American Burnweed

 

A plant trying to invoke squatter's rights in a potted raspberry, the nerve!

Here is a small one coming up in the cracks between asphalt and a building.

 

 

Common Name: American Burnweed

 

Other Common Names: Fireweed, Pilewort.

 

Botanical Family: Asteraceae (The Aster Family)

 

Botanical Latin Name: Erechtites hieraciifolius

 

Description & Habitat:  American Burnweed is a fast-growing annual plant in the Aster family. It can be easily found in almost any area with disturbed soil or habitat. Commonly you will find it by the roadside, in pastures, yards, and vacant lots. This plant will even attempt to colonize in potted plants, and may appear between the cracks in asphalt and concrete if there is enough moisture or viable soil. A large glut of these plants may occur after land clearing because competition is reduced. Also this plant tends to appear in areas with Beaver activity.  As its name suggests American Burnweed is native to the Americas but, due to its ‘weedy’ nature and reproduction rate it is not recommended as a cultivated plant for gardens. Immature plants will have oval shaped leaves while more mature ones can be lobed and somewhat resemble Sowthistles or other plants often mistaken for Dandelions. In a single growing season an American Burnweed plant can easily reach ten feet tall. A useful identification feature is that when crushed all parts of this plant are aromatic. American Burnweed may have gotten its name from the fact that it is one of the earliest pioneer species that emerge after an area has recently burned. Its flowers are pollenated mainly by wasps but also Honey Bees.

 

When & What to Harvest: The leaves, flowers and young stems of this plant are edible in raw or cooks form but it is wise top harvest and use these early because they will become bitter with age.

 

Poisonous Lookalikes: None are known.

 

Related Edible Species: This information is unclear.

 

Recipe: The only credible recipes I could find for this imply a raw salad of some sort or another. An article on Gardenista had some interesting ideas, please take a look:

 

https://www.gardenista.com/posts/american-burnweed-recipes/

 

 

 

With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but my booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog.  In addition to being able to process card payments we now take CashApp payments so your payment options for my product have tripled. With that said; if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic fruit, herbs, flowers and perennials, come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 8:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.

 

 

For those of you wondering what plants are going to be at the market this weekend here is the list.

 

>>I will not be at the Fayetteville City Market this weekend; I will be at the Plant Swap at the Smith Recreation center instead. The plant swap is from 12:00 to 3:00pm and is located in the Smith Recreation Center on 1520 Slater Avenue, that’s right next to Fayetteville State University.

 

Spring Vegetable Plants

Kale – Kalebration Mix

Swiss Chard – Ruby Red

 

Summer Vegetable Plants (NEW!)

Tomato – Sweet 100

Tomato – Chocolate Cherry

Tomato – Black Krim

Tomato – Paul Robeson

Pepper – Habanero

Pepper – Ancho/Poblano

Pepper – Sweet Banana

Pepper – Carolina Wonder

 

Herbs (New!)

Hoan Ngoc

Eucalyptus

 

Garden Plants

Daylilies

Walking Iris

 

Coming Soon:

Garlic Plants

 

 

How to stay in Contact with Us!

Our group’s online presence has migrated to Nextdoor.com. All you need to keep up with all our activities is to have a Nextdoor account and to look for the ‘Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville’ group and ask to join! You don’t have to live in Fayetteville to join us! Feel free to ask all your garden questions of our knowledgeable membership and post your cool garden pictures.

 

Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville

 

Also please take a gander at the YouTube version of this blog:

The Videos: Look Here

>Newest videos (2): Lupine, Bear’s Breeches (Short Video)

 

Meetings are still going on! We now meet at LeClair’s General Store on the First and Third Thursday of every month. Our next (unofficial) meeting is on April 13^th, between at the Plant Swap at Smith Recreation center between the hours of 12:00 and 3:00pm. The address is 1520 Slater Avenue, Fayetteville NC.

Tall Lettuce

Welcome to the 2024 edition of the LITFM blog.  This blog is the text-based complement to my weekly posts on Nextdoor.com and the gardening channel on YouTube. In 2023, this blog took on a more formal instructional tone with jokes dispersed within to serve as a hub for conveying information that might not work in a video or weekly update format. The subject matter here is always the wide variety of plant-based foods that you can find growing around you in nature or as some call it ‘Forage Foods’. This ties in with local bartering, and indirectly now we will be including mycology. The primary reason for the change in the blog’s tone and topic came about due to the events of the pandemic, the resulting economic turmoil and other factors. The reality is that we are surrounded with perfectly edible plants that can fill at least some of the void in our dietary needs. There is no reason not to be educated in what is and is not safe and how to prepare it into a nutritious meal. With that said I also realized that in my own way by keeping this blog running I might be butting heads with a billion-dollar pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer industry at times. It has always been in the interest of that industry to label certain things ‘weeds’ so they can sell you product that as time goes by we find out is worse for your health than the weeds are. Coupled with an Agricultural-Education system that peddles the myths of the industry and the old myth that if you can afford a nice lawn you must have wealth we have a population that has been fooled for a long time. So, here we are in 2024, and the forage foods series will continue. I hope all of you who read this blog find the information useful or at least thought provoking. The ‘weeds’ I am listing a certainly found in Zone 8A in North Carolina and should certainly be easy to find in the Southeast regions of America.  Thank you for sticking with LITFM and stay tuned for a year of forage foods.

