Our temperate climate has approximately 10,000 edible (wild) plants.
Some common and easy to recognize and find edible plants you should definitely know.
Use the leaf and prepared it as ’normal’ leafy vegetables (spinach or cabbage). Young leaves are more tender than older, thicker leaf, and suitable as a salad.
(Stinging) nettle (Urtica): tasty. Cook at least 6 minutes because of the formic acid in the needles. Also delicious as a tea.
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale): tastes slightly bitter. After cooking the taste is softer. The root can be dried and roasted, and is finely ground used as coffee.
(Common) chickweed (Stellaria media): has nice soft leaves, edible raw in a salad.
Saltbush and Goosefoot (Atriplex and Chenopodium): precursor of cultivated spinach. Tender leaves. Also edible is the closely related Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus).
Daisy (Bellis perennis): young leaves as a salad. Also flowers and flower buds are edible.
Comfrey (Symphytum officinale): cook the large fleshy leaves. Not to be confused with foxglove (Digitalis purpurea)!
Clover (Trifolium): edible raw in a salad. Cooked tastes better. From the leaf in Ireland is made flour to bake bread. Clover is perennial, so to find every year in the same place. The best known are the white (Trifolium repens) and red clover (- pratense).
The young leaves and flowers can be eaten fresh. The root is edible, but must be well cooked.
The four-leaf clover is a rare mutation of the three -leafed clove. The incidence is estimated between 0.1% and 0.01%. The cause of the mutation is maybe to find in pollution and other environmental factors.
Plantain (Plantago): bitter taste, prepare as spinach or salad. For old leaf remove the blade ribs.
Sorrel (Rumex): take young leaves, you can eat them raw, but they taste very strong. Cooked the taste is less sharp. Curled Dock (Rumex crispus) should be boiled first.
Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium): the leaf is narrow and resembles willow leaf. Collect young leaves and boil them. Not to be confused with foxglove!
Nettle : mosquito among the plants. (Levi Weemoedt)