Quackgrass, aka couchgrass, aka Elymus repens:
has long been my sworn foe. Only recently did I learn its roots and grains are edible.
Close up, quackgrass reminds me of corn: a tough central green stalk with leaf blades that fold away at intervals, sharp and fibrous.
(Aside: seriously, go look at a field of corn sometime, covering the edges of your vision to hide anything that might give you a sense of scale. Corn is grass. It's just mutantly large grass. It's grass that has been exposed to the green ooze in the Ninja Turtle movies. It's terrifying.)
But quackgrass doesn't root like corn. Corn stalks put out several shallow roots, grasping the dirt like mangroves. Quackgrass grows from long, rubbery white strings underground - its rhizomes. The rhizomes can be a meter long or more. My chickens will eat smaller pieces, but the long ones they leave lying on top of the soil.
Quackgrass is quick to part with its stems and leaves. They snap right off at ground level, making you think you've weeded. Nice try. The rhizome will send up a new set by breakfast. Of these meter-long roots, the plant only needs a couple centimeters' worth to start sending out new shoots again.
In this way, quackgrass reminds me of morels. The part that grabs our attention is actually least important to the organism. The organism has a whole life underground that we don't even think about. It's not about us, but it's everything to them.
I spent Sunday hunting morels on Ye Olde Family Farm - the place I grew up. Our forty acre forest plot pushes up some monster whites every year. I also spent some time ripping out garlic mustard.
I've described quackgrass as a colonizer before. One would think I'd appreciate it more for what we have in common. We're both the descendants of 17th century Europeans who decided the continent of North America was theirs for exploitation. Over the centuries, our ancestors shaped the terrain beyond recognition, and our generation is now impossible to get rid of. For all I know, quackgrass and my ancestors came over on the same boat.
I don't appreciate it more, but I do recognize it. And just like I don't know what I'd do with myself if I moved to Europe, I don't know what I'd do with myself if all the quackgrass vanished tomorrow. I'm too used to it.
I am somewhat less sentimental toward garlic mustard, aka Alliaria petiolata:
the incredible edible colonizer
Garlic mustard didn't get included in this year's "wait, you can eat that" because I already knew I could eat it. There are four quart bags of it blanched and frozen in my freezer now, awaiting winter soups and frittatas. I also knew it's categorized as an invasive species.
What I learned this year is that some invaders suck more than others.
Garlic mustard doesn't just grow rampantly, taking over whatever it occupies. It actually kills your soil.
Garlic mustard is a biennial. In its first year, it puts out leaves and not much else. This is fine. It's also when it tastes best.
In its second year, garlic mustard does two things. One is "make flowers" - little white four-petaled things, not terribly exciting. The other is to secrete chemicals that kill the fungal layer in the soil around it. This is how it scorches out the competition, so that its seeds can have a nice place to grow all to themselves.
This is like if you enrolled your child in a competitive kindergarten, but instead of giving your child attention and homework help and tutoring, you added a slow poison to the drinking water so all the other kids slowly withered away around your child.
I had planned to leave my garlic mustard up by the fence, until I learned it's poisoning the kindergarten. I can't install a food forest without a fungal layer. Full stop. Hence all the bags of it now in my freezer. I'll still pull and eat it each spring, but I don't have to cultivate it on my tiny one-tenth of an acre.
Here is a partial list of edible invasive species:
Eat the rich. Eat the colonizers.
(Not listed: dames'-rocket (Hesperis matronalis), which is honestly one of my favorites.)
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