Monday, April 18, 2011

When life gives you lemons...

...you make lemonade, or when life gives you weeds you make a crumble.

There is an invasive species living in our yard. It started coming up in a couple spots by the side of the house and by the fence last year. It grew quickly - very, very quickly. Left to it's own devices the patch by the fence grew to over seven feet in a few weeks and took over about a five foot diameter section of the yard. It was a constant struggle last summer to cut the weed whenever it started growing near the house. We poisoned them several times to no avail. Finally it went dormant over the winter, but the last few weeks it has started springing up in all the usual places again.

This awful weed I speak of is Japanese Knotweed. It is so invasive that it's an illegal plant in the UK. If you have it in your yard you have to get a professional to remove it, the risk of spreading the plant is far too great to do it on your own. The working theory on our little homestead is to keep chopping it as soon as we see it and hope that the roots loose the energy to grow more stalks in a couple years.

In the meantime I discovered that knotweed is edible - and rather tasty! There is a knotweed soup that is intriguing and generally speaking you can use it as a replacement for rhubarb. Saturday afternoon Mike trimmed a bunch of the pernicious weed and I cooked it up into a crumble.





The worst part about it was knowing that inside this scrumptious dessert was the weed we hate so much and have been battling for the last year. Once we swallowed our hate of the weed the crumble was quite delicious! It tasted like rhubarb. Mike even had seconds.

1 comment:

  1. Mike told me about this. That is so cool. I find it hard to believe because well, it's a weed and I think of grass. Awesome!

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