it is super common for invasive plants non-native plants to take over in areas that are really
disturbed soil this is part of how invasive plants got to be here is that they are those plants that
thrive particularly on the conditions that humans create which gives them a leg up over the native
plants that of course evolve to be in the natural environment without it being all torn up and
altered by human activity so you are looking at behind me a huge swath that is solid milk thistle
milk thistle looks similar to some of our native thistles but it's not it's an introduced species
and usually you can tell a native from a non-native or an invasive species just to say
not all non-native species are invasive but certainly there are plenty of them that are
so you can usually tell the invasive ones from the native ones because we rarely see native species
in this kind of abundance right this is nothing but milk thistle in a solid swath native species
usually have mechanisms to keep populations in check they evolved with the plants around them
so they don't take over in the same way so i wanted to point out this milk thistle because
while a lot of people you know have this real negative idea of invasive plants a lot of invasive
plants are actually medicinal or edible or helpful to humans in a variety of ways and milk thistle is
one of those so i want to introduce you to this lovely plant even though it's not native and
help you get to know it because particularly in the spring this is one that can be really
really helpful for helping us get our systems vital and vibrant after a winter of stagnation
milk thistle is unusual compared to a lot of other thistles one thing is that the leaves are hairless
so they are shiny rather than a little bit fuzzy like most thistles on a lot of our native thistles
also it has this beautiful white patterning on the leaves that is very distinctive and easy
to remember because milk thistle it looks like someone spilled a network of milk all over it so
milk thistle like most thistles have edible greenery although that isn't what first comes
to mind because of course they are also covered in very sharp very pokey thorns right so yes it
is edible but you need to know how to how to process it you don't want to just stick this
thing in your mouth unless you're a donkey or some such thing so right now is the spring so of course
the lush growth of the leaves is the primary thing and what there is available for harvest
however one of the beautiful things about milk thistle and its medicinal properties are the
seeds which are going to come on much later in the season milk thistle seeds are a wonderful
liver tonic so they help cleanse your liver and strengthen it
and they are mild enough that they are considered both a food and a medicine
milk thistle of course is in the aster family related to things like sunflowers and particularly
closely related to artichokes artichokes are essentially an enormous thistle and what we eat is
the flower head so other thistles and particularly milk thistle because it is hairless and it's
really big and succulent and abundant you can actually eat the flower heads just like you could
eat an artichoke they're just a lot smaller so the stems of the beautiful green leaves in the spring
the flower heads in the mid-summer when they're coming on and then once those flowers are mature
collecting the seeds which is a liver tonic it is a female reproductive tonic and it's also a food
so get to know your milk thistle i'm going to show you the processing of the stems for the succulent
greenery that is available now in the early spring so here you can see the back of the leaf doesn't
have that white marking and unlike some thistles that have spines on the underside of the leaves
or the back of the stem these are just hairs on the milk thistle the spines are only on the
edges of the leaf margins so by taking my knife and slicing along either side of the stem i'm
going to have a nice succulent centerpiece that's going to be a little bit like a stalk of celery
kind of similar to celery and texture but less stringy and with the delicious flavor of an
artichoke rather than the celery flavor really nice food all right so i'm here in a different
setting with some lovely baby milk thistles coming up here um so to process them i just reached in as
deep as i could to the plant and nipped off the leaves and now i'm holding them by the bare stem
and i'm just sliding my knife along the side cutting off all of those thorny bits
and letting those turn back into soil so now i have this beautiful stock which is delicious
and really nice and juicy and this is very good because it doesn't just have food value
and it's also a good way to get moisture if you're out hiking and you don't have a water bottle
with you or if you are in another moisture stress situation very succulent very juicy
and even if the water around the milk thistle is funky growing into the plant itself is a natural
filtration process so safe water in these delicious succulent stems of the milk thistle
lots of good fiber which can be very important
and a good way to process these is to chop them up and add them to salad
so they're going to be the mildest flavored and most succulent and least fibrous in the
spring you can eat these throughout the season but they're just going to get a
little bit tougher and a little bit stronger in flavor as the season goes on so you're going to
want to chop them into smaller pieces the later in the season you're harvesting them
these would go very nicely with a miner's lettuce chickweed salad they'd be a little bit of a crunch
and a little different flavor a little extra fiber really wonderful food to know about milk
thistle
you