Be a weed eater, straight from your backyard

If you're a food gardener (and even if you aren't), I'm sure you've noticed that the plants you didn't plant are almost always the first to leap to life and start multiplying at the first hint of spring. You know the ones I'm talking about: chickweed, henbit, dandelions. Also cleavers (aka sticky weed) and wood sorrel (the cloverlike plants with the heart-shaped leaves).

During especially wet springs (remember when we used to have those?), a few sunny days is all that's needed for these annual and almost always assertive springtime guests to weave themselves into a stubborn green mat that can't be dislodged without a lot of serious yanking and whacking. However, with this spring's drought, the weeds in my yard have been mild-mannered, slow to grow and, consequently, easy to gather and eat in a mixed-greens salad or a fruit smoothie or a savory flan. Yes, I'm eating weeds. Or rather, I should say, I'm giving weeds in my yard a chance at the table. I don't want to eat just any old green thing that pops up out of the dirt. I'm in search of wild plants that are palatable, as well as edible.

The fact that my spring vegetable garden is still a not-quite-ready-to-harvest work in progress (following one of the Austin area's coldest winters ever) has made this month's foray into weed-eating all the more timely and interesting. Back in the days before H-E-Bs and Randalls, subsistence farmers made do with what they had and what they could forage during periods of uncooperative weather. But I bet they didn't eat henbit. Or if they did, I bet they ate all the chickweed, dandelions and wild sorrel first.

Hunting and gathering wild foods is nothing new, of course. In some corners of the world, it has remained a necessity. In our corner, though, the urge to live simply off the wild fruits of the land seems to ebb and flow depending on the priorities of each generation. At the moment, with interest in food safety, food quality, food democracy and food prices at a seemingly all-time high, it is perhaps no great surprise that passions (ancestral perhaps?) for wild foods and foraging are re-emerging. After all, wild foods are the freshest, most seasonal, least processed, most local, most natural foods imaginable. They're packed with vitamins and minerals, and you don't have to worry about how to recycle the package they came in. And they're free - unless of course you're having dinner at a fine-dining establishment where a passionate and creative chef is taking chickweed to places it's never been before. And if you should decide to fly to Copenhagen, Denmark, to dine at Noma, a small restaurant that recently won the world's best restaurant award from The Restaurant magazine, you can expect to drop more than a few extra dollars for an exotic meal of wild Nordic things. The menu there includes only foods native to the region; and the chef, René Redzepi, 32, often forages for the wild foods himself.

And finally, one last little tidbit that makes me smile: Foodies and food bloggers are rediscovering the 1960s and '70s work of wild food icon Euell Gibbons ("Stalking the Wild Asparagus"). They're quoting him in their wild food blogs and YouTube videos, and they're snapping up copies of his books. I like to imagine the spirit of the late Texan sitting on a stump in the Piney Woods, saying "See? I told you many parts of the pine tree are edible."

OK, enough about trends and such. This month of eating weeds has been enlightening and a lot of fun. When wild plant experts and master chroniclers Scooter Cheatham and Lynn Marshall introduced me to parietaria, a tiny-leafed, low-growing ground cover that tastes just like cucumber, I was thrilled. What an adorable little plant, and it's growing all by itself in a totally neglected, and unwatered, part of my yard. I also learned (again thanks to Cheatham and Marshall) that my yard contains two other edible leafy greens - wild lettuce and sow thistle - in addition to the tried-and-true dandelions. And thanks to herbalist Ellen Zimmerman, I actually drank a whole glass of icy green liquid made in part with sticky weed. Sticky weed is not likely to become my favorite wild edible, but I'm glad to know it's good for something besides sticking to my garden boots. And finally (thanks to master gardener and forager Amy Crowell), I learned that one of my favorite spring blooming native plants - spiderwort, or tradescantia - sports a flower that's just as tasty as it is beautiful.