Berlin: Taking zucchinis for a walk

Here’s a picture from an urban plant incident that spotaneously happened a few weeks ago. I was wondering how to transport four gangly zucchini seedlings from my apartment to the community garden. Luckily some friends dropped by to invite us for a stroll. So we took the zucchinis for their first trip outside. Maybe we should take our plants for walks more often. Why should dogs have all the fun?

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Berlin: More tasty wild plants

The virtual tasting tour of Berlin’s wild plants continues! To get started, I’ll answer Sara’s question about the plants from this walk: which are native to Germany?

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Berlin: Edible plant walk

In a city with many wild-growing plants, you begin to wonder if some might be useful. When I weed my 10 square meters at the community garden, carting piles of unknown plants to the compost heap and leaving just a few lonely vegetables amidst bare dirt, it seems ridiculous to dismiss so many robust green plants just because they are weeds, i.e. just because I didn’t plant them. But beyond young dandelions, which I’ve started taking home and sautéeing, what other wild plants are good to eat?

Thanks to a tip from Berlin Reified, I got the chance to find out more. I signed up for a Kräuterwanderung (herb walk) led by the very knowleadgeable and enthusiastic Elizabeth Westphal of the Berlin Grüne Liga, an environmental non-profit. Last Friday, she led about thirty urban plant enthusiasts through the beds, fields and woods of the botanical park in Berlin-Blankenfelde. Here are some of the plants we tasted.

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