I’m coming to believe more strongly every year that foraging is an excellent idea for someone interested in localized gardening and/or plant breeding. When you find an edible weed that tastes good in your neighborhood, that is a giant hint.
You may want to look at crops that are in the same plant family. (Hoary cress and kale.)
You may want to look at crops that aren’t closely related, but which grow in the same way as a highly successful weed. (Star of Bethlehem, which is inedible and extremely invasive in my yard, has the same growth pattern as garlic. I took this as a giant hint and planted garlic everywhere last fall. It’s doing great.)
That may give you a hint of things you can grow easily with no care in your climate.
In breeding, you may try crossing the weed with a domesticated species in the same genus and see what you get. You may just start selecting the wild species itself. That may be an uphill battle, because your population will likely keep breeding with the wild forms around you, but that may not be a bad thing. A somewhat-selected population with less spiciness, more flavor, earlier flowering, or whatever else you value? Maybe it’ll be your new favorite plant.
Here are a few examples in my climate.
Hoary cress:
This is a “terrible invasive weed” . . . and it is, because it’s a perennial with deep roots that spread into huge colonies and grow back every year. However, that means it has the same growth habit as bindweed, which means it can outcompete bindweed.
And it’s edible, and tasty. Raw, it tastes like a slightly spicy broccoli. Cooked, it tastes more like spinach. I prefer the flavor raw, but I don’t like spiciness, so I usually melt butter to go on top of the chopped up plants, which removes the slight spiciness and preserves the brassica flavor. It’s all edible – leaves, stems, roots, flowers – and it all tastes good. So I usually uproot the whole plant as soon as it starts flowering, and I chop the whole thing up to eat, including the roots. (They’re a bit hard, but not woody, similar to dandelion roots. Reasonable to eat raw; very reasonable to eat cooked.)
Supposedly they’re a bit allelopathic too, particularly with brassicas, which may explain why the brassicas that I planted near it last year didn’t grow very well through the winter. But the dandelions around it seem completely unaffected, and so does the garlic.
Dandelions:
Everyone knows about these. Way too bitter to eat late in the year, but if they grow in full shade and haven’t started flowering yet, and the temperatures are still chilly at night, the leaves are reasonably palatable. If you cook them with butter, that removes most of the bitterness and makes them taste pretty good. The whole plant is edible. I find the flowers disgusting, but a lot of people love them and make jam and other things out of them.
Shepherd’s purse:
I finally identified this weed this year. They’re very nice! I think they taste similar to spinach, but without the dirt flavor (geosmin); my husband thinks they taste like lettuce with a slight hint of peas. The whole plant is edible, and they’re really easy to identify, because the leaves are highly distinctive, and there’s nothing else quite like them.
Yellow dock:
The leaves are sweet and sour in early to mid-spring. By summer (in our dry heat), the leaves are bitter and unpalatable. But they’re quite tasty in spring, especially if you like sourness. Supposedly the seeds (which are plentiful) can be used like a grain; I haven’t tried that yet.
Purslane:
Delicious, crisp, and spinachy. This is another edible wild plant with the potential to outcompete bindweed, because it can happily sprawl out of sidewalk cracks, and it has the same spreading-all-over-the-ground growth habit. This is nice to snack on raw. It can also be eaten cooked; I usually eat it raw by picking and eating it as a garden snack.
Clover:
Pretty decent greens. Nice tasting flowers. Everyone knows about this.
Salsify:
Tasty leaves that are similar to lettuce in flavor. Supposedly the roots taste like oysters; I haven’t noticed that, but they are edible. If you pick them before they flower, the stems and crisp and juicy, similar to eating a carrot. Delicious at that stage. If you wait until after they flower (because the flowers are beautiful, and then you can collect seeds!), the roots and stems will be woody after flowering, so unpalatable, but the leaves will taste fine. A little bitter, but not very much, and not nearly as bitter as lettuce during the same hot dry summer.
Siberian elm:
The leaves are edible, and sorta okay, but not all that tasty. I wouldn’t mind eating them regularly if I was hungry. The samarras (the seeds while still green) are delicious, but unfortunately absolutely full of elm seed bugs, which taste revolting. (They smell like stinkbugs when squashed, and they taste the same way.) If you’re willing to go to the bother to rinse the samarras really well, maybe after leave them soaking in a bucket of water for a few hours in order to drown the bugs and make sure they can’t crawl away from the rinsing, you’ll have a delicious treat. Make absolutely sure you get rid of any bugs, because those bugs taste disgusting. It’s well-worth the effort if you’re hungry or particularly like them, especially since they’re available in mid-spring, before a lot of garden crops are available; I generally can’t be bothered otherwise. But then, elm seed bugs are a huge huge HUGE pest insect where I live; if you don’t have a lot in your area, it may be easy to enjoy the samarras fresh off the tree.
Don’t ever plant Siberian elm on purpose – it’s an intensely invasive weed, and I do mean intensely. It will send up shoots all over your garden, and it’s extremely hard to get rid of. But if you happen to have the wild plants in your area (and most of us do, since it’s so good at spreading), it may be worth gathering some of those samarras while they’re still green. You’d be doing the ecosystem a favor anyway, since that means there’ll be fewer seeds left to spread and turn into further invasive trees in the landscape.
Right now, in late April, all of those weeds except purslane and clover are available to eat. Aside from winter crops (garlic and brassicas) and overwintering perennials (lovage), there aren’t a lot of garden plants to eat right now. So those weeds fill a gap nicely.
I highly recommend you pick up some foraging books and look around at what’s growing wild in your ecosystem that is edible. See if you like the taste. If you do, it may be a valuable component of growing locally adapted food.
Then, green tops are excellent in scrambled eggs and as a side dish.
