Chickweed

Chickweed is the most underrated plant on this site. It tastes of corn silk and fresh peas, it is tender enough to eat raw in quantity, it grows in the exact places you are already working, and it produces a crop in winter when nothing else does. The only reason it is not famous is that it is a weed in the vegetable patch and no one has ever needed to sell it.

The one identification rule

Chickweed is small, bright green, sprawling, and has a single line of fine hairs running down one side of the stem that changes sides at each pair of leaves. That alternating hair line is the definitive test, and it is worth learning properly, because there are a number of hairy, slightly similar plants in the same ground.

The leaves are opposite, oval, pointed at the tip, and less than 2 cm long, and they grow in pairs. The flowers are tiny, white, and star-shaped with five petals that are so deeply split they look like ten. If you have that plus the alternating hair line, you have chickweed and nothing else in the bed looks like it.

The plant that people sometimes confuse it with is scarlet pimpernel, which has opposite leaves but no hair line and orange flowers, and is not edible. Also check the ground is not one you have just fed or sprayed — chickweed in a bed where you have applied a soluble feed is carrying that feed.

Cutting it so it comes back

Chickweed is an annual and it reseeds from the tiny seed in the surface soil. Cutting the top 5 cm with scissors rather than pulling it up leaves the roots in place and the plant regrows from the base in about twelve days through the growing season. That gives you a genuinely repeating crop from a single patch.

The one rule is to leave two plants per square metre to flower and set seed. If you cut everything, the patch is gone in a season and you have to find a new one. Leave a couple, and the bed supplies you indefinitely. It also makes a decent living mulch for the same reason — a light chickweed cover keeps the soil surface cool and does not compete hard with established plants.

Wash it in a big bowl of cold water, not under a tap, and lift it out rather than pouring it through a colander — the grit settles to the bottom of the bowl and the plant comes out clean. Chickweed holds a lot of soil in its leaf axils when it grows flat on the ground.

Eating it, raw and cooked

Raw is where chickweed is at its best: it is one of the very few wild greens with a texture that needs no apology. A salad of chickweed, a sharp dressing and a handful of toasted seeds is a complete dish. It also makes the best possible substitute for lettuce in a sandwich, because it does not go limp.

Cooked, it behaves like spinach but faster and with more water. It needs about 20 seconds in a hot pan with butter, and it must be served immediately — held warm for five minutes it collapses to a dark green paste. That is the reason chickweed is a home dish and not a restaurant one, and it is fine.

The one serious use beyond salad is as a thickener. Cooked and chopped, chickweed has a mild, slightly mucilaginous body that thickens a soup or a stew without the floury taste of a roux. Add a large handful of chopped raw chickweed in the last two minutes of cooking a vegetable soup and it will thicken it noticeably while adding a clean green note.