Our ancestors were using wild edible plants (weeds) for food and medicine tens of thousands of years before we began to domesticate the plants found in supermarkets today. Yes, many of the same weeds we see around us now have been accompanying us all that time.

We've developed domesticated plants for sweetness, appearance, volume, and keeping ability, and in the process we've bred all the vigour and tenacity out of them. Wild edibles, in contrast, are still wild and complex and full of real nutrition -- vitamins, minerals, and healing compounds that our bodies can easily absorb and that no supermarket shelf or bottle of pills can ever provide -- and weeds are free!

This post lists some edible weeds that you're likely very familiar with¹ and some of their uses as food and medicine. It's intended as a prompt to get to know the weeds around you, but not as advice or instruction.

Please take full responsibility for being certain about the identity and uses of any plant you forage. Unless you are learning in person from someone who is eating the plant in question (or using it as medicine), always, always check the scientific name (the long fancy name usually in brackets and italics) because common names are confusing and unreliable.

Look at images of weeds on the internet, read herbal books, or best of all find local guides who can teach you in person -- and help yourself to the wild abundance that is all around us when we know how to recognise it.

When you harvest, remember to pause for a moment and silently or out loud give thanks to the wild plants and to the land, air, and water that nourishes them so that they in turn can nourish you.

Dandelion

(This section is a partial excerpt from my ebook, One Small Serve.)

We're starting with a superstar of wild nourishment - Dandelion. Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) have probably been used by humans for food and and medicine since before humans were a thing (fossil records indicate that they're around 30 million years old²). In recorded history, dandelions are known to have been used by ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, in traditional Chinese medicine, and by Native Americans.

Every part of the dandelion plant is edible and and safely medicinal, incredibly rich in a wide range of minerals, vitamins, and health supporting constituents. Even the bitter taste of dandelion leaves offers a cascade of health benefits. 

Eat young dandelion leaves and flowers in salads; add older leaves to any cooked dish that calls for leafy greens. They're less bitter before the plant flowers. Prepare the roots like any root vegetable.

Cover a handful of dandelion flowers with boiling water, add honey (optional) and enjoy. (Regular use may help with headaches, menstrual cramps, backaches, stomach aches, and feelings of depression.)

On your way home from work, collect a handful of dandelion leaves. Chop and cover them with your choice of wine or boiling water. Drink before your evening meal, for digestion and liver support and lots of other health benefits.

Purslane

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is native to Australasia, North Africa, the Middle East, and India, and has now spread around the world.

Early Australian settlers learned from the First Australians to use the juicy leaves of purslane, which they called "munyeroo," in salads and as a cooked green. The seeds are also edible.

Purslane is high in Vitamins A and C, iron,calcium, potassium, and magnesium.It's also high in omega-3s, important essential fatty acids that are relatively hard to come by in modern diets.

Plantain

Plantains are a common weed of lawns, driveways, parks, and playgrounds around the world.

There are many species, but the most commonly used are broad leafed plantain - Plantago major and narrow leafed plantain -Plantago lanceoloata.

In the top image above you can see a mature narrow leafed plant with the young leaves of broad leafed plantain towards the bottom of the pic. The next image shows mature broad leafed plantain with the distinctive seed heads, which look the same for both. 

Note that in both varieties, the veins run parallel in the leaf, rather than branching. This is a reliable way to identify plantain.

Eat the leaves in salads, steamed, in dips, soups, quiche, or pesto. The immature flower stalks are edible, either raw or steamed, and so are the small seeds.

Fresh plantain leaves can be crushed and applied to wounds, sores, insect bites, stings, eczema, and sunburn to stop bleeding and relieve pain or itching.

To make a fresh plantain spit poultice: pick a leaf, chew it well and apply as needed. Softening the leaves in boiling water works too, but is much less convenient.

Chickweed

Chickweed (Stellaria media) has been used by people as an edible and medicinal plant since at least the Middle Ages. It's originally native to Eurasia and has now naturalized throughout the world as a weed of waste ground, farmland and gardens. It likes shaded, moist conditions.

