Winter is a great time for harvesting volunteer ‘microgreens’ from your garden (or local park)

(Above: today’s bounty from a little wander around my own garden.)

Do you buy sprouts, bags of mesclun mix or microgreens from the supermarket?

Winter is a great time to find volunteer (‘weed’) microgreens, or young greens, around your garden or local park for FREE!

Because of winter’s rain and damp, the young weeds will be beautifully bright green, healthy and not heat-stressed.

To share some likely contenders with you, I took a walk around my small urban yard and here’s what I harvested.

I took care to only harvest volunteers/weeds and nothing that I’d planted intentionally. (Violet grows like a weed in my yard.)

The trick is to just harvest the young leaves, or the tips in the case of the dead nettle.

These wild ‘microgreens’ can be used in a salad, or chopped and sprinkled on top of soup, or in sandwiches, or blended into a smoothie…the same as you would use supermarket or homegrown microgreens.

I numbered the plants for ease of ID-ing them:

1. Nasturtium leaves. These are peppery in flavour so great in salads and on sandwiches, not so great in smoothies.
2. Dead Nettle tips. Great stand-in for lettuce.
3. Young violet leaves and flowers. Use in salad or cook as your would spinach.
4. Young ribwort plantain leaves. Important to pick the young ones as the older ones get stringy. The young leaves have a nutty flavour.
5. Chickweed. Such an enthusiastic garden volunteer. Use the young growth and chop finely.
6. Young dandelion leaves. These add a nice bitter element to a salad or sandwich. Not so great in smoothies.
7. Oxalis (known in the UK as ‘wood sorrell’ and the USA as ‘sour grass’) Has a sour, lemony flavour similar to sorrell. Use just a little at a time as it contains oxalic acid. Treat it more like a herb than a main vegetable.
8. Young mallow leaves. Mallow (also know as ‘Malva’) is a much-used vegetable in Middle-Eastern cuisine and parts of Italy. You can make dolmades with the leaves in place of grape leaves, making it useful during the winter when there are no grape leaves about. Young leaves are good in salad or cooked like spinach.

& of course, these plants have medicinal properties as well, (most plant food does.

I hope this inspires you to have a close look at what might be growing in your own back yard and save yourself a little money (or time) by eating some of the weeds around you.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Do you eat any of the weeds in your garden?