Eat Your Weeds, Dear

As a Permaculture Designer, I find it quite ironic that upon becoming a much awaited homeowner with an attractive, though MASSIVELY overgrown property, I promptly make war on dandelions. My environmental leanings outright prohibit any herbicide stronger than boiling water; yet with small children running around and actually USING our lawn and with a very new veggie garden in the vicinity it seemed inappropriate (not to mention not very neighborly) to continue to allow these plants to take over. I once heard market gardener and farmer Eliot Coleman recite the wisdom to "never let a weed go to seed." So for the last month or so I have been doing just that: pulling up, prying out, plucking and harvesting every dandelion that I possibly can in our yard.

Now along comes a bit of a personal paradox. My environmental leanings also prohibit rampant waste. Well yes, I compost, but every sensible gardener will tell you that dumping a load of dandelion flowers or seeds in your compost bin is a dumb idea if you ever plan on using it. So, instead, I have been taking the seedy portion of my efforts to our municipal yard for them to compost (along with the invasive, thorny, poisonous plant part of our overgrown property), and composting the leafy portion myself. I am always looking for a way to take things one step further, and I have been kind of preoccupied with local food and food security lately as well. So I thought; along with my current efforts transforming our suburban yard into an organic food-bearing permaculture paradise, why not eat what is already there, why not eat what I am already harvesting? Ralph Waldo Emerson said it perfectly, "A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
So to make a long story shorter, my personal paradox combined with seeing dandelion greens for sale at the local health food store and with a need for experimental dinner recipes for our weekly php Tuesdays thing. Voila! Dandelion Panir Curry (or Saag Panir) was born. I do have to say that it wasn't a particularly successful experiment due to the bitterness of the plant (a factor which I may just be able to work out with boiling), but hey - we all ate it!

Four handy tips on dandelion consumption:

1. Pick the big leafy ones in the shade for eating, especially for salads. The small shriveled up ones growing in the compacted soil between you driveway and sidewalk had better be dealt with some other way.
2. Cut the midrib of the leaf off, at least near the bottom where it is thick. Its even more bitter than the rest of the leaf.
3. Mind where you get it from; animals frequently mark clumps of weeds and grass, and by the road or driveway can be quite polluted. Wherever you get them from, wash them well.
4. Visit Wikipedia for other dandelion uses and information and read this article (especially the part about managing away the bitterness) on "Making Dandelions More Palatable" by Dr. John Kallas.