You can eat the leaves, stems, and flowers of chickweed, but not the roots. It makes lovely salads -- just harvest, chop, and add salad dressing.

Chickweed is high in chlorophyll, calcium, magnesium, manganese, zinc, iron, phosphorus, potassium, vitamins C and A, folic acid, riboflavin, niacin, and thiamine.

It stimulates digestion and metabolism and has a strengthening, anti-inflammatory, diuretic, and detoxifying effect.

Chickweed also contains something called saponins, which increase the permeability of cell membranes - meaning that it can increase our ability to absorb nutrients, especially minerals, from whatever we're eating.

(Chickweed is another plant I cover in One Small Serve.)

Cobblers Pegs

Cobbler's pegs (Bindens pilosa) -- a pain in the butt, right, to have to pick them out of your clothes? Perhaps the more a plant persists in following us around, the more likely it has something to offer us.

Cobblers pegs are originally native to the Americas but are now widely distributed around the world. They're a weed of gardens, parks, crops, pastures, roadsides, disturbed sites, waste areas, waterways, and the exposed margins of bushland and forest. They're regarded as an environmental weed in New South Wales and Queensland.

The leaves of cobblers pegs are edible -- eat them raw in small quantities, add them freely to cooked dishes, dry them and make tea. They're a good source of chlorophyll, vitamin C, calcium, iron, potassium, and magnesium. They're also high in tannins, which may be helpful for digestive and respiratory upsets.

Research has turned up a long list of ailments that cobblers pegs can help us with, including toothache, allergies, fevers, food poisoning, and many others.

Amaranth

Amaranths (Genus: Amaranthus; the scientific name will be "Amaranthus something or Amaranthum something") are native to tropical regions, but because their abundant seeds can survive cold winters and sprout in the spring they have spread to many other parts of world.

Amaranths are common weeds in gardens, along roadsides, and in gateways, and there are also decorative ones, bred for their showy flowers.

Search the internet for images of amaranth and you'll see there are many, many varieties, from very weedy to very ornamental. Once you've looked at lots of amaranth pictures and started to pick them out in your environment, you'll see the similarities that they all have -- it just takes a bit of practice. All are edible, but watch out for the spiky ones! 

The image at the top of this post is an amaranth flower stalk; the image above is of amaranth in our garden. 

Throughout the spring and summer months I add amaranth leaves and stem tips including the flowers/seed heads to any cooked dish calling for leafy greens. Young amaranth seedlings may come up thickly enough to harvest by the handful -- chop and then lightly steam or stir-fry.

Do cook your amaranth -- it's high in oxalic acid which you don't want to be ingesting lots of; cooking reduces it substantially.

And yes -- the amaranth "grain" (it's actually a seed) in fancy packets in the health food store --comes from these same plants. Amaranth seeds are very nutritious but also very small, so I just collect entire seed heads and chop them into dishes along with all the other amaranth parts. 

If you do want to harvest only the seeds, shake the dry seed head over something to catch the seeds.

Sources

The information and tips in this post have been sourced from the following resources (as well as personal experience):

Healing Wise - Wise Woman Herbal by Susun Weed, 

How Can I Be Prepared With Self-Sufficiency And Survival Foods? by Queensland Herbalist Isabell Shipard

Wild Food Forager Diego Bonetto

Related posts

Weeds: Real Nutrition, for Free

What's Happened to Your Mineral Intake?

Easy, Natural Ways to Increase the Available Minerals in Your Diet

Bitter Greens: a Cascade of Health Benefits

Aloe vera* is so easy to grow and so helpful** when you need it that having some growing somewhere in your garden or in a pot is an absolute no-brainer.  Thankfully we haven't needed it often, but the times we have needed it I've been so grateful to have fresh aloe vera leaves on hand to treat burns at home. 

Below you'll find a story, mostly told in pictures, of a nasty chemical burn and how fresh aloe vera came to the rescue***.

*Preferred Scientific Name: Aloe vera (L.) Burm.f. 

Also known as Aloe barbadensis Miller. If you want to geek out on Aloe vera's names, go here and here. 

