Edible Weeds

Chickweed In The Homestead Landscape

By: Marlene Affeld

No matter if you have an urban or rural homestead, you are likely to encounter chickweed. Tenacious and determined, chickweed is a widespread cool-season weed naturalized across most of North America. Although considered by some to be a pest in the homestead landscape, chickweed, also known as Tounge Grass, Scarweed, Starwort, Winterweed, or Stitchwort, is an integral part of the diet of chickens, farmland birds, and a diverse array of wildlife.

Chickweed Is A Super Edible Plant

Chickweed is also a valued wild edible. A balanced diet requires fresh greens. Diets that include a diverse array of plant-based foods encourage a lower rate of chronic disease and a much better health outcome. Edible weeds are an abundant, but overlooked food source with the potential to contribute to vegetable intake and dietary diversity, especially in areas with limited access to fresh produce.

Living more than thirty miles from a shop that sells fresh produce, I have learned to love the edible “weeds” that invade my garden. Edible wild and feral plants such as chickweed, dandelion, nasturtium, and broadleaf plantain are abundant, even during prolonged droughts, and they are highly nutritious. Not only are they tasty, free, and readily available, they can also fill a significant role when food is expensive or scarce. They are also a great source of intriguing culinary ingredients.

Excellent raw, chickweed is not only nutritious, but it’s also delicious. Use chickweed as a substitute for spinach or as you would sprouts: excellent in wraps, salads, and sandwiches. Chickweed has a sweet, earthy taste with a flavor compared to corn silk: pleasant and mild. To harvest, trim tender green leaves with scissors. Avoid any brown or yellow leaves. Chickweed is consumed raw, steamed, sauteed, or brewed as a tea. The stems, flowers, leaves, and seed pods are all “good and good for you.”

Medicinal Benefits Of Chickweed

The medical properties of chickweed include application as a carminative, expectorant, demulcent, laxative, emollient, antioxidant, and as an astringent. Chickweed offers several uses, both internally and externally, as an anti-inflammatory and pain reliever. Traditionally, chickweed has been used to treat menstrual cramps, rheumatism, and arthritis.

When used for digestive and intestinal support, chickweed’s high fiber content improves the absorption of nutrients and support bowel regularity. A tea or tincture made from the leaves of the plant treats blood disorders, asthma, COPD, and other lung diseases. The plant is also effective in the treatment of joint and muscle pain.

Chickweed is associated with accelerating the wound healing process. The constituents include mucilage, triterpene saponins, coumarins, phytosterols, tocopherols, minerals, flavonoids (mainly apigenin C-glycosides and rutin), organic acids (carboxylic acids), and vitamin C. When used as a skin treatment, chickweed, because of its emollient properties, is cooling and drying with a long history as an effective treatment for skin conditions such as psoriasis, rashes, eczema, burns, boils, insect bites. When used as a compress, chickweed relieves the pain of hemorrhoids and varicose veins.

Chickweed is cooling and drying, so it has a long history of use in treating skin afflictions like acne. The fresh juice of chickweed, applied as a tincture or compress, is used to draw out splinters. Fresh juice of chickweed, applied as a toner after cleansing, refines skin texture and helps soften wrinkles and fade scars.

Fresh chickweed, brewed as a tea, is often administered to clean and flush out the kidneys. To make this healing tea, steep a few leaves in a cup of boiling water. Chickweed is high in vitamins A, B, C, as well as other minerals and essential nutrients. Chickweed can be used fresh, dried, powdered, in poultices, formentations, or made into a salve with lard or vaseline.

Types Of Chickweed

Two species of chickweed, Cerastium alamerahum, also known as sticky chickweed, and Stellaria media, known as common chickweed, are winter annuals or biennial prostate weeds that readily establish in lawns, gardens, meadows, and pastures. While common chickweed tends to flourish in well-watered areas, sticky chickweed tolerates drier conditions. Both harbor insect pests and plant viruses.

Common chickweed serves as a host plant for insect predators such as thrips and Lygus bugs and acts as a reservoir host for the spotted wilt virus that plagues tomatoes as well as the cucumber mosaic virus.

