I went on a short trip this weekend, from my south-central Kansas area to far south-eastern Kansas. Just that short (2hr drive) distance was enough to lead to some interesting plant surprises. Alongside the usual thistles, johnsongrass, and occasional wildflowers in the ditches, there were also some other very lush edible & medicinal plants, like Wild Carrot/Queen Anne’s Lace, and most surprisingly, GARLIC!
I nearly pulled over to the shoulder when I realized what was catching my eye alongside long stretches of the highway – huge, healthy garlic scapes with heavy heads of bulbils. There were thousands of them! Fortunately for my weekend hosts and my kiddos, I resisted the temptation.
However… I’m not ashamed to admit than when I was driving back late at night and had to stop at a gas station for a quick stretch to wake up, I got excited to find more of that same garlic growing along the road where I stopped. I plucked 18 of them, hoping maybe some bulbils were mature enough to plant. I guess we’ll see later this summer/fall.
Anyone else found surprising wild or feral domestic edibles in unexpected places?
That’s awesome! I’m glad you were able to collect a few!
I found a bunch of feral rye completely dried down, with mature seed heads, near the entrance to our highway a few weeks ago. I was intrigued, and I picked about two dozen heads so that I can eat them and see what I think!
I’ve also seen flax as a weed in one of my neighbor’s yards. I was amused, and I’m taking the hint. I think I’ll sprinkle a bunch of flax into my lawn and see if I can get it to outcompete my grass I don’t care about.
All of my garlic was collected from feral patches I found in SE Indiana and one patch in Northern Kentucky. The first and only one I had for several years came from the site of an old homestead on my own land. Nothing left but part of the chimney, some garlic, some small very fragrant roses and some small but also very fragrant daffodils. All of which grow in my yard and gardens now. Over the years, I found four more patches of garlic in various places and one just this spring that I haven’t acquired yet. Ferel asparagus is fairly common here. Impossible to find in the weeds when it would be ready to eat, but the mature plants are easy to see from the road and seeds easy to collect.
More like “take some of this this home and plant it stupid” so you don’t have to come here to get it anymore.
I plant a little garlic in the garden to harvest big bulbs but mostly I let it establish in big patches outside the mowed part of the yard. This morning picked a whole bunch of immature bulbil heads. The outer casing hadn’t broken open yet and the little bulbils were white and juicy without their outer skins. I ground them with some salt, some with salt and black pepper and some with salt and rosemary and put them over the fire to dry. I can’t stop eating it.
I also plant only some of my garlic for bigger bulbs, and let the rest grow in clumps for various uses. I’ve been known to go out in early spring to chop some garlic chives for a dish and just grab a bit of the early growth for tossing in alongside. And the bulbils and green garlic end up in a lot of our meals fresh from the garden. Speaking of which, I just remembered I need to go pull up a clump that’s crowding some lettuce I’ve been trying to encourage to bolt (which you’d think wouldn’t be a problem in my current 90-100* temps, but alas, it’s resisting )
I don’t blame you, that sounds absolutely delicious!!
We’ve run across random asparagus clumps along ditches/fences, some beautiful wild fruits, etc. My sandplums are the result of going plum picking and throwing the “reject fruits” (read: too buggy or rotted for canning) into a new compost pile out back, only to have them sprout and thrive on otherwise unenriched clay. Sometimes, you just gotta pay attention to what’s doing well in your surroundings!
Yeah! About green garlic . . . I’ve discovered that I don’t even need to pull up garlic bulbs unless I want to move them somewhere else. (Or I want to divide them in order to get more garlic, naturally.) I can just keep harvesting green garlic all the live long day and leave the roots alone! Muah ha ha ha.
Oh my gosh, I was so stupid last year and discarded all the aronia berry seeds I could have saved after harvesting a bag full of berries from a wild tree along a hiking path near my home. Now I have to go back there this year to get those seeds!
In the fruit. Obviously. I’m going to make jam. But the seeds!
I let the heads dry for a week and finally separated them/cleaned out the “chaff” this morning. The ultimate yield for my 11pm scavenging session is right about 1/2cup of healthy well-developed bulbils of an unknown but clearly hardy garlic variety. I would call that well worth the effort!
I’m planning to start a new growing bed… my husband told me recently he wants to turn part of the fence along the west side of our lot into basically a green wall. I’m thinking trellises for enthusiastic viners/climbers like gourds underplanted with every companion crop and flower I can come up with. For this fall, though, I’ll just use the newly cleared space to start growing all these lovely bulbils into rounds. I have 40-45’ of fence to work with, which should be sufficient. If not, I guess I’ll start tucking them in around the dripline of some of my newer fruit trees and shrubs?
An interesting update to this… I had an unexpected surgery last fall (I didn’t expect it to be approved so fast!) and wasn’t able to get these bulbils in the ground before freeze. BUT I decided to take a risk and put most of them in a fabric grow pot under lights last week to see if I could get them started. Since they came from a ditch, I literally just sort of finger-raked them into the top of the soil, moistened them, and let them do their thing. I’ve already got little green shoots coming off of some, and many other bulbils are at least sending out roots. I expect I’ll be transplanting a whole bunch of this “ditch garlic” come springtime!
My plan for most of this garlic is to put clumps of it around/near most of my fruit trees and such, and just pull a few here and there to keep them from spreading too far. If it can survive on the sides of the highway with nothing more than twice-yearly mowing and whatever nature throws at it, it would be silly to baby it. I’m just going to put it out in the spring and for the most part ignore it from then on.
I plant a little garlic in my main garden the “proper” way, but otherwise, it’s way too much work. Benign neglect is more fun.
This feral/ditch garlic is doing GREAT! I let the fiber pot dry out a bit, then “flooded” it with some cool water once to replicate the sort of moisture it would get in early spring. The rest of the bulbils responded by exploding into life. I am going to keep them trimmed back shorter until time to plant. Which, oh darn, means some little garlic greens to toss into meals here and there. Taste testing suggests this is going to be a spicy, tasty variety, whatever it is!
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