If you can't beat them, EAT them!

 Some summers ago, I visited a friend in Hyde Park New York. She's the kind of person who sees a lint on her living room carpet five feet away, and must get up to pick it up. That's a preface to my saying that her backyard is well mowed and her vegetable and herb garden is well managed. Funny her mint stood in clusters and were sort of braided so they did not look wild. She is a neato, all right except that she could not get a handle on this particular weed that I happen to be very fond of. In my little garden, this weed is treated like royalty. I anticipate it's return every year and I replant them in pots. While both of us looked at the weeds that are growing back, after she pulled them out,  she asked me for advise about what she should do about it, and here's what I said, "If you can't beat it, then EAT it!!!"

"What do you mean?" she said. So I started to explain that she could make a salad out of it or simply steam it and eat it plain or put it in her stews. She was aghast...then she shrugged and thought I'm pulling her leg. Then I told her the truth, for what she and I thought is a worthless weed is in fact a powerhouse of nutrients topped with Omega-3. It is in fact the lowly purslane. Growing up in the Philippines, I used to see this weed by the roadside, or in between plants waiting to be pulled out, not knowing what healthful food it is until one day browsing through the farmer's market along 116th street station by Columbia University, I saw clumps of them for not so cheap dollars. I asked the vendor it's name and what I can do with it. Coming home, I googled purslane and there I saw the light. I was a convert. I knew I had to convince my friend too. My words were not enough for her for when you know purslane all your life as a pesky weed, you can't just chop 'em off and make salad out of them.So I printed information about them with accompanying pictures of course. The next time I visited her, her vegetable garden were littered with purslane plant,  top chopped off. She could not get enough salad out of them.

Henry David Thoreau had this to say about the lowly purslane:

                 "I have made a satisfactory dinner off a dish of purslane which I gathered
                  and boiled. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve,
                  not from want of  necessaries, but for want o luxuries."

Purslane

Some purslane growing  with basil and rosemary