Julia's Edible Weeds

Borage ice cubes, borage in a salad and coconut cream.

The beauty and fragrance of flowers have always drawn humans in nourishing our senses. Increasingly we see a trend to use colourful flowers to brighten and make food very attractive. This though is far from a new idea. Ancient Greek, Roman and Chinese herbalists recorded medicinal and culinary uses for flowers. There is also information on the use of edible flowers from the medieval and Victorian periods where salads were made using violets, daisies and borage. Cakes were baked with rosewater and elderflower vinegar. Sage flowers, lavender and peonies were made into preserves with added medicinal qualities. Later it became very popular to ‘candy’ all sorts of flowers other than violets.

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Ivy leaved toadflax

I’ve only just learned  that this month’s feature ‘weed’ is edible.  Ivy leaved toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis) has a number of other names such as Kenilworth Ivy (because it covered the walls of Kenilworth Castle in the UK), Oxford Ivy, Mother of Thousands or Wandering Sailor and is a garden escape originating in Southern Europe. It is a trailing, hairless, perennial plant that commonly grows in rock or wall crevices (as its Latin name muralis indicates), up shady banks, or over paths.  Its leaves are ivy shaped with five lobes, hairless and approximately 1cm in diameter. Pretty two-lipped mauve flowers with a yellow or whitish pouch emerge all year from Jan-Dec. They look like much smaller versions of snap dragons.

Ivy-leaved toadflax’s lacelike stems can grow up to 80cm long.  It has a remarkable method of propagation.  The flower stalk starts out as positively phototropic meaning they grow towards the light to

Ivy leaved toadflax flowers

attract pollinating insects.  Once fertilised the flower stalk becomes negatively phototropic and moves away from the light into dark cracks and crevices where the seeds germinate. This habit however, can be destructive. I found it growing behind a temporary repair patch on my garage wall. It was actually pushing the patch off, mind you it wasn’t well attached. I was amazed at the amount of plant I pulled out from behind the patch.  I better keep an eye on that.

I don’t want to get rid of  it however, as I find it a dainty, pretty plant and in addition, you can eat it.  It is a nice addition to salads, especially at this time of year to help with spring cleaning our bodies.

Ivy-leaved Toadflax is high in Vitamin C.  It tastes pungent and acrid but is great mixed in with other greens.  It is said to have been used in India to treat diabetes.

Ivy leaved toadflax

So why is a Toadflax called a Toadflax? The answer is lost in history, but one explanation is that the flower looks like the wide-mouthed face of a toad. Another is that the flower looks like a whole toad! There is also a theory that toads liked to shelter amongst the leaves, and given that they like the crevices in drystone walls, seems to the likeliest explanations. We don’t have toads but now I’ve discovered this plant I start to see it in lots of places.

Wild  Edible Salad

Pick leaves of the following: Lambs lettuce (Valerianella locusta), miners lettuce (Claytonia perfoliate), arugula (Eruca vesicaria ssp. Sativa), twin cress (Lepidium didymium), chickweed (Stellaria media), ivy-leaved toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis), oxalis or sorrel leaves (Rumex acetosella). Make a nice vinaigrette dressing and voila instant salad. Decorate with toadflax flowers.

‘The flavours you get from these pungent, lemony, bitter, sweet wild leaves are unlike anything you get from a polytunnel. They taste the best because this is when they are meant to be grown and picked – in their natural environment.’Caprice Holdings’ Chef director Mark Hix, London.

Wandering into the garden to pick and then eat lettuce plants I’ve grown from seed is very satisfying. Everybody is familiar with mild tasting, juicy lettuce. They’re such a convenient size and shape to put on a sandwich or in a burger or have in salads.  But have you any idea of the history of lettuce or that there are wild lettuces growing quietly all around us?

Lettuces were farmed in Egypt originally as far back as 2680 BC The Egyptians selectively bred them from wild prickly lettuce into a food crop with succulent leaves and seeds rich in oil. Lettuce was considered a sacred plant and believed to enhance sexual stamina and its use in religious ceremonies is depicted in images on the walls of tombs and in paintings.  The Egyptians passed lettuces on to the Greeks who around 50 AD shared them with the Romans.
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Luisa and salad

I have a lovely young wwoofer (willing worker on organic farms) called Luisa who grew up in England but has a NZ mother and so NZ citizenship. She is a made keen horticulturalist and has been a wonderful help in the garden.  We decided to go on a ‘pickathon’ to see how many leaves and flowers we could pick in my garden to put in a salad.  Here is the amazing list:

Half the 99 unusual edibles

Other half of the 99 Unusual edibles

Salad of 99 unusual edibles

Gorse leaves, thorns, buds, flowers and seeds.