 

 

Up close and personal, this is a first year Tall Lettuce plant.

As you can see, a first year and a second-year Tall Lettuce are growing next to my Bears Breeches, I'm ok with this as they bring more of the pollinators to my yard.

These are the emerging flowers of a Second-Year Tall Lettuce plant. They will be hosting aphids soon.

 

 

 

Common Name: Tall Lettuce

 

Other Common Names: Wild Lettuce, Canada Lettuce.

 

Botanical Family: Asteraceae (The Aster Family)

 

Botanical Latin Name: Lactuca canadensis

 

Description & Habitat:  Tall lettuce’s native range is unclear though current information suggests it is probably a North American native biennial. It is differentiated from Prickly Lettuce (Lactuca serriola) by a lack of hairs and prickly protrusions on its leaves and stems. This plant will form a large tap root and in its first year just a simple rosette of leaves that resemble those of the Common Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale). In the second year these plants will rapidly gain height and can be up to 6.5 feet tall. These edible plants can be naturally found in disturbed areas, by the roadside, in pastures and open woods but also will appear in yards and areas where mowing isn’t frequent or thorough. Occasionally as with the ones pictured in this blog post they will recur in a specific place in a yard year after year as if perennial. Individual plants in the vegetative and flowering state may be packed together on a small area of ideal soil. The flowers of Tall Lettuce will often remain closed on cloudy days which can be used as a weather indicator of possible precipitation or weather change. The flowers are yellow-orange in color and may turn purplish with age.

 

When & What to Harvest: Just like its cousin Prickly Lettuce, it is really only at its best when you harvest and use the younger leaves and preferably earlier in the spring or late winter. Ideally you want to pick leaves when the plant is less than a foot tall for best results. The flowers are useful for making a version of Dandelion Wine.

 

Poisonous Lookalikes: None known.

 

Related Edible Species: Prickly Lettuce (L. serriola).

 

Recipe:

You can use the greens by themselves or mixed with other forage greens in salads. As a cooked vegetable you can boil the leaves in a small amount of water for about 2 to 5 minutes and then serve with seasonings such as garlic, salt and butter. These leaves also pair well with crumbled feta, bacon if served cooked but in raw form and a robust Italian salad dressing does wonders for them especially with black olives and parmesan.

 

 

With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but my booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog.  In addition to being able to process card payments we now take CashApp payments so your payment options for my product have tripled. With that said; if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic fruit, herbs, flowers and perennials, come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 8:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.

 

 

For those of you wondering what plants are going to be at the market this weekend here is the list.

 

Spring Vegetable Plants

Arugula – Astro

Kale – Kalebration Mix

Swiss Chard – Ruby Red

 

Summer Vegetable Plants (NEW!)

Tomato – Sweet 100

Tomato – Chocolate Cherry

Tomato – Black Krim

Pepper – Habanero

Pepper – Ancho/Poblano

Pepper – Sweet Banana

Pepper – Carolina Wonder

 

Herbs (New!)

Hoan Ngoc

Eucalyptus

 

Garden Plants

Daylilies

Walking Iris

 

Coming Soon:

Garlic Plants

 

 

How to stay in Contact with Us!

Our group’s online presence has migrated to Nextdoor.com. All you need to keep up with all our activities is to have a Nextdoor account and to look for the ‘Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville’ group and ask to join! You don’t have to live in Fayetteville to join us! Feel free to ask all your garden questions of our knowledgeable membership and post your cool garden pictures.

 

Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville

 

Also please take a gander at the YouTube version of this blog:

The Videos: Look Here

>Newest videos (2): Wood Hyacinth, Blueberries (short video)

 

Meetings are still going on! We now meet at LeClair’s General Store on the First and Third Thursday of every month. Our next meeting is on April 4^th, between 5:30pm and 7:00pm. We are in the back room so come on in and join us for a fun garden chat.

