Part I. Living in the Midsouth, I've seen a billboard ad of a local lawn care company featuring a scowling, stern-looking man holding a clump of dead weeds, with the tagline, "Lemme kill your weeds!" Each year, home and business owners spend significant time and money battling weeds and undesirable vegetation in their lawns. I've read articles discussing how growing an ideal, beautiful, 'monoculture' green lawn impacts the surrounding environment for the amounts of herbicide, fertilizer, elimination of diverse cultivation, reduction in food for bees, etc.
Interestingly enough, the above image registers when I searched "Dandelion". I say so initially, but on closer look, it appears that what I thought I knew isn't quite accurate. Identifying Dandelion, I look for leaves originating from a center point with a single flower or "make a wish" head on a hollow stem. Like nearly anything else in the plant world, that is but a single variant. The above is another. And then there are the look-alike weeds, like Cat's Ear. Thankfully, they are both edible. But, why would I want to eat something I just suggested for a cow's cud?
If I may... let me EAT your weeds! Yes, I'm serious. Well, I'll eat what's on my lawn. I don't use any chemical herbicides or fertilizers, nor have I done so for a number of years. As a Boy Scout, I had read further into the scout manual, and having been interested in "survival" type books, I have known about the edibility of certain plants that we would ordinarily overlook as nuisance vegetation, perhaps something a cow with its multiple stomachs would spend the afternoon chewing.
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| Taraxacum officinale |
Interestingly enough, the above image registers when I searched "Dandelion". I say so initially, but on closer look, it appears that what I thought I knew isn't quite accurate. Identifying Dandelion, I look for leaves originating from a center point with a single flower or "make a wish" head on a hollow stem. Like nearly anything else in the plant world, that is but a single variant. The above is another. And then there are the look-alike weeds, like Cat's Ear. Thankfully, they are both edible. But, why would I want to eat something I just suggested for a cow's cud?
Enter the world's at large, straight on down to just about every locale's situation. In late February, I came down with the flu, and after spending about a week convalescing, into a second week of being just run down, by the third week I needed to grocery shop. In a moment of clarity, I anticipated a coming run on food (at least in the grocery stores), and stocked bulk rice, bulk beans, flour, dry milk, root vegetables, and some other staples (coffee). I stayed home, I isolated, and I didn't go to the grocery for all of March. Ordinarily, I might have made two or three trips in a month. I ran out of fresh milk and then canned milk, my meat supply dwindled, but I still have about 7 out of 20 pounds of rice that I'm working through.
Of all the things that I used (and started using for the first time in a long time), I made it for about 10 days after my fresh vegetables ran out. Sure, I had frozen vegs to carry me through, but to me, there is no substitution for fresh vegetables. The result of this? Return of INTENSE carb cravings. Of course, I'd run out of dark chocolate a long time before the vegetables, so I was becoming a neurotic cabinet scavenger. The flour was running low, so I had not made any bread in a bit either. By Day 4 of this madness, I took some beans and started the process of sprouting them in order to "make" some on-demand greens. That's a process I'll get into in another post, but it takes about 4 or 5 days, and I was already losing it on Day 0.
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| Wash & sort |
Ever listen to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"? Listen to the introduction to the last reprisal of the main theme. That's where I was standing, on the cusp, thinking, "am I really gonna do this, or should I just go to the store?" Facing the lush front lawn, weeder in hand -- my lawn is green year-round only because more than half of it is "weeds" that I have managed to pretend are, and keep mowed like grass. I waited until the evening, and went out to pick. Earlier, I'd watched a lady in her 90's on YouTube describing her youth during the Great Depression, and making a salad that she had enjoyed with her family when they could find dandelions growing. I made the salad. I tasted it, and my face melted off. It was so bitter!
illustration from 1897 Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen
To be continued in Part II
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