek has asked me if they could have seed!

Seed! From weeds! Like they want to intentionally plant one of my weeds! (Okay, they're not my weeds. It's hard to consider these plants as belonging to me when they just grow without any effort whatsoever on my part. But when people asked me for seed, it's hard not to feel like they're a possession of mine.)

I keep intending to take a photo of the cleaver plant which is part subject of this post. I'll do that, for sure.

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My next plan for weed appreciation is weed-topiary.

While weeds have been a part of my diet for over thirteen years now, and I've had many occasions to speak about eating them, it's been a long time since I've actually served them to anyone. In fact, apart from my wife, I can only recollect that reporter from the St. Albert Gazette, and my room-mates from just before I was married. And with my roomies, it was only dandelion root coffee.

Dandelion root coffee and chickweed omelets were part of a strategy to introduce weed-eating to people using the least foreign tasting species. Something like prickly lettuce isn't a friendly starting point. "Just that picture of prickly lettuce in your blog looked menacing," amandi_khera said. "I don't think I'd ever put something like that in my mouth."

Today though, I'd start with lamb's quarters. It's not just "least foreign tasting". It really tastes good.

This was my supper tonight:



Left-over rice in hot popcorn-green tea, smoked oysters, and lamb's quarters sauteed with chopped bacon. Those are re-used disposable chopsticks that we wash in the dishwasher.

Lamb's quarters is a member of the Goosefoot family, named for the shape of their leaves.


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Lunch break post:

On the eve of Canada Day (July 1), amandi_khera and I took a short trip to the east side of town and Casino Edmonton. Donna-lee had given me all the casino coupons from her Entertainment Book and I had a 2-for-1 at the Casino Edmonton Grill. Unfortunately, the food there isn't much better than what you'd find in an institutional cafeteria, and our luck at the craps table was quite cold.

Over a pepper steak (Amandi's) and a King Donair (mine), I explained how pound-for-pound, edible weeds are more nutritious than cultivated food.

"Cultivated vegetables are bred for sweetness and succulence," I said. "Consequently, there's more water in them." Weeds are tougher and some are bitter, but no cultivated green matches them for vitamins and minerals.

This intrigued Amandi. She said that she doesn't care for salads and the prospect of eating fewer leaves for the same nutrition sounded like good value. Especially if those leaves are free.

"Did you see my response to meimeigui's comment in my last post?" I asked her. According to the this site, recorded Egyptian history tells that they were eating lettuce 6500 years ago. It was the prickly lettuce variety because non-spikey lettuce was invented by the Romans much later.

"Prickly lettuce produces a white sap which is a mild n4rc0t1c," I continued. "The Romans would eat it at the end of dinner to aid in digestion and promote sleep. The sap can be processed somehow and used to cut 0p1um."

This last point intrigued us. I suggested I might get into the illicit lettuce trade.

End of lunch break.

Breakfast Post:

The work Hannah and I put into our backyard isn't very visible from a distance. There are so many plants over a foot high that the shape of the mono-cultured beds is simply obscured. To create a sense of order, we've garden-fenced a couple of beds in the yard so that it looks less like a vacant lot. From one bed, we pull all but one species of wild plant, and do the same with a different species in the other bed, thus creating the impression of cultivation.

We do have some planted beds, though; some planted from commercial seed, others with transplanted wild species from neighbors and colleagues.

"We need a different word than 'weeding'," Hannah said to me yesterday afternoon, quite independently of my last post. I suggested 'grooming'. We are grooming our garden; giving it shape and order. She decided to groom the bed growing our Jerusalem Artichoke which was crowded with juvenile lamb's quarters.

When the Jerusalem Artichoke bed was tidy, Hannah had a compost bucket nearly full of wild-plants. We stood alongside the bed as if it were a small grave.

"I feel kind of bad," Hannah said. "We're just going to compost this food" (we have more lamb's quarters than we need) "but there are people in Africa who have no food." In retrospect, I should've shown her how to trim the plants as she picked them and then I could've blanched and frozen them for winter use.

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I gave two tours of The Vacant Lot of Eden this weekend. The widow, Mrs. Steiner across the back alley from us has the most direct view of our back yard and has a very tidy and colourful garden compared to our overgrown green. She was returning home from some errand as I was planting a pair of oriental poppies Eleanor gave us last weekend.

"Aren't you going to put in a vegetable garden?" the widow Mrs. Steiner asked me.

"We have some vegetables planted," I explained, "and we've been eating a lot from our yard." Mrs. Steiner was surprised and I took her on a tour of the Vacant Lot. I explained that you eat the base leaves of the shepard's purse, not the heart-shaped seeds; that the prickles on the prickly lettuce don't prickle when you eat it; our mono-cultured bed strategy; and pointed out all of the planted beds that you can't see because they're surrounded by foot high wild-plants.

"That's a very unusual garden," Mrs. Steiner said. "Mine is much more normal."

Not long after, a young woman next door to the west called out to me.

"Can I ask why you didn't plant grass?" she inquired. I gave her a tour of the Vacant Lot as well and we introduced ourselves to each other. E.'s accent must be Italian as she told me that there is an Italian dish that uses lamb's quarters, but I wouldn't have guessed so by the sounds of it. I mustn't have an ear for such things. After the tour she said she was much less confused by our yard.

End of breakfast.

First: nomenclature. Which words to use?

Wild plants suggests wilderness. Untamed. Possibly dangerous (ie. toxic). But weeds implies a valueless nuisance. An overgrown eyesore.

Alright. We'll go with 'weeds'.

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"So, that thing with sharp edges was 'prickly lettuce'?" Hannah asked, gingerly touching a finger to her lips. She'd just finished up our lunch salad made of plants unrecognizable to her.

On our kitchen table was the 1995 St. Albert Gazette Homestyle section with my first story on edible weeds. I'd pulled it out for this post because I was trying to calculate how long weeds have been a part of my diet. More than thirteen years, apparently.

Along the mid-rib of a prickly lettuce leaf is a row of spines. I was studying the tiny spikes on a piece of prickly lettuce that was protruding out of my cheese sandwich. They looked vaguely menacing and I wondered why I do this? Do I actually like the taste of prickly lettuce? In a salad or cheese sandwich, all you taste is salad or cheese sandwich. But a leaf of prickly lettuce by itself is bitter-tasting.

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Over 13 years ago, the Toxics Watch Society campaigned for a right-to-know bylaw that would require advanced notice whenever and wherever pesticides were to be applied. ('Pesticides' in a broad sense, including insecticides and herbicides.) The most widely used herbicide is 2,4-D on dandelions, and it doesn't take long to discover the history of the dandelion as a valued plant. The generation of Toxics Watchers at the time decided that a useful part of an anti-pesticides campaign would be a pro-dandelion front and we launched The Lion's Tooth Festival to celebrate some of the uses of dente-de-lion.

My weed-eating, then, began as ideology. But it rapidly became an over-all value activity. It was pretty easy to calculate the value of dandelion-root coffee-extender by price of coffee conserved. Today, my purchases of green produce at the supermarket simply ends the first day that the chickweed comes up. And now that resource inputs like water and fuel are becoming limiting factors on food production and distribution, having foodstuff that require no additional water than rainfall, and no fuel at all, is a valuable thing.

Here's a photo of prickly lettuce:



I just use it as a substitute for lettuce.