Portland, OR

I cannot tell you how happy I am now that gardening season is here! Living in Chicago, Illinois for the past three summers made me appreciate the backyard garden so much more for the lack of one. True, many people have gardens in the Windy City, but unless you own the house, there is not much an apartment dweller can do except container gardening. Don’t get me wrong: Container gardening can be fun and rewarding, but it is not quite like planning a landscape or a full garden and digging a shovel into the Earth.

So today, I would like to draw your attention to something I have only just come across. I have been weeding my garden for the past three or four weeks now, and I have been pulling a large amount of these little plants, that grow out low in a circle from the base stem, and send out taller aerial stems to produce tiny white flowers.

Much like this.

And they grow everywhere. They start out quite small, the size of a quarter, but can become quite large, up to maybe twelve inches. I spent an afternoon pulling them from the cracks between paving stones and the mosses along walks. Little did I know that the Shepherd’s Purse is a beneficial weed for this area.

The little “weed” came from Europe, where it was named for the shape of its seed pods, which looks like a shepherd’s purse I guess. Not that I know what a shepherd’s purse looks like, per se…I will take their word for it.

So anyway, not only is the shepherd’s purse edible — the leaves are good early in spring, before the plant produces flowers. When it looks like this…

Toss into a salad for a mustard-y taste (BTW, the shepherds purse is a member of the mustard family). But, check this out, once the flowers go to seed, the seed pods (the aforementioned purses) become sticky and are useful to catch unwanted insects, such as the hated mosquito. The gangly, leggy mosquito gets stuck in the seeds.

Brilliant! As Oregon can be a bit damp, and standing water is commonplace, why not have Mother Nature provide us with natural, non-chemical-based mosquito catchers?

So before you do what I did, and yank out all of the shepherds purse from your yard, why not wait a few weeks, let them go to seed, just in time for the majority of mosquitoes to hatch and become a blight on this fair landscape…

I was out last night, enjoying the seven o’clock sunset and the mosquitoes are already starting to become ferocious. I am now resolved to go into my compost pile and find the shepherds purses and replant them.

beneficial, weeds, plants, Oregon, garden, gardening, shepherds purse, mosquitoes