This is a weed.
Except it’s pretty and tastes like lettuce that doesn’t get bitter in the summer heat.
This is a weed.
Except it’s pretty and tastes like slightly spicy broccoli.
And they’re both drought tolerant and can grow just fine in a space full of tall grass and bindweed.
Salsify and hoary cress, you hereby have permission to take over my lawn. Please take me up on it.
Yellow sweet clover? Yellow flowered alfalfa? These are guesses, hope someone else can pipe in that might know more.
It’s definitely not alfalfa. That’s a common weed in my neighborhood, and it has more angular leaves (and woody stems because it’s a bush, and the flowers are purple). Hmmm, unless it’s a phenotype I’m not familiar with? I don’t know what kind of leaf shape is normal for yellow-flowered alfalfa.
Does it smell like vanilla? Sweet clover is supposed to have a very nice vanilla odor. (Apparently it can be dried and ground up in order to impart a vanilla flavor to dishes, too.)
Root nodules, good stuff! Cut it through with a sharp knife. If it’s red inside, plant them back. 
Salsify has an edible root they say, really gotto get round trying them this year. In Dutch they’re called keukenmeidenverdriet, meaning kitchenmaid sorrow, so i might end up enjoying their morning flowers and leave the root to rot leaving a compost plug in the soil.
I leave horse nettles nowadays, great soup and dry them to add to porridge ground up to a powder. yesterday heard it’s used in teas for hay fever allergies.
Visite4d a farm in southern Spain, they had a great project, but so dry.. And mountains close by. But they had some tough years and no soil to speak off. The lady took my gf foraging the garden and she came back with quite a lot of weeds i’d say. Best salad in ages! All those different exciting tastes, and feeling safe, because she’d done it for years. I took seeds of some wild salad of sorts. It’s too prickly and bitter where i live, but theirs was soft and lovely.
My thoughts too but I still cant get a positive identification.
Aroma is like green grass. Hoping the bimps/nodules on the roots are nitrogen fixers so this can help the soil.
We like eating the weeds too. Still learning to utilize what we can.
As an update, I have since downgraded my opinion of hoary cress. It’s still pretty good, but it’s way too invasive for my taste – it spreads really fast, and those runners are almost as difficult to get rid of as bindweed. That would be fine if it was spreading into my lawn, but it seemed to be exclusively interested in spreading into my garden beds, and is ignoring my lawn. 
What’s worse is that it appears to have a pretty strong allelopathic effect on other plants, especially ones in the Brassiceae family. This is a VERY big deal in my garden beds (I want Brassica oleracea, thank you!), but it’s also a big deal in my lawn, because I prefer both shepherd’s purse and blue mustard (which are “weeds”) to hoary cress.
So . . . I’ve decided hoary cress is a weed that needs to be removed, more’s the pity. It just doesn’t grow nicely in a polyculture. It wants to grow in pure monocultures, that jerk.
However, shepherd’s purse and blue mustard both seem to play very nicely in polycultures so far, and are happy to spread through my lawn, and they both taste yummier than hoary cress, so . . . right now, I’m aggressively digging out the hoary cress and gathering extra blue mustard and shepherd’s purse from around the neighborhood!
Oh, and as another update, I have also upgraded my opinion of salsify. 
I thought it was terrific when I’d only tasted the leaves – but man, those stems before they flower are delicious!
The only problem is that I always want them to flower because they’re so pretty, especially since then I can get seeds . . . 
Also, there are two types of salsify that volunteer in my yard – yellow and purple. They taste about the same, so I always favor the purple, even though the yellow ones are way more common. I think the purples are prettier. That’s just my personal opinion, though.
My stepson thinks I’m insane, but I stopped alongside the frontage road of a nearby highway that’s had major construction done last year, and I quickly ran over to pick this plant I’d spotted out of the corner of my eye last time I went by…
I believe it’s Field Mustard, or another related wild mustard? Either way… I know where the rest of the plants are and if they’re not mown down before they set seed, I’m going back to grab them!
I love “weeds” that are actually edibles. I picked up some ground ivy, violets, and purple dead nettle this week from a friend’s overgrown yard, so I can establish them in appropriate places in my once-boring suburban back yard. And I’ll be picking up more violets later this week from another site… all V. sororia as far as I can tell. The ground ivy will need some careful placement to keep it from getting aggressive, but I’m hoping the violets take over the areas I put them!
This is a great example of what makes a weed a weed. It entirely depends on the context and what you’re trying to accomplish in a given time and place and what other species-relationships are present or absent in your location.
Sometimes species are highly valued by some people in their own context but cause huge problems for other people or disrupt important local ecological systems. It gets particularly tricky when that species spreads aggressively or is easily dispersed by wind, wildlife, or flooding, and thus it’s difficult to cultivate it in one location without it spreading beyond where it’s desired.
The difference between a weed and a wildflower is a judgement and reflects the values of individuals, their community, and the larger society they live in.
Yes – well put! 
Since they taste the same, eat the yellow and let the purple go to seed.
That would be nice, but I can’t tell whether they’re yellow or purple until the flower blooms – and by then, the stems and roots are too woody to eat!
@UnicornEmily any chance I could get some seeds from the purple ones from you at some point? I love the yellow, but wouldn’t mind purple and I haven’t seen any around my area…
At some point, sure. I don’t have any spares right now, because I’ve planted them all. But I’ll keep in mind that you want me to save some for you. Hopefully I can collect more than I need this summer!