 

Hare-Foot Plantain

Welcome to the 2024 edition of the LITFM blog.  This blog is the text-based complement to my weekly posts on Nextdoor.com and the gardening channel on YouTube. In 2023, this blog took on a more formal instructional tone with jokes dispersed within to serve as a hub for conveying information that might not work in a video or weekly update format. The subject matter here is always the wide variety of plant-based foods that you can find growing around you in nature or as some call it ‘Forage Foods’. This ties in with local bartering, and indirectly now we will be including mycology. The primary reason for the change in the blog’s tone and topic came about due to the events of the pandemic, the resulting economic turmoil and other factors. The reality is that we are surrounded with perfectly edible plants that can fill at least some of the void in our dietary needs. There is no reason not to be educated in what is and is not safe and how to prepare it into a nutritious meal. With that said I also realized that in my own way by keeping this blog running I might be butting heads with a billion-dollar pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer industry at times. It has always been in the interest of that industry to label certain things ‘weeds’ so they can sell you product that as time goes by we find out is worse for your health than the weeds are. Coupled with an Agricultural-Education system that peddles the myths of the industry and the old myth that if you can afford a nice lawn you must have wealth we have a population that has been fooled for a long time. So, here we are in 2024, and the forage foods series will continue. I hope all of you who read this blog find the information useful or at least thought provoking. The ‘weeds’ I am listing a certainly found in Zone 8A in North Carolina and should certainly be easy to find in the Southeast regions of America.  Thank you for sticking with LITFM and stay tuned for a year of forage foods.

 

 

 

Hare-Foot Plantain seems to be best known for it's long flower stalks and almost fussy-grey looking spent flower clusters. It's interchangeable in use with other members of the Plantago species.

 

 

Common Name: Hare Foot Plantain

 

Other Common Names: Round-head Plantain.

 

Botanical Family: Plantaginaceae (The Plantain Family)

 

Botanical Latin Name: Plantago lagopus

 

Description & Habitat:  To clear up possible confusion, the Plantains referenced here are not related to the Type of Bananas called Plantains (Musa sp.). Hare-Foot Plantain is native to South America and is an annual herb. You can find it in yards, vacant lots by the roadside, in disturbed sites. I found the pictured specimen in a grassy median off 1-95 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This specific species of Plantain does not mind sandy soils, and will appear in your lawn if the grass is not allowed to dominate.  Hare-foot Plantain is named such because it’s long flower stalks look like fuzzy little grey-green rabbit feet when the flowers are spent. The flowers do have pretty long stalks by plantain standards.

 

 

 

When & What to Harvest: The leaves have the same use against the itching and swelling of mosquito or flea bites and can relive the swelling and itchiness of wasp or bee stings. Leaves should be chewed into a sort of pulp and applied to the sting to get the relieving effect.

 

Poisonous Lookalikes: None known.

 

Related Edible Species: Broadleaf Plantain (Plantago major), Buckhorn Plantain (P.  lanceolata), Paleseed Plantain (P. virginica), Bracted Plantain (P. aristata), Wright’s Plantain (P. wrightiana).

 

 

Recipe:

 

Aside from using the seeds to make forage-flour, you can make a beverage from this plant as well as using it as a cooked vegetable.

 

Cooked Plantains

Soak washed leaves in salted water for about 5 to 7 minutes. Boil the leaves with just enough water to cover the leaves in a covered pot until they are tender but not overcooked. You can serve these greens with rice or on their own with just a dash of garlic like you might do with cooked spinach.

 

Plantain Tea

Steep a handful of washed fresh plantain leaves or an equivalent amount of dried and crumbled plantain leaves (2-4 tablespoons) in water that has been briefly brought to a boil. Steep the leaves for up to a half hour if dried or longer if fresh. Strain the leaves out and sweeten to taste, then drink at your preferred beverage temperature.

 

 

With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but my booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog.  In addition to being able to process card payments we now take CashApp payments so your payment options for my product have tripled. With that said; if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic fruit, herbs, flowers and perennials, come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 8:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.

 

 

For those of you wondering what plants are going to be at the market this weekend here is the list.

 

Spring Vegetable Plants

Arugula – Astro

Kale – Kalebration Mix

Swiss Chard – Ruby Red

 

Summer Vegetable Plants (NEW!)

Tomato – Sweet 100

Tomato – Chocolate Cherry

Tomato – Black Krim

Pepper – Habanero

Pepper – Ancho/Poblano

Pepper – Sweet Banana

Pepper – Carolina Wonder

 

Herbs (New!)

Hoan Ngoc

Eucalyptus

 

Garden Plants

Daylilies

Walking Iris

 

Coming Soon:

Garlic Plants

 

 

How to stay in Contact with Us!

Our group’s online presence has migrated to Nextdoor.com. All you need to keep up with all our activities is to have a Nextdoor account and to look for the ‘Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville’ group and ask to join! You don’t have to live in Fayetteville to join us! Feel free to ask all your garden questions of our knowledgeable membership and post your cool garden pictures.

 

Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville

 

Also please take a gander at the YouTube version of this blog:

The Videos: Look Here

>Newest videos (2): Wood Hyacinth, Blueberries (short video)

 

Meetings are still going on! We now meet at LeClair’s General Store on the First and Third Thursday of every month. Our next meeting is on April 4^th, between 5:30pm and 7:00pm. We are in the back room so come on in and join us for a fun garden chat.