Edible Lawn Weeds
Clover, Dandelion, Plantain and More Obscure Finds
There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of edible wild weeds out there, and honestly, it can be a bit overwhelming and intimidating when you start trying to learn them all.
I’ll admit, when I started foraging many years ago the myriad of tiny green (but potentially edible/useful) plants EVERYWHERE was incredibly overwhelming. How do you start when there are 10 species in one square foot of land?
I think a big game-changer is realizing that you don’t have to learn them all, and even if you want to…you don’t have to learn them all at once. Every year, or every month, or even every week, try to learn a few more in a specific area.
In my case, where and what I’m learning is always dominated by where my kids are at that particular time. When they were tiny babies, we took a lot of walks down a shady stretch of rail trail that runs near our house, and each time I tried to come home with a new plant under my belt.
That shady trail was perfect for things like wild ginger, jewelweed, wild violets, cucumber root, and fiddlehead ferns.
Most of the time it’d be something I’d read about, and then finally spotted in just the right stage of growth to recognize it. Other times, something would catch my eye and I’d snap a few photos and try to ID it when I got back home.
(These days, they have a nifty little app for that called inaturalist, and it’s shockingly accurate. I highly recommend it. It also works on desktop, and you can upload photos for ID even if you don’t have a smart device.)
When my kids reached the toddler phase, we were spending most of our time in the garden, stuffing strawberries into their mouths as fast as their chubby little baby fingers could manage. Once I explained that pulling weeds meant more fruit, they went to work annihilating anything that wasn’t a strawberry plant.
Until one day later in the summer, when my daughter asked just what she was pulling… I told her it was edible too. (Just not planted on purpose…)
We spend the rest of that summer going into edible garden weeds that absolutely love fertile soil and the disturbance that comes with sowing and harvesting. The lemon-y zing of wood sorrel, which is prolific in our garden, was one of her absolute favorites.
At the preschooler phase, they were all about sweet wild fruit…and we spent the summer identifying more than 50 species of edible wild fruit and berries. It’s crazy how often you find that fruits are edible, once you start looking up every single berry you pass out in the woods.
(Though there are still plenty of poisonous fruits, so obviously be certain on your ID.)
Now at 5 and 7 years old, my days are all about picnics and soccer, water balloon fights, and tag. Less time in the woods, but plenty of time in wide-open grassy spaces.
Now I find myself fascinated by the incredible diversity of life right there on the lawn.
My daughter’s picked up on the game and now stops mid-stride during water balloon battles to pluck new strange lawn flowers for me to ID. She knows, better than anything, how to make her mama smile.
Many of them are simple things that everyone knows and sees almost every day…things like clover, dandelions, and plantain. They’re easy to see in just about any grassy space, and the trick is knowing that they’re edible, tasty, useful and potentially even medicinal.
Others take a bit more work, and while they might be just as common, they’re not readily in our modern day-to-day vocabulary. Things like speedwell and heal all, which as their names suggest, were popular medicinals back in the day. Others like Ale Hoof (or ground ivy), which were used to make beer just 100 years ago.
Some are even escaped garden plants, that establish themselves in lawns and grow like weeds without a care in the world. Wild Asparagus isn’t really wild, it’s “feral” and escaped from somebody’s garden, with the seeds carried by birds for a few hundred feet (or a few hundred miles).
It’ll pop up anywhere that’s not mowed too often, and is fond of growing right around mailboxes and street signs, where it won’t get mowed down except for occasionally when the weed whacker comes out.
Other garden plants will establish themselves right alongside the wild weeds, and anyone that’s grown mint knows how weedy this plant can be. You can’t really control mint, and wild mint is one of the most vigorous plants alive.
Truly wild mint isn’t nearly as tasty as the garden varieties that have been selected for flavor, but no worries, those garden varieties are just as weedy. This stem of chocolate mint (or at least a very similar wild variety) is growing in the grass at the base of one of our cherry trees, battling it out with speedwell (tiny blue flowers) and dandelion.
I didn’t plant it, but it’s delicious just the same.
I spent much of this spring and early summer combing the grass, watching new plant life emerge. Many of them are plants I’ve seen dozens of times in foraging books, but I just had no idea they were so close at hand.
All of them are there, right under your feet, once you learn to see them.
This year, I’m slowly working through finding and identifying as many as possible, so that I can write about them next year.
While just there are literally hundreds of weeds that could grow on your lawn, I’m going to try to limit it to just the things that can handle mowing/grazing at least semi-regularly (every 2-3 weeks or so) up to regular mowing (every week, or multiple times per week).
If you mow less regularly, like every month or two, or you get into more old field-type weed species like goldenrod, chickory, and melilot, but I’ll save those for another time.
Not all of these will necessarily reach full form in a lawn, but things like mullein can hunker down and stay below the lawnmower for many years…waiting for a year of neglect to send up a tall flower stalk.
Here’s my list thus far, and I invite you to scour your lawn with me, and we’ll see what we can find together this summer:
Bugleweed (Ajuga sp.)
Chufa (Cyperus esculentus)
Cleavers/Bedstraw (Galium sp.)
Clover (Trifolium sp.)
Crabgrass (Digitaria sp.)
Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea)
Evening Primrose (Oenothera sp.)
Henbit (Lamium amplexicaule)
Horsetail (Equisetum sp.)
Mullein (Verbascum sp.)
Purple Dead Nettle (Lamium purpureum)
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)
Prosso Millet (Panicum miliaceum)
Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota)
Ryegrass (Elymus canadensis)
Sedge (Cyperaceae sp.)
Self Heal (Prunella vulgaris)
Speedwell (Veronica sp.)
Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica)
Violets (Viola sp.)
Wild Mustard (Sinapis arvensis)
Wild Mint (Mentha sp.)
Wild Oat (Avena sp.)
Wild Strawberry (Fragaria sp.)
Wood Sorrel (Oxalis sp.)
I hope to add at least half a dozen more species to the list but the time the summer’s out.
What have I missed? What’s growing in your lawn, park space, soccer field, or grassy knoll?
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance
Of my two garden locations - one in Shrewsbury, MA and the other in Wickford, RI, the RI site has sandy soil while Shrewsbury has clay soil. No purslane in Shrewsbury. Tons of it in RI! Good stuff!
Purslane! We have it growing as a weed in our gardens. Tastes like spinach and the leaves are thick so you've got some bulk when eating it. Fun fact! Thoreau ate purslane at Walden Pond and mentioned it in his book, On Walden Pond.