I once heard Derrick Jensen recommend learning about edible plants that are native to your area. I was kind of mystified. I mean, you’ve got dandelions, right? I know those are supposed to be edible, and then… well, it’s not like there are fruit trees growing wild anywhere around my house. It’s all grass and pine and oak. Oh! Okay. Acorns. That makes two. Dandelions and acorns. Done.

Suspecting that there must be more to the story than that, I went on a nature walk that was focused on identifying edible plants. It was held in a typical apartment complex, and the host identified an amazing variety of edible plants growing in the wooded areas of the complex: wood sorrel, clover, young rose hips, persimmon trees, huckleberry and blackberry vines, silverberry bush, sourwood tree, sassafras, plantain, wild black cherry trees, miner’s lettuce, violets, and even, yes, boring old dandelion. Funny-I used to look at a field and just see green; now I was noticing the vast variety of different types of plants that were present in the field. Now I was looking at the field through a cow’s eyes! Edible. Not edible. Edible. YUMMY!

Clearly, I have a lot to learn about the plants that grow where I live. I started a project where I would try to catalog and, if possible, identify all of the plants that grew in my yard. Not the boring old grasses, which are in my opinion good for nothing unless you’re a ruminant or a basket-weaver, but the broadleaf stuff. Just between you and me, I also ate a little bit from most of them (nope, still not dead–phew). I was having a lot of trouble identifying most of them, until I stumbled across the University of Georgia turfgrass weed management page. Sure enough, nearly every plant I had cataloged was right there.

From the guide, I learned that the stuff in my yard was nearly all edible, and lots of it had other uses like extracting dye from the roots or making a coffee-like drink from the fruit. One plant, catch-weed was particularly interesting because it germinates and grows in the winter, making it a potential winter food source, if not a particularly palatable one.

Recently, I was in a Home Depot, and I noticed a bottle of Ortho weed killer. What were the weeds listed on the back of the bottle? Dandelion, clover, and plantain. Having just been through the nature walk, these plants jumped out at me. They’re all edible!

So, what do you call a plant that is hard to kill, that propagates easily, that is edible, and that may have other uses above and beyond eating? Apparently, a weed. Apparently, the right thing to do is to spend money, time, and effort, ridding your yard of actually useful plants so that nothing will disturb your totally-useless-unless-you’re-a-cow grass. Shit, I bet you a dollar, even cows think yard grass is useless. It probably tastes like cardboard to them.

Down with boring monoculture. Up with free food that grows itself prolifically and is damn near impossible to kill.

Your assignment: Go outside and eat some clover or sorrel. It tastes like lemon and/or tomato.