Weed Garden
Many of the “weeds” gardeners hate are in fact edible and/or medicinal plants themselves. Which means, as gardeners, that we’re often in the position of pulling out hordes of near indestructible super nutritious greens only to replace them with needy delicate ones that’ll thank you for all your work by bolting at the first hint of summer. As an experiment (or maybe just laziness), when spring arrived we let one of our garden beds grow “wild”, didn’t plant anything, didn’t weed anything. What we found is that the vast majority of plants that grew were either medicinal, edible or both. As one might expect the plants that came up required no care and had no pest issues – they’re “weeds” after all! The surprising thing is that many of them are better flavored and more nutritious than the garden plants we generally work so hard to tend. So what came up in our “weed garden” – Dandelion, Plantain, Ground Ivy, Purple Dead Nettles, Lambs Quarters, Wild Onion, Violets, Thistle, False strawberry, Feverfew, Wood Sorrel, even tomatoes and squash started coming in, seeded from fallen fruit the year before.
