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/

The Weekly Weeder: Whacking Weeds Can Work

          Whacking annual weeds can kill them, if you whack them low enough—right into the dirt, below the crown.  They have no means to grow without a crown, from which all their growth comes.  (Chickweed is an exception, as it does not have a crown and will keep trying to grow and set seed until it has made enough of it.)

          I saw weed whacking work several years ago, when the city or one of its maintenance contractors eliminated goat heads from the Wastewater Treatment Plant property for several years by repeatedly scalping the dirt where they grew with a string trimmer.  This year, they are blooming and seeding in their old locations near the back fence; apparently the maintenance contract has changed and the city’s institutional memory is short, but goat head seeds can sprout for at least 5 years and will come up all summer until frost.

          This year, I whacked the dense weeds along the irrigation ditch behind my mom’s house into the dirt in May, when they were still green and flowering, but hadn’t set seed yet.  A week later, I pulled a few that had been missed.  The next week, only the false dandelions had come back, and over two months later, that is still the case.

          Last week, I was pulling and cutting crab grass from the backyard below, and looking at the enormous quantity of spotted spurge growing along the same path, but not yet flowering, and asked myself why I didn’t just whack them all, as the annual weeds would be killed out, while the perennial grass and clover would come back from roots.  So I got my battery-powered trimmer out and started beating the dirt, working out which direction to work in order to throw the debris away from my legs and face.  The next week, that area was still quite barren.  This week, some were starting to grow back, and I whacked them again.

          I will have to repeat all summer and reseed clover in the fall, I am sure.  Spring weeds start in the fall and winter, flowering and setting seed around the same time in the spring, allowing one to kill them out for the season with one soil-scalping before they are ripe.  Some summer annuals, like star thistle, start together in spring and can be killed out as they start to bloom in early summer.  Most summer annuals keep sprouting through the hot weather, particularly where they are watered.  Goat heads have a final flush of sprouting as the weather cools in the fall, just as heron’s bill is starting its fall sprouting season.

What does not work to kill weeds, of any sort, is cutting two inches above the ground.  They continue to spread their flowers and ripen seed below the cutting height.  Weed control is seed control, and if the plants are still flowering, they are still violating our city code, which requires that one prevents flowering, seeding and noxious growth by cutting or killing.

                             

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

The Weekly Weeder: Chickweed for fall and winter food

          Fall is in a hurry this year, sending us cold, rainy weather on the equinox, and now a summer-ending rain system as October began.  It may warm up to the 80s this weekend, but maybe not, and it will probably be the last such warm spell until spring.  We are forecast to have a cold, snowy winter.

Chickweed en masse under locust trees by the Greenwood overlook.  This area got fenced in this year, but there is more not fenced further down the trail, where the city spread compost a few years ago.

          Chickweed has been growing in my watered garden for weeks.  Now that the rains have started in earnest, it will be sprouting in the dry areas down by the river, where it grows thick and lush, under the locust trees along the river trail behind the waste water treatment plant on Greenwood.  Locust drop small, soft leaves that chickweed can grow right through and they form rich soil to grow chickweed leaves up to an inch long and a half-inch wide, large and juicy enough for good salad, sandwich and boiled greens right up until they seed out heavily in the spring.  

The stems are soft and juicy and can be eaten along with the leaves.   I like to cut just the top two inches of the plant for eating, for minimum stem and best quality.

They often start flowering in late fall with small, multi-petalled starry white flowers which quickly make tiny seeds, but are still good eating until the weather warms in the spring and they get leggy with smaller leaves and lots of seed.  Their taste is mild and very green.

Chickweed being weedy on the Caveman Bridge a few years ago, growing in decomposed locust leaves.

When it gets too leggy and seedy for salads and sandwiches, it is time to transplant it to other places by grabbing a load of those seedy greens and spreading them where you want them to grow.  For good results, it should be an area of good soil for growing big plants, where leaves will not be lying too thick and heavy for them to sprout the following fall and winter.

          Chickweed is also good for eye medicine, being a mild source of boric acid.  Make a tea with the leaves and stems, let it cool, and drop it in the eyes.  I’ve cleared up many cases of pink eye and kitten eye infections with chickweed tea.  To keep it available year-round in your garden, where it is watered regularly, keep pulling the above-ground portion of the plant before it makes seed.  It will keep growing until it makes enough seed.  It tends to break off at ground level when one is pulling it, so ironically, the way to keep it in your garden all summer is to keep pulling it.  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.

                             

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