Gorse or Furze Ulex europaeus is right now covered in golden-yellow flowers adding colour to our wintery landscape. Not a sight many appreciate due to the bad rap gorse gets as a noxious weed. However, this plant is very important to bees during early spring providing protein rich pollen to grow baby bees (brood) and build the new season’s colony.

Gorse is a very spiny, woody perennial shrub growing up to 2 m or more. After the pea-like flowers black pods appear that split explosively when ripe dispersing the shiny, smooth, round seeds.

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Prickly pear plant in flower

Cactoblastis caterpillars eating a prickly pear pad

Prickly pear cactus Opuntia stricta though not a weed on our shores of Aotearoa, in Australia has ruined the livelihoods of many farmers. It was

Cactoblastis moth

unstoppable in spreading for a decade until the 1920s, when its natural enemy the cactoblastis moth was introduced.  Noxious in Australia, here we grow it for its bright yellow flowers, rich red fruits and dramatic appearance.  There are 300 species some of whom have red or pink flowers. The best part is Opuntia holds nutritional and medicinal secrets beneath the mean exterior.

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I’ve had a lovely little patch of this on a walkway over summer and I enjoyed seeing and even walking over part of it every day!  It stays low to the ground but the stems rise up when not disturbed.

It’s botanical name is Chenopodium pumilio.  Chenopodium Greek = goosefoot. (It is in the same family as fathen or Lambs quarters Chenopodium album and my favourite Magenta spreen or Tree spinach Chenopodium gigantium) and pumilio Latin = dwarf.

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I’ve watched this documentary and was astounded at the inventions happening around the world that we have never heard about – inventions for healing, free energy, ways of living – it was just so exciting and inspiring. The quest that Foster Gamble and his beautiful wife Kimberley Carter Gamble have been on to bring these things to light is so great.

Check out the trailer here.

I invite you to register to have free viewing from 23 April on the above link.

There is also Thrive I which is free to view on You Tube. Watch that as a lead up to Thrive II in the meantime.

Here is the synopsis of the documentary:
THRIVE II: This Is What It Takesbrings viewers behind the scenes with the people and innovations that have the power to transform life for everyone. It follows a journey across the globe investigating the most promising solutions in energy, health, consciousness, and non-coercive self-organizing while unpacking the underlying science, principles, and strategies that make them possible. Inspiring trans-political, grassroots, and decentralized solutions THRIVE II offers practical tools for reclaiming authority over our lives, an endeavor more significant by the failures of governments and authoritative institutions amid the pandemic and civil unrest sweeping the globe.

Don’t you love it when you solve a mystery. I have an intriguing pretty plant in my garden that I

flowers and the plant

couldn’t identify.  Finally a person with the App ‘Picture This’ revealed it as‘Jewels-of-Opar or Talinum paniculatum. I was totally delighted to learn this. It is also known as Fame Flower or Pink Babies Breath.

If you are a Tarzan fan you’ll probably have heard this name as Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1916 wrote ‘Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar’.It was also

The novel cover

mentioned in his second book ‘The Return of Tarzan’ written in 1913. Who or where is Opar? It may be based on an ancient African place called Ophir which held rich treasures of frankinsence and gold. Burroughs’ Opar is a fictional place holding a huge cache of gold and gems gleaned from doomed Atlantis. Tarzan ventures to Opar in order to claim some of the wealth. Some event, which seems as logical as a few of the plot twists of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, linked this Central American plant to a fictional African city. In any case, this charming plant was given the  nickname ‘Jewels of Opar’. Read more

I had a big surprise in my garden this summer – a squash that grows like a ‘weed’. Zucchini

Young rampicante

rampicante (Cucurbita moschata) is an Italian heirloom zucchini also known as Zucchetta Rampicante or Tromboncino squash.

I thought I was sowing the Chinese pumpkin or Chinese zucchini seeds which my gardening friends and I like to grow each year.  I acquired the seeds at our monthly crop swap at Our Place container

village on the last Sunday of the month labelled ‘Chinese pumpkin’.  They grew well and I planted two plants in my compost heap and in an area where they could spread out.  They grew fast and to my surprise they produced strange curling fruits.  And they were prolific!

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