Pick Wild Foods From Your Garden!

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Fortunately, brief cooking will serve to [1] drive saponin out of the plant's leaves, and [2] create a vitamin-rich vegetable side dish that's sure to please the most fastidious palate. (Because the plain, cooked greens have a very delicate flavor, you may wish to serve them with a stronger-tasting vegetable—such as curled dock—or with a cheese sauce.)

Boiled, wilted, fried, creamed, or steamed . . . green amaranth is an uncommonly delicious "find".

PURSLANE (Portulaca oleracea)

If you want a weed that you can safely eat raw, try purslane.

A native of southern Asia, pussley —as some folks call it—is at present widely cultivated throughout Europe and the Orient for use as a salad green and potherb. In America, however, relatively few gardeners have discovered how tasty—and nourishing—this small, ground-hugging plant can be.

Although purslane rarely grows taller than two inches, it can—and will!—quickly spread its fleshy, reddish-purple stems and paddle-shaped leaves over a large portion of one's garden. Which is probably just as well, since all above-ground parts of this iron- and calcium-rich semi-succulent are edible. (Harvest only the tender, growing tips, though, if you want to keep your purslane productive all summer long.)

The leaves or tips add a welcome and slightly acidic flavor to salads. In addition, the foliage is delectable either boiled or fried in butter with salt or pepper.

The texture of purslane is somewhat gooey or mucilaginous. If you find this disagreeable, try [1] dipping the plant In a beaten egg, [2] rolling it in a mixture of bread crumbs and flour, and then [3] frying the vegetable until it's brown. The glutinous quality of the leaves is rendered unnoticeable by the procedure. (I should add that this same "gooey" quality makes pussley a good substitute for okra in soups, sauces, and most any recipe calling for a thickener.)

You may wish to take advantage of purslane's rich yield of seeds—up to 50,000 per individual plant—for use in breads, biscuits, pancakes, etc. To collect the seeds, simply pick some plants before their pods have fully ripened, lay them out to dry for two weeks on a sheet of plastic film, thrash the dried pussley, and—finally—winnow out the myriad tiny, black seeds.

CURLED DOCK (Rumex crispus)

The docks are some of the hardiest, most widespread, most persistent weeds found anywhere. (Pull one out of the ground—if you can!— and you'll soon find that it's been replaced by two more.) And docks are found practically anywhere: alongside streams and roads and driveways, in pastures and vacant lots and gardens . . . in short, wherever you'd expect a weed to grow!

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