When a Weed is a Superfood?
Meet Purslane!
6/30/2017
This little bugger of a weed is trying to take over our kale and Swiss chard area of the garden! Turns out this ‘weed’ called Purslane is probably more nutrition-packed than other vegetables we actually mean to grow. Purslane is loaded with more Omega-3 fatty acids than any other leafy green plant and is also a rich source of Vitamin A and C. I have noticed purslane as an addition to salads on restaurant menus recently as well. Hmmm...maybe this weed needs to be harvested instead of composted? It’s quite juicy and tasty! As always, we must be careful not to ingest plants until we know they are safe. I was careful not to mix this one up with a similar plant called hairy-stemmed spurge.
Volunteers in the Garden This Week
Adventure Club and Spin kids help stake and fertilize tomato plants.
Spinach plants in our raised beds decided it was too hot to produce any more decent leaves and bolted, which means the plant moved to producing seed in order to reproduce. The kids helped us remove the plants and replanted the beds with Swiss Chard which can handle more summer heat.
We picked our first zucchini of the season! AJ Moses, our beekeeper, taught us that typically our squash and cucumber plants need to be visited by a bee eight times to be properly pollinated. The curve and deformity in this zucchini probably means it wasn’t visited by a pollinator quite as often as necessary to make it straight. We ate it, and it still tasted great!
Thanks to you kids and to Master Gardeners Sue and Liz for your help!
Rain, and lots of it, forced us to cancel our Woodbury UMC Summer Stretch teen helpers for Wednesday. We will see them again soon! The weather cooperated for Thursday when we were visited by the 6th grade Hidden Pines Ranch kids. They came to us from their camp sleep-over and managed to stay awake and work hard! Thanks to the kids and their counselors Ike and Natalie for all of your help! Thanks also to Olivia for your service!
The kids learned to hand-pollinate squash flowers with paint brushes and Q-tips just as the bees do. Finishing building tomato support structures and harvesting 5.5 pounds of kale, lettuce, pok choi, summer squash, zucchini and peppers (yes, peppers!) completed our morning.
--submitted by Master Gardener Kathy Luoma
