Foraging for wild food and medicinal plants - Chickweed Plant Profile

While much greenery dies back in winter, there is plenty of food to forage from hedgerows and even unexpected parts of your garden. Christopher helps you to identify and use Chickweed

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Winter is a challenging time when it comes to food growing, so why not take advantage of what nature provides for free? More often than not, our hardy wild plants will offer us nutritionally-high greens for the salad bowl or cooking pot (often far higher than from plants generally grown or bought), and provide us with safe, effective medicine!

Hardy winter greens

When in the garden or plot at this time of year, the otherwise-ignored wild plants will grab our attention, and naturally so, because there is precious little other growth about. The simple aim of this article is for people to think thrice about ripping these gifts out of the ground and plonking them on the compost heap. For that would be a waste of the food and medicine on offer, as well your valuable time and energy. Not very permaculture!

One plant that you will almost certainly come across, is that most tenacious of cultivated weeds, little old chickweed. Yet not too many years ago, it would have been one of the plants that we turned to for food during the darker months.

Getting to know... Chickweed

Read more here.