July News from Julia's Edible Weeds

Dear reader,

What a cold winter we are having! Here at 'Farleigh' farm we are having frost after frost. I have to wait until the plants have thawed before I can go and gather some wild edibles. At the moment I'm using the little bitter cress, chickweed, speedwell which is growing abundantly in the cool weather, onion weed and cleavers. Cleavers is the featured plant this month. I made a very nice hot drink after roasting the seed heads of cleavers and then boiling it for a few minutes. Check out my article on it here to learn how beneficial it is.

I had a very refreshing trip up to Kaikohe in Northland to visit my friends who are lifestyle block sitting for six months. The property is rich in plant life - vegetable gardens, fruit trees, lots of herbs and perennials and of course 'weeds'. I met a couple of new ones that I hadn't seen before. Patersons curse or Salvation Jane Echium plantagineum looks like borage but it has much bigger flowers than borage. It has contrasting names depending on the situation. In Australia it is seen as a curse in some instances because it can be very invasive and then a life saver in drought situations when there is nothing else for the farm animals to eat. Although it is poisonous for horses. It contains the same compounds called
pyrrolizidine alkaloids which are also in comfrey and borage. It is safe to eat all of them in small amounts though.

Hillcrest in Hamilton is the venue for my upcoming Sunday 13th September Wild Edible Workshop. This is my first time in Hamilton which is exciting. Workshops can now be booked online thanks to my amazing Webmaster Sharon who put this on my website.

There are two interesting workshops coming up in the Bay of Plenty. The first is a talk and workshop on Co-housing with Robin Allison of Earth-Song Eco Neighbourhood. The second is a 7 week series of talks on Rudolf Steiners Biodynamic lectures to farmers by Glen Atkinson. Be quick the early bird price to attendance ends tomorrow.

Finally Parsley Dropwort is the second new weed I met in Northland. See it at the end with comparison with wild carrot.

'Pattersons Curse' or 'Salvation Jane' flower and the plant below. It doesn't mind being mown, it just grows right up again. Needless to say I didn't bring any back with me.

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Parsley dropwort (Oenanthe pimpinelloides), some people call it carrot weed Daucus carota, but it is a separate species. Parsley dropwort is a perennial (Carrot weed is an annual) that grows in Northland, Coromandel, Waikato and the East Coast invading and dominating pasture. It can do this because it has tubers on the roots which make it drought tolerant.
I visited Fraser who came to one of my workshops who had his dairy farm covered in this plant, but through soil and herbage testing he got the nutrients balanced in the soil and it is all but gone. Magnesium was the most lacking nutrient and parsley dropwort is the indicator.

The individual bunches of flowers on the umbel of flowers is rounder and denser in parsley dropwort and flatter and bigger individual flowers in wild carrot (photo above with little copper butterfly). Wild carrot smells like carrot but I couldn't smell carrot on parsley dropwort. I ate some and it tasted a cross between parsley and carrot leaves.