Salad Days

Our front yard

A delay in our curbside grocery order meant that we were short on fresh greens for our salad. "Not to worry, we have our yard!" said my editor Barb.  To those who aim for a "perfect" monoculture lawn, we are heretics.  Some years ago we started letting the yard flower and watched the grateful insect life enjoy it.  The mower is set at 4 inches and the lawn is mowed every other week.

It is paying other dividends this year.  Violets are scattered across the lawn giving it splashes of purple blossoms so beloved by great spangled fritillaries.  Henbit and dead-nettle mix in with the grasses.  And all three find a place in our salad bowls.  Even before this our standard salad was decorated with violets.  (It is important to note that we don't spray our yard with chemicals).  This salad contained chickweed, henbit, dead nettle, redbud blossoms and violets.

When our grocery ran out of lettuce we headed back to the creek.  Barb set me out at the creek to collect Rudbeckia lanciniata, one of the few non-flowering plants she can trust me to identify.  She even allowed me to pull some of her invasive garlic mustard which adds a pleasant faint bite to the greens.  She meanwhile harvested  chickweed, henbit, and dead nettle from along our fields.  Topped off with violets and redbud blossoms it was beautiful.

The nice thing about eating some of the weedy plants is you can spare the edible wildflowers.  Large fields of rudbeckia and garlic mustard indicate they don't have a lot of insects or herbivores eating them.  For that reason she doesn't eat edible wildflowers such as spring beauty which provides nutrition for our insect friends.  Violets are an exception as they are abundant enough to share with the fritillaries.

Sochan was the Cherokee name for Rudbeckia laciniata, aka cutleaf coneflower or tall golden glow.  It is best eaten in the spring when the leaves are most tender.  It is slightly chewy in a salad then but is an excellent pot herb and it covers our riparian area.  Barb cooks it like spinach (she uses bacon fat, the universal way to my heart, probably both mentally and cardiac wise but you have to make your choices.)  It produces its golden flowers in the late summer when the leaves are too chewy.

Dead-nettle is considered a weed by many people but it has its charm.  Known as red dead-nettle, purple dead-nettle, or purple archangel, it is a herbaceous flowering plant native to Europe and Asia.  While it can grow exuberantly in mats that can take over an area, it is a problem you can eat your way out of and the tiny flowers are kinda cute if you get down to their level.  To demonstrate its benefit to butterflies and bees Barb reports she saw zebra and tiger swallowtails taking nectar from it and a bumblebee gathering nectar and pollen while she was pulling garlic mustard today.
 
Now is a good time to be out in nature, be it forest, field or the untended areas of our yards.  Consider letting at least a little of it go wild.



As you can tell by all the purples in its name, you wouldn't expect to find white flowers but that is just what Kelly McGowan found in the photograph below that she sent me.

What can you find that is new to you?

Finally, I think this article in Smithsonian magazine about Doug Tallamy should be required reading for anyone who is concerned about the ecology of our planet or even just a little curious.