Wild Chickweed: How to ID Harvest and Use as Food or Medicine (With Scott Sexton)

If you have just the right climate or microclimate, you can grow chickweed year round. If you’ve got cool pleasant weather, you probably have chickweed. You’re likely to find chickweed growing in yards, gardens, pastures, along the edges of paths. It likes rich moist soil and it doesn’t seem too particular about sunlight and it must really like people too because it really grows around us. With a lot of wild edibles, you’ll have to contend with a certain amount of bitterness. Remember back talking about the dandelions, oh my goodness. But chickweed has this pleasant mild taste and it’s a really nice plant to start with if you’ve got someone who’s new to foraging.

The taste is comparable to say lettuce or corn silk or maybe a snap pea. It’s also very nutritious as have been all the others. Chickweed is a really good source of beta carotene, ascorbic acid, magnesium, niacin, calcium, riboflavin, selenium, thiamin, copper, and gamma-linolenic acid. It also has more iron, zinc, and potassium than any of the traditional garden greens that you’ll be growing. It can be used in say salads, soups, really almost anywhere that you want something green. It’s just it’s a really light and polite plant. It doesn’t want to stir anything up or cause any problems.

It’ll just fit in anywhere. And this is another one that I think makes an excellent pizza topping in my humble opinion. Oh, and I love me some hot, crispy, chickweed fritters. This is one you ought to try. To make these, you want to mix up some freshly-wrenched chickweed with some flour, salt, and pepper. Then form that into patties and you can fry it in coconut oil or whatever oil you like until they are golden brown. Then remove the patties onto a wire rack where they can drain for a minute or two. But they’re best when they’re still hot, so don’t wait too long.

And don’t forget about that honey mustard or barbecue dipping sauce. Delicious. You’re going to be craving chickweed. You’re going to have to tell the kids to slow down harvesting it because they’re going to pick too much of it because it’s so delicious. Okay, here’s how you identify common chickweed. Chickweed is a thin-stemmed plant with small opposite leaves, about a quarter to a half an inch. The leaves can vary a bit in shape, but they’re usually oval and they’ll always have a tiny point at the tips. This is usually a small plant, but the stems can grow over a foot long in ideal conditions.

The sap is not milky, so if you pick a stem and you discover white sap, that’s not chickweed. The bloom is white and it has five deeply notched petals. They’re so deeply notched that it’s going to look like ten petals. But if you’ve got a little magnifying lens, you would see that it is, in fact, five. They’re sort of like five rabbit ears. There are two more features you need to look for to be sure that you have the right plant. One is a single line of hairs growing down the stem. So just on one side of the stem, you’ll have one line of hairs, and then that line is going to switch sides after every pair of leaves.

Now, these hairs are tiny and you may need a magnifying glass to see them, or you may be able to hold it up to the light and see it silhouetted in the light. The other key feature is an inner core, and this one takes a little practice, but if you bend the stem back and forth and twist it carefully, you can break the outer stem, revealing a somewhat elastic inner stem. So if you find a plant with all of these features, you can be sure that you have found chickweed. All of the above ground parts are edible.

On the younger plant, the entire stem is tender and desirable. However, as they age, the lower stem becomes tough and stringy. You can chop them up to cheat a little, but you’ll probably be happier just cutting off the last two or three inches toward the growing tips. Chickweed has some wound healing, soothing, and cooling properties. It can also be used internally and externally, and it’s digestive aid helping to relieve excess gas in the intestinal tract, too. So this plant, too, has some really nifty medicinal qualities as well as edible ones. Well, that about wraps up my presentation.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at these five super nutritious, wild and weedy plants, and I hope you’ll be encouraged to give them a try in some of your meals. If you’re interested in more, I write for the grownetwork.com where I’ve got several articles on foraging, and I’ve got a Facebook group called Forager’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse where I present information on a variety of edible and medicinal wild plants. I’d love to see you at either one or both. Thanks for watching. [tr:trw].