Food for Free. Fabulous Forage. Part 2. Chickweed stellaria media

It is not for nothing that one of the alternative names for stellaria media is 'The Hen's Inheritance'. The Greeks and Romans thought so highly of it they even cultivated it. The Victorians coveted it as a super food and made it into all kinds of salads and sandwiches and chickweed is now enjoying a renaissance as a wild edible and herbal. You will easily find it everywhere, from seed catalogues to medical and beauty preparations.

Chances are you have no chickweed in your garden at the moment, if like me you have your birds free-ranging in your food forest, they will have eaten it. Why? Well because firstly it's often the only fresh weed available in the Winter months but also because of its valuable nutritional and medicinal value. Poultry, as I am often fond of writing, know more about their digestive systems and general health than we ever will.  

So if you have a dearth of this ubiquitous plant, then why not do as we do and go and offer to weed someone else's organic garden or homestead. You will be earning their eternal gratitude and also gaining a forage plant that is worth all the gold in China.

In The Herball or Generall Hiftorie of Plantes, the 16th century botanist, herbalist and gardener, John Gerard wrote:

          'Little birds in cages (efpecially Linnets) are refrefhed with
           the leffer Chickeweed when they loath their meat : whereupon
           it was called of fome Pafferina'

Chickweed amongst its many virtues therefore, is a tonic and one my birds enjoy in the Hungry Gap, which occurs, well about now! As with all good things however there are certain provisos, which should be observed and considered and I'll look at them too in the following paragraphs.

Chickweed Habits and Habitat

Like poppies, witness this beautiful wheat field beyond our house, chickweed prefers soil that is periodically disturbed, such as that used for home vegetable cultivation or arable farmland. It grows in various soils but does particularly well in the damp earth shaded by overhead crops – hence in my neighbours' cabbages. Chickweed reproduces by seed and can take less than 6 weeks to complete a growth cycle. Thus, although an annual, because of its ability to flower in all months, it can keep germinating and reseeding throughout the year. It also reproduces asexually or vegitatively by means of rooting at stem nodes, thus forming a dense mat of foliage. The average seed per plant was noted by the agricultural engineer, Lucian.Guyot in his 1962 book Semences et plantules des principales mauvaises herbes to be as many as 25,000. Furthermore, seeds have the ability to lay dormant and thus remain viable for 10 years, I have actually read 40! Chickweed is thus an incredibly successful plant or shall we say weed and is one of the most common found on arable land, where it is also an important dietary element for many farmland wild birds, such as partridges, linnets and sparrows. Chickweed also has the ability to grow at low temperatures and survive all but the hardest of frosts. As an addendum to this, the 18th century botanist, William Withering, in his book A Systematic Arrangement Of British Plants, (1776), wrote of what he described as 'the sleep of plants'. This is the ability of certain plants including chickweed to protect its tender shoots and flower buds by covering them at night with older, larger and thus more frost hardy leaves. 

 

Stellaria Media - Virtues

What's in a name? Well in this case quite a lot, because chickweed is high in potassium, essential for development and growth. Birds deficient in potassium will fail to grow and die within a few days of hatch.   In their study of thirty one wild edibles, published in 1996, Bianco and Santamaria, of the University of Bari, found that stellaria media had the second highest value of potassium. Given that Sir Humphrey Davy first identified potassium as an element in 1807, it is interesting that, as with other vitamins and minerals found in forage, the practical observation of how birds fed if not the why, was known many centuries before.  It is also probably why Mummy told them to eat up their greens....

What is also very interesting from a human dietary point of view is that 'weeds', which were eaten as the precursors of the modern cultivated vegetable, (in fact most root vegetables were considered by the nobility as fit only for animals), are often more nutritious and also obviously much easier to grow!

There is now a rekindled interest in wild edibles and I have seen various and differing nutritional contents for chickweed but I have sifted through and compared many research papers and articles and come up with what I hope and believe to be the most likely.

Ascorbic Acid – Vitamin C

Beta-carotenes – Vitamin A precursors
B Vitamins - notably Thiamine B1, Riboflavin B2, Niacin B3 and Folate B9
Bioflavonoids including rutin
Coumarins
Gamma-linolenic acid (omega-6 essential fatty acid)
Genistein

Minerals – including Calcium, Copper,  Magnesium, Potassium, Iron,  Manganese, Silicon and Zinc

Triterpenoid Saponins
Phenolic Acids
Cyclic peptides
Proteins

It is therefore no wonder, looking at this list, that this weed is now being trialled for a variety of pharmaceutical products including those for prevention and cure of Hepatitis b, cancers and heart disease.

