Lambsquarters

Lambsquarters in the garden 2016

Lambsquarters is a pioneer plant (often considered a weed) that volunteers in exposed rich soil such as the quarters where lambs have been kept. The biggest Lambsquarters plants we've ever seen were in the rich clay of the Scarborough Bluffs on the shore of Lake Ontario: 250 cm tall, with stems 25 mm in diameter! "We plucked the foliage from this enormous plant like penned Goats offered cut branches, and found them mild and succulent" (15 August 1994).

When we moved to Bishops Mills, we tried to grow Spinach in the garden, but it was always overwhelmed by the Lambsquarters (LQ), which both grew faster and tasted better than the Spinach. After a few years we gave up on Spinach, evolving our procedures into what we now call 'Neolithic Gardening' in which we encourage weedy species rather than exclusively encouraging planted crops. We now plant various large-seeded garden vegetables (mostly domesticated in the Americas) which tend to shade-out competition: the Three Sisters (Squash, Corn, & Beans), Potatoes (from the Andes in South America), and the nearly wild Jerusalem Artichoke. There are also a lot of edible perennials in our garden which we encourage in various ways: Rhubarb, Day Lilies, Asparagus, Curly Dock, Spear- and Pepper- mints, and Catnip.

The weeds are about the only small-seeded annual species in the garden - this year mostly Sow Thistle, Carrot, and Lambsquarters. Inedible weeds such as Ragweed and Motherwort are ruthlessly composted, so our main battle of cultivation and mulching is with densely rhizomatic Brome grass.

We manage the Lambsquarters in dense beds by snapping off the tender tops. This leads the lower plants to grow up above the snapped-off plants, and to be snapped off in their turn. If the stand is a bit less dense, the snapped-off plants spread new axillary shoots into the space between the plants, which are then snapped off in their turn.

Blanching Lambsquarters for freezing

In 2016 we had two harvests, which we blanched and froze for winter. I heat water in a stock pot, and chop handfuls of tender-stemmed Lambsquarters into a colander with scissors, and plunge it into rapidly boiling water for as long as it takes for the water to come up to a rolling boil again, then lift the colander out and run cold water through the limp, bright green Lambsquarters. It's similar in taste to Spinach, but milder and not as mushy - and more nutritious. 

As the season goes on, the plants become impatient with this exploitation, and the tender snappable shoots become shorter and shorter and more and more made up of flowers. This progression can be slowed by application of water and nitrogen - the latter as diluted urine carefully watered in at ground level. As the plants toughen, we select the ones we want to go to seed as the parents of the next year's crop, and pull the rest.

New stands spring up on soil that was disturbed or uncovered later in the season, but these late stands bolt to maturity more quickly than the spring stands. One pest is the Lambsquarters Leaf Miner, Chrysoesthia sexguttella, a Twirler Moth that hollows out a lot of the leaves in some years, but has been nearly absent this year. In some years there's a wilt, perhaps due to the fungus Verticillium, which crumples up the tops of some plants, but we haven't seen any this year.

If you consult a botanist about the taxonomy of Chenopodium, you get wafflely answers, and form the idea that there's been so much hybridization and global movement of weedy & cultivated stocks, that there's no close correspondence between the variation in your garden and any set of names for species and varieties.

Wikipedia says: "Chenopodium album has a very complex taxonomy and has been divided in numerous microspecies, subspecies and varieties, but it is difficult to differentiate between them... It also hybridises readily with several other Chenopodium species..."

We try to select for the tender slow-to-bolt red-stemmed plants that generally correspond to the Chenopodium album name. We've selected against the long-stemmed rangy kind that seems to correspond to Chenopodium berlandieri - a form, or species, that is said to have been cultivated by local First Nations, and so is presumably more native to our area.

This summer [2018] has been so unprecedentedly dry that in our shallow soil the beds have done well only where Fred has watered them. I snap tops for my daily smoothies, and Fred for his weed-and-Oats microwave quiches. These photos are from our 2016 harvest. It was also a dry year, but we happened to have larger area of exposed soil for Lambsquarters to come up.