**Aloe has a long list of uses, but I'm sticking to burns in this post.

***Please read the disclaimer at the bottom of this post. 

Get me some fresh aloe vera leaves!

Some time ago Alain encountered a chemical spill under a machine he was fixing; the result was a nasty burn on his shoulder. 

Alain is generally a stoic person, but this was intense. There's no way around it - burns are painful.

It took a few seconds for my brain to kick into gear: "Ouch. Burn. Oh boy, bad burn."

Long, painful pause, and then, "Oh, I know -- aloe vera!!" 

"KIDS!! GO GET ME SOME ALOE LEAVES!!"

(Actually, the first action should have been to run cool water on it for as long as Alain would have been willing to stand under a cool shower, but this was now several hours after the burn had happened and I wasn't sure if that was still relevant. )

So the kids came back with some aloe leaves and I got busy extracting the cooling, healing gel from inside them.

Before we go on, there is one caution to be aware of with extracting gel yourself from fresh aloe vera leaves: avoid the sap just under the skin. 

Aloe vera leaves have a thick green outer skin, then a very thin layer of bitter, sometimes yellow-ish sap, then the clear inner flesh that contains the gel. It's the flesh and gel we're after. The sap can sting or burn, so we want to avoid that. Sometimes you can see the sap just inside the skin clearly and sometimes you can't, but to be on the safe side I stay well away from the skin when I extract the gel. 

Here's how I do it.

Getting the gel out of the aloe vera leaf

Step 1 - slicing off the prickly edges of the leaf...

Next, I slice off the skin from the concave side of the leaf...

Step 3 is to lay the leaf down on a firm surface and scoop/slice the gel off. I use a spoon. With care, you can lift off a long slimy layer...

Applying the gel to the burn

The next thing is to get that slippery stuff onto the burn somehow. In this instance I laid strips of peeled aloe flesh on the burn and slid them across, leaving a layer of slime behind...

Alain found the sliding part acutely painful (which is saying quite a lot given his tolerance level) but as soon as I stopped that, the gel gave immediate relief. 

NOTE: if you can get the patient to sit or lie still in an appropriate position, a better option than what I did here is to lay the strips of aloe flesh directly on the burn and leave them undisturbed until the pain returns, then replace them with fresh ones. Continue to replace them until the pain stops. (Read more about this in the related burn story below.)

The downside of laying strips of aloe flesh on the burn is that it does require the person to be still, or for you to find a way to hold the strips in place while they move around. And you will need to change them frequently until the pain eases. 

The gel seems to form a protective film over the burn (later, I read about this and confirmed it for myself -- but I neglected to keep the link to the resource I read, and now I cant find it again. Sorry.)

Comparing the pictures below, the shine you see in the second one is the protective film. 

When the gel was completely dry, we gingerly put a clean shirt on over it. As I said, Alain is a very stoic person. Off he went, back outside to his afternoon jobs. He said the shirt was uncomfortable, but tolerable. 

Fresh aloe vera gel can facilitate rapid healing of burns

The burn happened on a Friday. We applied aloe gel for the first time that afternoon, then repeated it 3 times per day over the weekend. The result was really rather amazing. This is what it looked like on Sunday afternoon

Once the work week started again, the aloe vera applications dropped to once per day. This is what the burn looked like on the following Wednesday afternoon... 

And on the following Sunday, 9 days after the burn occurred... 

Fears and doubts...

I'm not gonna lie. As much as I advocate for building self-reliance, re-learning what our grandparents knew about home health care, and turning first to what's in your kitchen, your garden, and your neighbourhood rather than to pharmaceuticals, I had doubts when I saw this burn.  

I feared that A, I wouldn't be able to keep it clean enough and there would be a risk of infection, and that B, we would need high tech dressings to keep it comfortable.

Thankfully, I was wrong on both counts. A foundation of good health, basic hygiene, and a willingness to have a go at taking care of it ourselves paid off.

There are also herbs that would have protected against infection, or countered it if it started, but thankfully we didn't have to go there. As you can see from the pictures, the burn healed rapidly and without complications. 

