Winnie Lustenader pauses as she walks through her back yard toward an area alongside her contemporary brick home. She wants to explore a small plot, not much bigger than a kiddie swimming pool, that she eventually plans to turn into a flower garden. But something has caught her eye.
Lustenader bends over and pulls a leafy green weed out of the grass, the bane of any homeowner who wants a lawn that looks like a country club fairway.
“I love this,” she says, biting off a piece of the weed and chewing it slowly before swallowing. “This is sour grass, or sheep sorrel. It’s great in salads.”
What appears to be clover is also flourishing in the grass. Lustenader picks some of it, too.
“This is wood sorrel,” she explains, “and my grandchildren are crazy about it. They’ll eat it all afternoon.”
By the time Lustenader, 76, a gregarious, self-taught master gardener, reaches the weed-strewn future flower garden, she feels the need to defend her approach to all that grows on her seven acres.
“What is a weed?” she asks. “A weed is something that grows where you don’t want it to grow. Flowers that reseed themselves are actually weeds.”
Lustenader’s approach to gardening and to eating is simple: Almost everything, with a few notable exceptions, such as poison ivy and herb Robert, a wild geranium, is edible. By her lights there are no weeds because whatever grows on her property is wanted, wherever it is.
Even stinging nettles are perfectly fine to eat, she insists.
There are nearly no limits to what is edible, Lustenader believes, as long as you are aware of what you are picking and eating. An organic gardener, she uses the uncultivated garden-to-be space alongside her home to illustrate the point. Where she hopes to grow flowers are slender, shin-high, grasslike weeds that most amateur gardeners would remove without hesitation. But this is lambs quarters, and there’s no reason to turn them into mulch, Lustenader says.
“Everybody pulls it, but it’s delicious,” she insists. “It’s almost like spinach, but it’s better than spinach.”
“Where it breaks is the tender part. This is the part to steam for your vegetable dish.” The purple-tinted leaves and tassel-like heads of green amaranth are also flourishing in this bed. The plant is a perennial, she explains — delicious when stir-fried in olive oil with onion and garlic.
Martha Griffin, a consumer horticulturist with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Albany County, N.Y., cautions people who bring plants into her office to be identified before eating them: What is the history of a plant? The plants themselves may not be harmful, but what about the soil they grew in? Were they near sewers, or septic systems? Has the lawn or garden been treated with chemicals?
“If they want to eat them, it’s their business,” Griffin says. “My only advice to anybody foraging is to have a good weed-identification book to make sure you know what you’re eating. I also urge people to consult the (American Medical Association’s) poisonous-plant book. Without those you’re really taking a big chance unnecessarily,” Griffin says.
“There are edible weeds, but whether you want to eat them or not is another story. Personally,” she adds, “I won’t eat ’em. In fact, I won’t touch ’em.”
