Weeds, Weeds, Glorious Weeds

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

I really don’t know how this happened. One moment, I’m skimming through the local on-line newspaper, shortly thereafter, I’m thinking about eating weeds.

The local paper has a gardening column, which was about garlic mustard this week. Garlic mustard is a common weed – you may well have some lurking about in your yard. It makes a tallish, tapering plant with white flowers, and it comes up pretty easily – not like that scoundrel goutweed.

Well. It turns out that the Brooklyn Botanical Garden says that garlic mustard is edible, and offers up a recipe for pesto. I don’t really think I’m going to be making that anytime soon, but one thing led to another, and I discovered that the heinous goutweed is also edible. Who knew? In short order, I found a recipe for goutweed soup, and a whole section of Wildman Steve Brill’s book includes recipes using goutweed (though they’re a little suspect, like garlic “butter” with no butter in sight and “hollandaise” made with tofu and lecithin). I’m not even touching on the “medicinal” uses for goutweed, but do note that the name includes “gout”.

So tell me, those of you overrun with goutweed and/or garlic mustard, would you eat it?