Another aloe vera burn healing story

This is the second significant burn we've treated at home like this. The other one happened years ago - I was pouring rendered fat into a glass jar that broke, sending hot fat sploshing all over the counter top and onto my upper legs. (Since then, when pouring hot fat into jars, I place the jar inside a stainless steel bowl or in the sink - so if the jar cracks the fat can't go anywhere. Duh.)

On that occasion I sat outside the back door running cool water from the garden hose onto my upper legs. I sat there for a long time, because whenever I stopped the water, the pain started -- and it was intense.

When it got dark and too cold to continue the running water, I came inside and laid peeled strips of aloe vera flesh on the burns, which I found (to my great relief) was as cooling and soothing as the water had been (in hindsight I could have done this a lot sooner).

I left the strips lying in place until they were no longer giving relief (it felt as if the aloe strips were pulling heat out of my legs and once they were all warmed up, the pain would come back), and kept replacing them with fresh ones until the pain stayed away when I removed them.

Over the following days I kept applying aloe vera gel several times per day and those large, dramatic burns on the fronts of my thighs first blistered dramatically, then healed quickly and with no scarring.

Serious burns are serious business - don't take them lightly

Serious burns are serious business for a range of reasons, including the risk of unseen damage below the skin layers, the risk of infection, and the risk of severe scarring that may limit movement after healing.

As you know, medical professionals grade burns and call them first, second, third, or even fourth degree burns depending on their severity -- and these grades can be difficult to judge and may change as time progresses after the burn occurs. So don't treat large or severe burns lightly. 

Only you can decide if/when you need to reach out to the professionals -- and yes, I wrote a disclaimer for this post, which you can read below if that's your jam. 

High tech medicine vs home-based medicine

Modern medicine can save lives and repair broken bodies when there's been an acute crisis. 

But to build or restore a deep, abiding foundation of health, you need a simpler, slower, deeper, close-to-home kind of medicine.

It's been estimated that over 90% of healthcare given world wide is given by women in their own homes, with the use of what we might call "kitchen remedies."³

Home-based medicine is the remedies of mamas and papas and community healers, passed down by grandparents or preserved in books and websites, remedies we can use to care for ourselves and each other within the home and within the local biome and ecosystem.

Kitchen remedies don't look like medicine if we've been conditioned to think of "medicine" as coming from a pill, capsule, or syringe; as being administered by doctors who know better than we do because of their education and qualifications⁴; and as being fast, dramatic and "drug-like" in its effect.

Home remedies fit in with the Permaculture principle of "use small and slow solutions" - they're small scale and they may work slowly (although I've also experienced and seen rapid responses to simple medicines). 

Home remedies are super-local, unique to the place and the family/community. They are not profitable. And they do no harm; there are no side effects except positive ones.

In my opinion, home remedies also might include things like rest, safety and security, optimum nutrition, and warm, caring relationships.

I guess my point is that while home-based health care may directly address a specific injury or illness, it does so without undermining health. It builds overall health by nourishing and caring for body, mind, and spirit, and by simultaneously tending to the relationships and the web of life that sustains us.

More posts that explore this topic of "high tech vs home-based medicine"

"The Dominant Healthcare Approach vs Marginalized Alternatives"

"Two Different Kinds of Healthcare - Part 1"

"Two Different Kinds of Healthcare - Part 2"

"Let's Choose a More Empowering Story"

"The People's Medicine"

"Expanding on the Grandmother Effect"

Disclaimer

I know. I agree. I hold space in my mind and heart for the possibility of a world in which we wouldn't have to write disclaimers for everything. 

But for now, here it is:

Use this information and these ideas at your own risk. Do your own research. You are most welcome to use my stories as part of your research and decision making process, AND I take no responsibility for the results of your choices and your actions or inaction.

Which leads me to comment, lastly, on risk taking...

On risk taking

In a recent post on their travels, Patrick and Meg of Artist as Family wrote,

I completely agree. I think a little self-reliance and risk-taking build our capacity to make wiser choices, to be more effective decision makers, and to live in more values-based ways.