Nitrate Accumulation and Oxalic Acid

This is one of the things that always impresses me with my chickens, they don't over-eat any single food item and they also eat 'the best bits' of everything. Leave apples for them in the garden and they will eat the pips first and then hollow out the fruit, leaving the skin, which contains most of the anti-nutrient phytic acid. When I used to give my poultry mixed dried grain, I always noted that they always consumed them in the same particular order. When I decided to reduce grain to the minimum and also only feeding it once sprouted, I chose the first grain they ate, triticale.

As discussed in an earlier post; Providing Forage for Organic Poultry Part 2 (link below), it is the dose that makes the poison. However, as with all forage, I am ever cautious when harvesting it in volume, as I do on occasions from my neighbours. They are organic gardeners but heavy on the manure due to sandy soil, I choose to harvest from amongst the cabbages, themselves hungry and competitive feeders for nitrate. As with all food that you introduce to your birds, be aware, if you are, for example, rehoming battery hens, that they may overdose on greenery. For all they know this is the one and only time you plan to feed them the essential nutrients they have been craving. Oxalic acid alters the uptake of calcium, so it is not something you want your laying hens, or young chicks to be gorging themselves upon. Stellaria media was measured by Bianco and Santamaria to contain 578mg per 100g which puts it slightly below spinach, which my birds will only eat in tiny amounts. The main thing is to put all forage out in an obvious form, I suspend it from bunches in the garden or put it on the ground. I would never think of chopping it up and putting it in their grated vegetables, for example. It is also an idea to put a mixed bouquet of weeds in, if you are feeding them on a regular basis.

Now if you'd like to sit back and watch the film. In it I also use the expectorant and demulcent virtues of chickweed to help with Rupert's head-cold.

If you have enjoyed this blog and found it interesting then please think about subscribing, sharing it and/or commenting. Please also feel free to ask questions. 

All the very best,

Sue

RELATED POSTS

Providing Forage for Organic Poultry Part 1

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Providing Forage for Organic Poultry Part 2

Continuing an in-depth look into forage and discussing the what, when, where from and why...read more
 

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Interesting Reads:

Bianca, V.V., P. Santamaria & A. Elia. (1998). The Nutritional Value and Nitrate Content in Edible Wild Species used in Southern Italy. Proceedings 3rd International Society on Diversification of Vegetable Crops. Acta Horticulturae 467: 71-87.
Gerard, J. The Herball or Generall Hiftorie of Plantes. (1597)
Withering, W. A Botanical Arrangement of British Plants: Including the Uses of Each Species, in Medicine, Diet, Rural Economy and the Arts. (1787)

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©  Sue Cross 2016

Forest Garden Poultry - Organic Feed for Free, Forage - An Overview Part 1

If you are setting up a forest garden and intending to run your poultry through it, then you are probably going to be short of certain wild 'pasture-type' elements in their diet. I've already looked at bringing in grass, not only as a great source of nutrient and essential dietary fibre but also, as an additional resource, the uneaten greenery aids in the creation of the forest floor layer. This will in turn engender a suitable environment for invertebrates and foster the emergence of weed seeds.

On small farms raising poultry was often the preserve of the farmer's wife and 'egg money' went directly to fund the household budget. There was very little cost involved in keeping fowls as they were on what could be classed as a hen 'paleo' diet with table scraps, vegetables and some soaked or sprouted grains fed as the additional feed. With a small flock and a relatively large acreage, this feed was often only used as an enticement to get the birds into the coop in the evening and away from the fox. Organically raised poultry maybe today's recherché foodstuff but up until the First World War, all small farm country

-bred birds were kept this way. There was also a symbiotic arrangement in that the cattle kept on a farm would graze the grass to a level useful for the foraging poultry to find insects and other invertebrates. Old pasture also had a mixture of plants, with differing nutrients, there were also edible wild flowers and seeds and hedges providing further rich veins of nutrient. Once the hedges were grubbed out to make way for modern machinery that ecosystem vanished too.

