Welcome to DK Preppers: A place to discuss practical ways to get through emergencies, both short term and long. Topics may include skills for growing, storing and sharing food, lost and historical skill sets, sustainability issues, living and leaving safely, and growing community. Everyone is welcome, and the comments are open. This is getting to be the busy garden season for me, so my posts will be less frequent. Sorry!
The chickweed in my yard is blooming with tiny little white flowers, and the low growing weed is lush, in it’s own small way. Most people find that chickweed is a nuisance plant, a weed, but for me it is an edible green that can often be found in the early spring before any other edibles.
I was out picking some chickweed to chop up to add to my salad, and thought about how valuable chickweed is to our diet. We try to grow most of what we eat, so a lot of our winter food is preserved. By early spring, our diet can be a little monotonous and uninspired. When you have eaten mostly canned or frozen food for the winter, an early spring fresh green is a treat. Right now I can pull it up by the handful, rinse it and pick out dead leaves, then pop it right into anything I want some fresh greens in, but in a week or so it will go to seed and die back slowly as the weather warms up. I’ll see it again in the fall when it gets cool. It got me thinking that I might want to save the seeds for the chickweed. I want to see if it would grow around the chicken yard fence so the chickens and ducks can have more greens too.
But from a prepper standpoint, wouldn’t saving weed seeds be a good thing too? Especially edible weed seeds?
My family eats a lot of weeds. Dandelions, ragweed, violets, purslane, dock, mustard, lambs quarters, pigweed, shepherd’s purse, horseweed, plantain, sorrel, henbit, nettle— all these end up on our plates with regularity. From a nutrition standpoint, weed greens haven’t been ‘improved’ by seed selection, so they have more bitter and less sweet flavors which means they probably have more of those vitamins and minerals that our grocery store and even garden foods are lacking. While soils can be depleted after seasons of growing foods, especially with monoculture farming, many weeds have deep taproots that go down into the subsoil to mine minerals from below the normal growing surface of the soil. They bring up minerals and nutrients that are out of the reach of plants with shallow roots, and that is reflected in their nutrition. When weeds are attacked by bugs, they put out bitter chemicals to discourage the pests. These bitter chemicals that are found in weeds, and to a lesser extent in many cruciferous vegetables, are shown to be just the ones that help prevent cancers in humans.
If you don’t have a green thumb, you might want to think about growing weeds. Weeds are easy to grow; most people can’t stop them. If you have a garden bed where you can’t get the peas to sprout, just wait. Some dandelions (or dock, or purslane) will sprout soon, and you can eat them. Extra greens can be dehydrated, frozen, or canned. I’ve canned plantain for the first time this year, and I’ll let you know how it turned out when I try them in a couple months. In the past, I’ve dried greens, and then just used them in small handfuls in winter soups and casseroles.
Weeds aren’t obvious food. Most people would look at a yard full of weeds and not see a thing to eat. In a disaster scenario, your garden produce might be pilfered, but you can bet they’ll leave the weeds. If you have a stock of weeds seeds, you could plant some weeds strategically to hide your veggies too. People would be less likely to wade into an overgrown and neglected looking garden full of nettles and lambs quarters. They might never know that your tomatoes, cabbages and bush beans were thriving behind them, and that everything they saw was also edible.
Another niche that weeds can fill for a prepper or a homesteader is as feed for the livestock. Don’t forget that those chickens and rabbits you are planning on raising during the zombie apocalypse also need food. High protein weeds like ragweed can feed the chickens and rabbits instead of alfalfa, while a mixture of other edible greens can round out their other dietary needs. You’ll need lots if you want enough to cut and store for the winter as hay, so seeds will come in handy if you don’t already have areas dedicated for hay production.
Finally, if a disaster scenario left land barren, weeds would be the first thing I would use to reclaim it. Some weeds have soil remediation properties, and can clean soils of cadmium and heavy metals. If the land is poor, weeds can draw up nutrients from deeper with their taproots, then as the leaves die, this nourishes the upper levels, both with the stored minerals and the organic matter. At my home, I have a 10th of an acre that has been killed by the chickens. My chicken yard used to be a lush, semi shady spot, but after three years of having 10 to 20 chickens and ducks on it, it is nothing but bare clay and chicken poop. So, I’ve moved the poultry over to the side pasture, and am using the weed seeds I saved from last summer to replant. The chickens love the forbs more than grass, and with their wild ways I expect weeds to enjoy taking the over abundance of fresh fertilizer and breaking it down to make prolific growth. In just a couple weeks the ground is already starting to have sprouts, so I’m hopeful.
So, maybe this growing season, take some time to get those weed seeds too. Weed seeds can be stored in a dry, dark, cool place for years and still retain their vitality. They are easy to grow and useful in several ways. That is just what a prepper likes.
**Always be sure to correctly identify a plant before eating it. Get a good foraging book with lots of photos and keep it with you until you can recognize them easily on your own. If you aren’t sure of plant, don’t eat it. When in doubt, throw it out. Gather from areas away from car and foot traffic, and away from industrial areas, and spray and runoff areas for agriculture. Use your common sense, and be smart about gathering. Don’t gather endangered species. Don’t trespass to gather.
In the comments, let us know your plans for being more prepared, and the measures you have taken to get there. Anything about getting yourself to a place where, in an emergency, you can care for yourself, your family, and your community is great to talk about.
If you would like to do a story for DK Preppers, I will try to have a discussion weekly. The stories can be about your experiences, or just a topic to discuss. Let me know if you are interested.