Chickweed is fall and winter greens and medicine

       

Some of the biggest chickweed tops I've ever seen this year, with leaves 1 1/4 inch or more.

          Chickweed is a dependable fall and winter green for chickens and people.  It tastes like grass, sweet and lightly bitter, and makes good salad and sandwich greens or wilted salad for people.  Cut the just the top inch of stems with its new leaves and flowers for best eating.  The stems can be rather tough below that. Chop the tips for salad and sandwiches; cover with boiling water long enough to wilt the greens to eat it like spinach.  Save the water and drink it for the vitamins and minerals, and to help with weight loss.

Unlike dandelion and wild lettuce, it is not bitter when blooming, and is full of A, B and C vitamins, magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc.  This year, I am finding the chickweed leaves bigger than ever before under locusts by the river.

          Chickens love fresh chickweed best in fall and winter.  Chicks love the seeded plants in late spring for their seeds.  I just pull the stems by the handful and fill a grocery bag for my flock. 

Chickweed is also good for eye medicine.  Make a tea with the leaves, let it cool, and drip it into the eye.  It stings a little for a few minutes.  I’ve cleared up many cases of pink eye and kitten eye infections with chickweed tea.  If it doesn’t work, pink eye is not the reason one’s eyes are red, or you may be allergic to it.  I researched it this year and found many medicinal uses I’ve never thought about, including a salve recipe I intend to try.

          It grows best in our area by the river under locust other trees with soft leaves that are quickly eaten by worms and make rich soil.  I’ve seen some under shrubs by the post office.  It starts growing with the first fall rains, and blooms through the winter into late spring, when even the newest growth gets rather leggy and is not as good for salads and such.  This is a good time to pull quantities of the plant and spread it in a good growing location.  Once it has made enough seed, it dies down until fall.

To keep it available for medicine year-round in your garden where it is watered regularly, keep pulling the above-ground portion of the plant as it blooms, before it makes seed.  Being an annual, it will keep growing until it makes enough seed.  It is one plant that doesn’t make a crown between root and stems, so it can’t be stopped by cutting below the crown.  It tends to break off at or above ground level when one is pulling it, so ironically, the way to keep it in your garden all summer is to keep pulling it as it blooms.  The way to get rid of it all summer is to let it seed out in the spring, or smother it with mulch, the easiest way to lose it entirely.

Published 12-21-2021 at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

 

An article with almost too much information: https://www.healthbenefitstimes.com/chickweed/

This one has a concise rundown of its vitamins, minerals, and medicinal constituents:

https://draxe.com/nutrition/chickweed/

Give us a real break

 

New Water Treatment Plant site, cleaned for construction.

            Council decided to give the New Water Treatment Plant Project three million dollars of our ARPA funding for a down payment on our new water plant.  You also plan to give ratepayers a small break on our rates in return.  

At first, the City and The Daily Courier said that the City would cancel the last two years of base rate raises that are supposed to help pay the loan.  But they also said that the unit rate raises for the new plant would continue, as well as inflation and raising the separate new plant debt payment fee.  Lately, Courier articles and City staff have become less specific about which rates would be curtailed.

If you stop increasing base rates, but keep increasing unit rates, as unit rates rise, ratepayers will collectively cut back further on water use, decreasing revenue.  This will make the City raise unit and base rates to cover the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water plant, clawing back our expected $8 savings on the base rate.  Or the City might dip into the ARPA $3,000,000 to cover it, decreasing our future down payment and increasing our interest.

If you stopped the new plant unit rate raises instead of base rates, we would be paying more from base rates and no more for our use, and our rates might stabilize. 

When you passed the new plant payment fee, we were told that it would not rise by inflation and would go away when the debt was paid.

We were not told then that the fee would not cover the whole loan.  Twenty-two percent of eighty million dollars is being put on our base and unit rates, increasing by 5.28%, plus inflation, yearly for five years, will never go away, and will rise by inflation, every year until this rationing rate system is reformed.

You, our Council, can set base rates to cover all overhead: debt payments; operations; administration; maintenance; and actual inflation of plant costs.  You can lower all unit rates to one rate, paying for only unit costs, which rise and fall with our water use.  This was the way we paid for our plant and the cost of producing and delivering clean water with it, for over fifty years.  Grants Pass was watered; rates were low and stable.  To return to that rate system would be a real and permanent improvement in our health, wealth, safety, and happiness.     

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 12-1-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com