It's not a weed; it's a wildflower

I walked around the corner of my shed the other day and came face to face with these earth-fallen bits of blue sky:



Chicory (Cichorium intybus), sometimes called cornflower, is one tough wildflower, growing in dry, inhospitable places like road shoulders and the gravel base of my shed.

Endive and chicory root come from cultivated varieties of Cichorium, although you can also use the wild plant. It's been used as a coffee substitute or additive for generations, and as a vegetable for thousands of years. Horace (b. 65 BCE) mentioned it, along with olives and mallow, as part of his diet.

And while the sky-blue flowers are the ones that catch my eye, I've occasionally seen it with white flowers.

On a completely different note, but still garden-related:

While our growing season is limited here in the Northeast (read: New England), we enjoy beans, peas, carrots, sweet corn, zucchini and other squash, peppers hot and mild, melons, tomatoes, tomatillos, leafy greens, brussels sprouts and probably a score or more of other fresh vegetables. And a lot of us put up some of the harvest in jars or in the freezer.

Even if we don't have gardens, we have supermarkets where we can buy fresh produce year-round. But it's a pretty good bet you have a few cans of peas, corn and/or beans in your pantry.

In England, refrigerators tend to be under-the-counter appliances, and people make more frequent trips to the market for smaller quantities of fresh foods.

But is Old England really this devoted to fresh veg? From an article on independent.co.uk:

"No rational person would buy [canned vegetables] to eat, but sales soar around harvest festival time when millions of churchgoers and schoolchildren have to give a basket of non-perishable foodstuffs for distribution to the elderly. What the elderly do with them is a mystery."

I don't know about you, but I grew up on canned green beans, and for years I wouldn't touch those suspiciously crisp sticks Dad brought in from the garden. Now I like both fresh and canned, for their own particular attributes.

Like the way canned green beans squeak when you bite into them.

I LOVE that little squeak.

Green cheese

When I was a little girl, my mother showed my sister and me the edible "cheeses" of cheese mallow, a rangy, low-growing wildflower.



She and her sister ate them when they were little girls. Their mother and grandmother probably did the same in their own childhoods.



My family wasn't big on foraging for wild foods, but we did pick wild strawberries, and went looking for raspberries and blackberries in season, sometimes going to an old farm and braving a whole field of the prickers to get the fruit. But mostly, snacking on wild stuff was left to the kids (well-trained not to eat anything we didn't know).

I tried wild carrots -- they were kind of tough, but they smelled so good! And we chewed on lavender clover blossoms and red columbine flowers for the nectar. We called the latter honeysuckle, as my mother did; it seemed like an obvious name, since you sucked the honey out of the blossom. I was probably a teenager before I knew the real name.

My mother also showed me "sourgrass" (yellow wood sorrel, Oxalis europaea). That's the delicate shamrock-like plant with little yellow flowers you find growing as a weed in gardens and lawns. I've never been a big fan of sour tastes, so I was never in any danger of overloading on the oxalic acid it contains. Not that I knew about that as a kid.



I found some sourgrass in a friend's garden the other day and had her taste it. Passing on old-timey country lore, I guess.