An article in the Edmonton Journal yesterday led me to a website by a local gardener. There is no greener activity than producing food in your own backyard, and there is much room for innovation in our northern corner of the world. I’m constantly delighted by what you can grow here, and how many different types of wonderful food can be produced in a few short months of summer.

Of note is the post “17 Hardy Fruits That You Can Grow On The Prairies”.  I’ve put a link to www.albertahomegardening.com under “100 foot diet” to the left of your screen.

Today’s weedgeek post is a bit of a cheat because I didn’t make this product, but if I ever adopt brewing as one of my hobbies, this is definitely something I’d attempt as two of its main ingredients are prized crops in the Vacant Lot of Eden.

While riding home from a downtown meeting late last summer, I noticed a burdock growing at the southern approach of the Highlevel Bridge  read more... »

Raspberries growing in Edmonton, Alberta

It’s been quite a dry year, much to the relief of TV weather people all over the city. They’ve barely had to complain at all about their waterskiing getting interrupted just so the pesky ecosystem can get some water.

The dryness is one reason that I’m impressed by the raspberry harvest. The iconic prairie canes are chock full of fruit at my community garden. With little maintenance or water, no fertilizer, and no pesticides, raspberries are as close to a zero-carbon food as there is.  read more... »

My weed books refer to the white part of the dandelion that connects the root to the leaves as the “crown”, but the term is confusing. Crowns are at the top of things, where the blossom on a dandelion is. As I was picking dandelions this afternoon for both this post and for a side dish to tonight’s Cassoulet-style Chicken dinner, it occurred to me that this part of the dandelion is the dandelion ‘heart’, just like the heart of celery, or the artichoke heart.

So, from now on, I’m calling them “dandelion hearts”.

Pick, trim and clean as many dandelion hearts as you wish to serve. I halve or quarter the larger hearts so that they are all a uniform bite size.
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Indian Tomato Rice Soup

I'm always on the lookout for vegetarian recipes that can be made with local organic ingredients. When I get to eat straight from my garden, especially in November, I get even more excited. The rice aspect of this soup isn't so local, but I always use leftover rice, so I'm reducing food waste. Plus, it's shipped dry (from California), so the calories per gallon of diesel fuel ratio is pretty high (I can say things like that because it's already well established that I'm the world's biggest eco-nerd).  read more... »

Readers at both my blog suite-mck.livejournal.com and here at greenedmonton.ca asked about the taste of the dandelion root coffee that I described here.

As you can see below, after grinding and brewing, it certainly looks like coffee, and the 50-50% blend with real coffee is barely distinguishable for having been economically adulterated.  read more... »

Edmonton has a new movement: guerrilla gardening. A group of Edmontonians has started organizing and enacting gardening events that aim to promote "issues of community ownership, food security, native habitat, biodiversity, and the direct replenishing the environment in which we live our daily lives". Awesome.  read more... »

It's harvest time in Edmonton, and that means fresh, delicious food from our gardens at virtually no cost to the environment. Last night I made some soup, with 90% of the ingredients coming from my garden or the farmer's market. If I had a bigger/better garden, it could have been a 100-foot diet soup.

Ingredients:  read more... »

While weeds have been a part of my diet for over thirteen years now, and I've had many occasions to speak about eating them, it's been a long time since I've actually served them to anyone. In fact, apart from my wife, I can only recollect that reporter from the St. Albert Gazette, and my room-mates from just before I was married. And with my roomies, it was only dandelion root coffee.

Dandelion root coffee and chickweed omelets were part of a strategy to introduce weed-eating to people using the least foreign tasting species. Something like prickly lettuce isn't a friendly starting point. "Just that picture of prickly lettuce in your blog looked menacing," amandi_khera said. "I don't think I'd ever put something like that in my mouth."

Today though, I'd start with lamb's quarters. It's not just "least foreign tasting". It really tastes good.

This was my supper tonight:

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Prickly Lettuce, a weed found in Edmonton gardens.

First: nomenclature. Which words to use?

Wild plants suggests wilderness. Untamed. Possibly dangerous (ie. toxic). But weeds implies a valueless nuisance. An overgrown eyesore.

Alright. We'll go with 'weeds'.  read more... »