There is a plant growing along your fence line right now, the one with the broad grey-green leaves and the little white dust on the underside, and gram for gram it carries about two and a half times the calcium of a glass of whole milk. Three hundred nine milligrams against a hundred twenty-three, by the Department of Agriculture's own numbers.

I spent thirty-one years on a county road crew, and my job was to pull plants like that one out of the ground. It took me about half that long to work out that a good share of what we were killing was supper.

This one goes through nine plants, every one of them above whole milk on calcium per hundred grams, every figure from the same government database. Some are weeds you already have. A few you can buy this afternoon in any grocery store. And one of them comes with a catch that almost nobody mentions, which is the part I care most about getting across.

Here's what we go through:
The lawn weed with two and a half times the calcium of milk, and why the number oversells it
The reason two different tables give two different figures for dandelion, and which one is right
Why kale has two contradictory entries in the same government database
The one plant on the list where the figure describes a cooked leaf, not a raw one
The part of the turnip most people feed to the hogs
What oxalate does to calcium, and why every traditional way of cooking these greens involves draining the water
Three honest reasons nobody sells any of this in a store

I'll tell you plainly where the numbers are solid and where they're doing more work than they should. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here will fix anything. Get anything identified properly before it goes in the pot — your county extension office will do it for free.


#foraging #ediblewildplants #oldways