Weeds I Love: Chickweed

Poking around the few existing garden beds here, I was delighted to find a raised bed in the shade overflowing with weeds! Beautiful, healthy, useful weeds with pretty little white flowers and graceful stems and leaves. I'm talking about chickweed.

Packed with vitamins and minerals, chickweed can be eaten raw in salads. It is also traditionally used in salves and tinctures for its skin calming properties.

I use chickweed in an herbal salve I make for my very sensitive skin (I can't even put Eucerin or expensive eczema-specific products on my face - they burn!). I had just a few little patches of chickweed in my yard in Kentucky, and it was never as lush as this flourishing patch I found here.

No chance of ripping this out! Though I may mix in a few ornamentals so the garden bed looks a little more "on purpose."

Let me encourage you - before you pull up or poison the weeds in your yard, try to identify them online, then do a quick search to see if they might be more valuable alive.