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At the age of 18 I bought the book "Wild foods" by Roger Phillips and a whole world opened up to me, the world of edible wild plants. Then, in London, in the small garden adjoining the house that I shared with other people, I created my first wild garden. I designed and planted the beds with wild plants, often called “weeds”!
Another principle in Permaculture is “minimum effort for maximum results”. Our strategies and the methods used make it possible to reduce the amount of work needed largely thanks to “the ergonomics of the gardens”. We organise the elements in a coherent way: layout of the garden, access to tools, watering… in order to have the minimum effort to make. We see a lot of gardeners weeding and pulling out unwanted plants. Often people pass a rake to properly “clean” a vegetable bed. (This opens up the soil surface and can, by breaking the capillarity, reduce evaporation.) Many of these plants that are raked or pulled up are edible and it seemed odd to me to pull them up and put them on the compost heap. Why not eat them?
Then there was a time when I organised survival courses. During these courses, we practiced navigation, the construction of bivouacs, the lighting of fires as well as the harvesting and consumption of edible wild plants. Many participants notice how quickly our wild salads filled them up. For me, this is not surprising. As I have noted before, our diets today are not diverse enough and the varieties of plants we grow do not have enough nutrients. For these reasons, for more than 30 years, I have encouraged the consumption of wild edible plants (WEP). I didn't invent anything, people have eaten these plants for millennia!
Of course, not all wild plants are edible! I tend to divide them into three classes, edible plants that are good to eat,
edible plants that are less good to eat,
plants that shouldn't be eaten.
At first, I found it easier to learn which plants were poisonous and inedible than to learn which ones were edible.
I have three methods for cultivating WEPs. These plants grow on the beds with the rest of the crops, I harvest them and they go, together with the cultivated plants, directly into the kitchen. The second method is to harvest the WEPs in areas close to my home. And the third method is to dedicate a bed or two to growing WEPs.
In my first garden in town there were only WEPs. The main disadvantage is that these plants have their seasons: a lot in spring, much less in summer, again a certain abundance in autumn and a few grow in winter.
On the strength of this experience, in my second garden I mixed the WEPs with plants that are easily sown without my intervention: arugula, mizuma, purslane, mustard, broccoli and some types of cabbage. I devoted other beds to growing tubers and roots: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, etc.
I knew that it is not a good idea to grow plants of the same family from year to year on the same surface (more on this later). Finally, in my third garden, I decided to mix everything together like a quilt. I told myself that the fallen seeds would grow, or not depending on the soil conditions, the climate…. So I let them work it out. Some plants are biennials so they don't set seed until their second year, carrots for example. I re-sowed these plants the 2nd year, and since then the seeds sow themselves. When I dug to harvest my potatoes, I created a clearing for the other plants to sow themselves in. As a border around my patchwork garden I grew climbing plants on trellises such as pumpkins, squash and zucchini.
We desperately need to eat a much wider variety of foodstuffs, wild food plants are a great start.