Cerastium fontanum, also known as mouse-ear chickweed, is an especially troubling perennial variety reseeding to become established agricultural plots, drainage ditches, forests, wetlands, lawns, and gardens. Chickweed competes with garden crops for sunlight, moisture, and nutrients. If chickweed is allowed to spread in large numbers, the weed can substantially reduce both the yield and quality of fruit and vegetable crops. Both common chickweed and mouse-ear chickweed spread, forming dense mats. While this plant characteristic is troublesome when it invades the garden, the plant is useful to control soil erosion and to maintain consistent soil temperatures.

Plant Description

Chickweed, a shallow fibrous rooted plant, presents smooth, bright grayish-green pointed oval-shaped leaves, hairy stems, and small white five-petal flowers resembling carnation flowers. Chickweed is a member of the carnation family, Caryophyllaceae.

Seeds are produced in small red capsules on the end of the plant stalk. Chickweed weed leaves, as well as the stem, are covered with white hairs, some with glandular secretions, that give the plant a sticky texture.

The succulent-like plant spreads to form a thick, dense mat, which chocks out less competitive vegetation. Because chickweed creates a dense, spreading mat that roots at the nodes, it is difficult to eliminate with hoeing or hand weeding. Cultivation will work to effectively control chickweed if done before the plant goes to seed. Weeding is most effective when the soil is dry, and plants are small.

A lawn weed that grows to a height of 2-3 inches tall in sunny locations, and up to 6-8 inches tall in shaded, wet areas, chickweed becomes an unsightly, aggressive plant, reducing the aesthetic value of the homestead landscape.

Germination

Chickweed seeds germinate at or very near the soil surface from January to March, typically when the soil warms above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Chickweed weeds are hairy, some with glandular secretions, give the plant a sticky texture. A common chickweed plant can produce approximately 800 seeds. Once incorporated into the soil, it can take up to 8 years for 95 percent of the seed bank or viable seeds in the soil, to be depleted. Thus a chickweed infestation can last for many years.

Chickweed starts producing seeds within five weeks of germination and continues to produce seeds for weeks and even months thereafter. Seeds sprout (germinate) soon after they disperse from the host plant and does not require further ripening as does the seeds of many other weeds. Chickweed completes its lifecycle in six weeks.

Chickweed adapts to most environmental conditions, and soil types and chickweed seeds quickly germinate after they dispense from the parent plant. It grows most vigorously in nutrient-rich, moist soil with less vigorous growth in dry soil with a low pH.

Chickweed is aggressive and tenacious. Chickweed begins producing seed in less than six weeks from germination, creating more and more seeds for weeks or months with new seeds sprouting within days after they disperse. Chickweed seed does not require additional ripening, as do the seeds of many other invasive weeds.

Habitat

Both types of chickweed flourish in a diverse array of soil textures and habitats. Chickweed grows fastest in soil with a pH range from 4.8 to 7.3, although it seems to prefer soil with a high level of nitrogen. Chickweed tolerates cold temperatures, flowering, and fruiting even when under a blanket of snow. Chickweed is cold tolerant to temperatures as low as -15 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the plant requires plenty of moisture and is drought sensitive.

Creeping chickweed can quickly infest a homestead garden. Therefore, it is important to keep both common and mouse-ear chickweed controlled. Repeated had weeding and cultivation slowly depletes the nutritional reserves in the underground storage tissues and eventually controls chickweed.

References:

University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources - Chickweed Management Guidelines

http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn74129.html

USDA – Mouse-ear Chickweed

https://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=CEFO2

United States Library of Medicine - Looking backward to find the path forward

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3141300/

United States Department of Agriculture - Chickweed

https://www.maine.gov/dacf/php/gotpests/weeds/factsheets/chickweed-usda.pdf

Iowa State University Extension - Weed Management In The Home Garden

https://www.maine.gov/dacf/php/gotpests/weeds/factsheets/weed-mgt-iowa.pdf

UCIPM – Chickweed Management Guides

http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn74129.html

Maine Government - Got Pests?

https://www.maine.gov/dacf/php/gotpests/weeds/chickweed.htm

Medicinal Herb Info - Chickweed

http://medicinalherbinfo.org/000Herbs2016/1herbs/chickweed/