Ever since I was a small child covered in oozing poison oak rash, I have been fascinated by weeds. These hardy, much-maligned plants can be beautiful, ugly, prickly, smooth, smell bad, smell great, be poisonous, be edible, in fact be about anything.
The only thing the group of plants known as weeds have in common is that they flourish whether we want them to or not. I like that! These hardy plants have plenty of spunk, and are often medicinal, or edible, or good for the soil, or provide protection and food for birds and animals. More and more often, proponents of permaculture and companion gardens urge gardeners to keep a "wild zone" near their cultivated areas so that the garden can benefit from proximity to weeds.
And I like them.
Today's Weed of the Day is the sow thistle, or sonchus oleraceus. The sow thistle grows to be about 3 or 4 feet tall, and has dandelion-like flowers; it is a bit prickly, but less so than prickly lettuce, and it is edible (but bitter). I have read that the young leaves are good in salads, and when eating older leaves or stems it is good to cook them in several changes of water.
Sow thistle is prolific, and will happily cluster anywhere that doesn't get mowed. Oh, and rabbits and pigs like to eat it! So if I ever get rabbits, I will have plenty of sow thistle to feed them.
Sometimes my sow thistles are literally covered in aphids; there are a couple of schools of thought on this: the anti-weed people think that sow thistles attract aphids into the garden and therefore we should douse these innocent plants in toxic chemicals to make them go away forever. Other people think that maybe the sow thistle is attracting the aphids away from the plants we want to protect; even better, there's the thought that these aphid colonies create a food source for predators like hoverflies, etc, attracting beneficial insects to the garden.
Finally, sow thistles are a food source for a number of species of butterfly larvae. So yay for the sow thistle!
I would love to hear comments from people about the sow thistle, or who have a favorite weed they would like me to feature.
3 comments:
I'm so excited about this weed of the day development! I've been wanting to learn more about weeds, actually. And I've especially been wanting to know the difference between sow thistle and dandelion. This was because I thought dandelion leaves were edible, but sow thistle wasn't. However, I learned from your entry that sow thistle is edible as well! I have one of them in my garden - I think it's dandelion. I believe dandelion only gets one flower per plant, and nutsedge gets multiple per plant. I'd also love if you wrote about my archenemy: purple nutsedge.
Oops, I meant to say I thought sow thistle got multiple flowers per plant (not nutsedge). I just had nutsedge on my mind, as I am currently at war with it. It bites. Hard.
Purple nutsedge? OK! I'll feature it soon. We have some yellow nutsedge in the garden in Sonoma, it is quite tenacious. Last summer I picked a lot of it to use in flower arrangements, I know it's tough to get rid of, but it's also pretty! Oooh, just looked at a pic of the purple king, it's not nearly as attractive, alas.
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