P.E.I. gardens serve up some surprising edible weeds, plants

While weeding your garden, you could be throwing out delicious salad ingredients, says a P.E.I. foraging enthusiast.

There are many edible plants that you've probably never heard of, but see all the time, according to JoDee Samuelson from Canoe Cove.

She took Lindsday Carroll from CBC Radio's Island Morning out on the fringes of her extensive garden, to see what was there to eat, and immediately found a plant called dock.

"It's a relative of burdock, which is a relative of rhubarb," she said. "These nice tender leaves, they're edible, I would say until they get that big, spiky, weedy brown shoot. So you just take any of these leaves, chop them up and they have a nice red stem down the middle.

"Chop them up in pieces and steam them, and if the water is turning brown, just throw away the water and steam them again. We've had them as like a green vegetable, like spinach." 

When asked how to distinguish dock from another plant with fairly large leaves, Samuelson had practical advice for the rookie forager:

"Go out with somebody who knows," she advised. "Look at pictures on the internet, it looks exactly like that."

It's not the easiest plant to pick in the garden though.

"You cannot pull it up by the roots, that's another thing that's so annoying, you have to dig it out," Samuelson explained. "The roots are tap roots, they're yellow and they go in all directions."

Plenty of recipes

"You can find recipes on the internet, you absolutely can. Just look up dock recipes and you'll come up with hundreds of them. There's even a website I think for dock," she said. "You could probably stir-fry them, and add garlic and mushrooms."

It didn't take Samuelson long to find another edible.

"Now right beside this, well that's fireweed. In many places you'll see fireweed in later summer," she said. "It's a beautiful pink flower on a stalk. They're too far gone now, but when they're just starting to come up through the ground, and they're just spikes, you just snap them off like asparagus."

But close by was something in season.

"Those bushes that are blooming right now? That's elder, elder bushes. The white flowers? Well, you can take some of those clumps and you put them in water with sugar, and you add a squeeze of lemon, something like that, and it turns into a champagne, elder flower champagne," said Samuelson. "Right now would be the time to harvest them, before they go to seed." 

Lots of different plants

She kept spying more and more common plants that had surprising uses.

"I see spruce buds!" Samuelson said excitedly. "I'm taking the little husk off, like a little peanut husk or fiddlehead husk, anything like that, and you chomp it up. It's kind of lemony, and it stays with you. Actually tonight, we're going to some friends' place, and I've got a pocket full of these. I'm going to stir-fry a little garlic, and I've got some chanterelles, put them in, stir-fry them a little bit, and then add these at the end."

Finally, it was time to get to perhaps the most common, and certainly the weed that has the worst image — the dandelion.

It's well-known for its uses, from dandelion wine to a green, and Samuelson has her share of recipes too.

"All right, so dandelions, just before they go to flower really, I think the leaves are still good. We put them in salad all the time, just eat them raw."

She also named daylilies, nasturtiums, aloe flowers, chickweed, sorrel and lamb's quarters as common edibles on the Island.

Of course, the most important advice relates to safety: Before eating anything in your yard, do some research, check with an expert or reference pictures online.

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