GARDENING Advice Weeds Why weeds are worth cultivating – and eating
By Ella Walker, PA lifestyle reporter
Weeds can feel like a never-ending problem that creeps up when you’re not looking and devours half your garden. But these pesky plants aren’t all bad, says horticulturalist Jamie Walton. The north Yorkshire-based ecological gardener has appeared on Gardeners’ World talking about his work on a windswept kitchen garden, while his videos about the vegetables, flowers and microbes he’s growing have won him 1.3million followers on Instagram.
In his new book, Nettles and Petals, he shares “accessible, easy to follow tips and guidance about growing food and gardening, working with nature rather than against it.”
So you won’t find him using chemicals or pesticides on his crops, instead he tries to “mimic nature”, and that’s where jogging along with weeds, rather than ripping them all up, comes in.
Give weeds a chance
“When I first started gardening and growing my own food, I spent a lot of time trying to eradicate weeds from my garden like most people,” admits Walton.“They’re often quite hard to deal with, they take over space quite quickly.As I began to research ecology and the need for biodiversity within a garden space, I started to look at them slightly differently.” To be fair to weeds, many are designed to take over bare ground fast.Whether dandelions, chickweed, thistles or clover, so-called ‘pioneering weeds’ act as a natural balm, protecting and improving a patch of bare ground.“They’re there to cover it, because exposed, the soil leaches nutrients, and it’s susceptible to erosion,” explains Walton.They add to biodiversity too, and “actually a lot of them are far more nutritionally beneficial for us than the plants that we try to grow.”
For Walton, there are two key weeds we should embrace a bit more and even eat: dandelions and nettles.
Dandelions are the new rocket
It turns out all those dandelions poking their sunny heads up in your borders could save you the price of a bag of supermarket rocket. In fact,“they have a better nutritional profile than rocket,” says Walton. Rich in vitamins A, C and K, dandelions are completely edible, from the flowers (Walton suggests making syrup with them) to the roots.Although, we wouldn’t recommend eating the seed heads, unless you fancy a mouthful of fluff. Walton digs up the long tap roots (“They penetrate deep into the subsoil and bring up nutrients to the surface.When the plant dies back, those nutrients can be used by the plants around them,”) for making dandelion root tea.
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