Last summer, the state re-did the road in front of my house, in conjunction with a bridge project. As part of improving the drainage, the project had the unfortunate side-effect of emptying my well, which means a new (and much deeper!) well had to be installed.<\/p>\n
Every dark cloud has a silver lining though!<\/p>\n
Putting in a new well resulted in my side yard being torn up, and one thing that thrives in disturbed soils is cress<\/em>. As a kid, in spring, my father would take me to gather cress, which we prepared like spinach and served with apple cider vinegar. I’ve always loved wild cress.<\/p>\n So in the wake of the well project, that whole area was covered in cress! Rather than tear it out and seed with grass, I let it all go to seed with waves of tiny yellow flowers. When ready, I collected thousands of seeds from it, which I will be sowing in my garden early this spring! It is best harvested young and before it goes to seed for best flavor.<\/p>\n There are several varieties of wild cress in North America, but this particular variety is Barbarea verna, a close relative to the mustard family, is a biennial that makes seeds every other year. Garden cress (for which you can find seeds at the store) is an annual. <\/p>\n In terms of flavor, wild cress species vary from barely edible to delicious. Cardamine bulbosa (also known as bitter cress) is a perennial with white flowers, that is best eaten cooked whereas the Barbarea verna variety can be eaten fresh.<\/p>\n So now I have thousands of seeds of a delicious wild edible I enjoyed in childhood. I can’t wait for Spring!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last summer, the state re-did the road in front of my house, in conjunction with a bridge project. As part of improving the drainage, the project had the unfortunate side-effect of emptying my well, which means a new (and much deeper!) well had to be installed. Every dark cloud has a silver lining though! Putting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,38,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cress","category-seeds","category-self-sufficiency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markhamfarm.com\/mainsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}