In the handbook,  Practical Poultry Management written by James E. Rice and Harold E. Botsford, pastured 'green food' was already being referred to  as an additional foodstuff, in much the same way as organic food, once the only sort of farmed food available was/is relegated in mainstream supermarkets to the 'diet' or 'health food' section. In the 1947 edition of their book, the authors wrote this of green food:

'It is rich in vitamins and should supply any that are lacking in the other ration ingredients. In this sense it is a protective feed. A lack of it is often a cause of ill-health and low production. It acts as a tonic, stimulating the appetite and also aids the digestive tract in functioning properly securing for the bird a larger utilisation of the feed consumed.' 

It is interesting to note that although poultry had been pastured for centuries and the above book was first published in 1925, it would not be until a decade later or more from this date, that some of these vitamins would finally be identified and that one of the consequences of their having been so, was to usher in a packaged food for hens in the way of layer pellets.

The ability to analyse the nutrients; vitamins, minerals and amino acids, bioflavenoids etc.,. contained within the forage the bird selected for its diet, would eventually permit the rise of the synthetic vitamin, farm-cultivated protein, industrial minerals and feed additive enzymes. This in turn would enable the chicken to be removed from pasture onto deep litter and finally to be shut away completely severed from the land in the battery or broiler house. Intensive poultry production would also allow for the CAFO system to be self-perpetuating with skimmed milk, blood, bone and feathers becoming a major part of poultry food protein, vitamin and mineral content. In the U.K., for example and within a few short years of the World Wars poultry had gone from a peripheral farming exercise to one of intensive 'monoculture'. Even the linguistics had changed from Poultry 'Husbandry' to Poultry 'Science' and the Poultry 'Industry'. The idea of a bird foraging in a meadow for the whole or even a major part of its diet was out, now man would dictate what it was to eat. For most part too it would be the end of the meadow, hedges and pastured cattle, with vast fields of monocrop cereals, wheat, corn and in the U.S. ubiquitous soya, which was to become the next major alien ingredient to the poultry diet

The concept of using the products from 'rendering', however, was nothing new. The image of the feed bag above is reputed to come from a poultry breeder directory from 1891.

The idea of a food forest to me is not only to supply food for us but also to provide a return to as near as possible free-range foraging for our birds. Within the walls and hedges of our garden, there are several levels of potential foodstuffs from the floor, the sub canopy and the canopy itself. However, due to the actual size of our forest (1000m²) I am very much aware that green foods need to be brought in. To this end, we have over the years established various contacts which have allowed us to make up this shortfall. This includes 'harvesting' green-stuff from neighbouring gardens and fields.

Most people when they think about forage and free food will be thinking about the economic angle and of cutting feed bills but this is only part of the equation. At one of the organic farm open days we went to some years back, the main interest expressed by the conventional farmers, was in the minimal cost of veterinary bills per farm animal. The words of Hippocrates, of food and medicine being interchangeable should perhaps be taken to mean that food and medicine are one and the same because what good nourishing food does is prevent the necessity for ever needing the other. Green food such as chickweed, stellaria media is a medicinal herb, presently being trialled for all kinds of conditions and diseases but the chicken knows it as food. From observation, my birds also know not to over consume it, nor any other food item I present them with, which I find fascinating. That is of course unless there are special circumstances which I will discuss in the following article.

If you have enjoyed this blog and found it interesting then please think about subscribing, sharing it and/or commenting. Please also feel free to ask questions. 

All the very best,

Sue

RELATED POSTS

Providing Forage for Organic Poultry Part 2

Continuing an in-depth look into forage and discussing the what, when, where from and why...read more

 

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 1 Grass

For centuries farmers and homesteaders raised poultry on a forage-based diet supplemented only by a handful of grain and the occasional table scraps..read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 2 Chickweed

Stellaria media an incredible food and medicinal for poultry, an in-depth look at this ubiquitous weed..read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 3 Tree Fodder & Tree Hay

The idea of tree fodder is inextricably linked with the changing landscape, the full domestication of animals, the concept of farming and the clearance of the forests... read more
 

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 4 Roses for Food & Forest

For me the rose is the quintessential forest garden plant, from canopy to ground cover there are so many to choose from ... read more

Food for Free. Fabulous Forage Part 5 Rose Petals

One of the main roses I use for both cooking, medicinals and which my hens very much enjoy is, not surprisingly, rosa gallica Officinalis, or The Apothecary Rose... read more

RETURN TO CONTENTS PAGE  
©  Sue Cross 2016