Backyard Greens
/My backyard greens are ready to eat! I won’t be buying arugula or spinach again until the late fall. Since I don’t put any chemicals on my yard – they are safe to harvest/eat just before I need them.
Right now, the dandelions are full of blooms and I pick mostly flowers – although there are a few leaves too. I generally use them in stir fry since cooking reduces the bitterness of the leaves. The flowers are tasty cooked or fresh!
I use violet leaves like arugula. The flowers are edible – but only available in the spring. They are easy to harvest and seem to replenish themselves quickly. The violet patch has gotten bigger each year we have lived in our house – once I stopped mowing the area where they were spilling out of the flowerbed. They will be the ‘carpet’ under the American Spikenard and the small Red Buckeye and pawpaw and spicebush.
The dandelions are not native…but they are attractive to pollinators and their roots are deep – they hold the soil. So – I am OK with them in my yard. The violets are native and I am encouraging them to grow as far out into the yard as they want. They have taken over about a third of the yard area on the east side of the house; there they get morning sun but once the neighbor’s River Birch gets its leaves the area get less sun even in the morning; the violets thrive in that environment!
I am enjoying the green bounty of my backyard!
