I wish I knew which patches in my city were pesticide free. I'd love to go harvest a shit ton of dandelions for salads and wine, but choking down a bunch of roundup seems less than safe to me.

Whenever I see an article like this, I'm reminded as to HOW MANY common garden plants are poisonous. It is VERY important to know the difference, as most ornamental plants are dangerous. Azaleas, for example, bear a powerful neurotoxin. so powerful, in fact, that the Chinese used to dry the flowers, crumble them on the surface of water, and wait for the dead fish to rise up. Novel method of fishing.

Fuck yes! I eat chickweed, creeping charlie, dandelion, wood sorrel, plantain, yarrow, etc. Weeds are the shit. If I can't eat it or make a tea from it, I compost it. I have no idea why people fight weeds so hard.

Nice post. It reminded me of this site: http://www.eattheweeds.com Check it out if you're into eating weeds.

I live in the tropics now on a fairly rural island so food isn't hard to scavenge for. When I was a poor student, foraging bananas and guava was my primary source of fruit. But it's good for people to know what is edible where they live and pass that knowledge to their children.

Dandelions is one those plants it's good to know that you can eat them in case of zombie apocalypse.

One way to get rid of dandelions is get a couple of ducks. They'll eat ever flower that shows itself and after a year no more dandelions. Of course, they'll eat every other plant or herb they could choke down unless you protect the plants. The ducks will also get rid of every snail, slug, pill bug and any other insect they can find. My ducks used to patrol the property lines looking for bugs coming over from the neighbors' yards.

edit: my ducks were those flightless white Peking ducks. I had two females and they laid huge eggs as a bonus. Downside is they were sort of noisy and wanted to be fed several times per day. Oh, and they pooped a lot.