Bittercress
spicy greens for the cooler months.
It’s leafy green vegetable time at weedom, and we’ve been into the chickweed, shepherd’s purse, the ground ivy, purple dead nettles and dandelions. Wintercress is hanging about, and we’re waiting for some violets, baby plantain and other goodies to add. Kitties are already getting stoned on their favorite catnip which has appeared in generous clumps that we fail to weed, because we like it as much as they do, but for slightly different reasons. If you haven’t already done so, we urge you to get back to the 2023 late winter and spring archive to find all the free, nutritious greens you could be eating right now. Think of them as the bottle brush for your G.I. tract, to clear out the heavier fare you were eating over the winter.
The weed of the week is Cardamine hirsuta, one of our types of bittercress which we passed over last year due to the abundance of other seasonal offerings. Sprouting in the fall, this is one that can even help you through the winter, though it’s pretty tiny and ground hugging during that time. By now you can harvest some pretty significant masses of leaves and eat them raw or cooked. The name bittercress is applied to a group of related cardamine species which are believed to have invaded the U.S. from Eurasia. We’re featuring this distinctive one because it has good flavor, can grow to a decent edible bulk, and become fairly showy with its tiny flowers and exploding seed pods.
The bitter cress name is a sort of misnomer since the flavor is really a super mild, peppery, horseradish type. It helps out a salad well, and can add an alternative spice to life for all the people who think that cilantro tastes like soap. If you have had watercress, our weed is like that, but milder. Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Wild Edible Plants calls this plant ‘shotweed’, apparently due to the exploding seed pods.
There are about 200 species or so in the Cardamine genus, of the family Brassicaceae, or mustard family. Most of these feature edible leaves, so that if you happened to confuse one species for another, disaster would not likely result. We have rubbed the leaves, smelled the classic mustardy flavor, and munched on similar looking species, before keying them out to species level, and have lived to write about it :-D. The elongated, or needle like pods with seeds all in a row, and the small four petaled flowers are other classic signs of the mustards. Some species, like our featured one, retain the familiar basal leaves as they send up little flowering stems, and others grow quite tall, losing their basal leaves entirely when they flower and go to seed.
The leaf of bittercress is compound, with leaflets emerging in a pinnate pattern from a winged rachis (central stem-like portion, like that on a feather). The terminal leaflet at the far end of the rachis is often distinctively kidney shaped. The little leaflets along the sides of the rachis are broadly elliptical to almost round. They are arranged such that the upper angle between opposite leaflets is less than 180 degrees. There might be 20 to almost 100 of these compound leaves arranged in a rosette pattern. The bittercress plant germinates and grows in the fall, surviving in full or part throughout the winter, and fully recovering to flower in the spring to early summer depending upon the climate.
Floral stems possess compound leaves in the lower portion with narrower leaflets than those on the rosette. These can range from green to a purply red in color. White flowers with 4 sepals and 4 petals emerge from the stem as it grows upward. Cardamine hirsuta flowers have 4 stamens and a single elogated pistil which rises above the petals. The similar, (and also edible) Cardamine flexuosa plant has flowers with 6 stamens. The pistils mature into long, thin (edible) pods called siliques, containing seeds in a single row. The pods dry out by early summer and will explode when touched, sending seeds everywhere.
Is there a plant with more potassium per gram? Maybe, but we haven’t found it yet in our wanderings. On a weight basis, this weed beats the bananas, kiwi fruits and every other green leafy so far, including the dandelion. If you like this bitter cress a whole lot you can get within the prescription dose range of potassium. Approximately 1 percent of its fresh weight is potassium, according to Basumatary and Nazary, who cooked this and 5 other weeds up for nutritional analysis. About 4% of its fresh weight is protein and it supplies about 35 mg. of vitamin C per 100 grams, which is significant. As our weed is an accumulator of minerals you should pick yours far away from the battery factory or other polluted places. Flavonoids, alkaloids, carotenoids, coumarins, saponins, plant steroids and plenty of excellent fiber are among its detectable constituents.
Cardimine hirsuta is probably of widest distribution throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and both sides of the U.S. and Canada. It appears to be sparser in the central U.S. that is west of the Mississippi river. However people in the eastern half of the U.S. can also have Cardamine impatiens, the narrow-leaf bittercress, (which appears to have invaded our greenhouse), and C. bulbosa. Most of the states can enjoy C. pennsylvanica, Pennsylvania cress. Those in the far coldest areas of the U.S. and Canada will find C. pratensis, cuckoo flower. Among other edible Cardamines are C. Amara, C. flexuosa, C. parviflora and C. concatenata (cutleaf toothwort, pictured as a woodland spring ephemeral in the Catnip 3 bonus section). Almost everywhere in the world there is a spicy Cardamine species waiting for your salad.
Lastly, you can eat the leaves of the Cardamine hirsuta raw when they’re tender. They go everywhere that you can hide some spicy green leaves, and can replace a lot of fancy microgreens in your sandwiches. After they’ve aged a bit, you can use them as a pot herb, cooking them as you please by boiling or stir frying, or in the hot spinach dip. The flowers are tougher eating, and so are the unripe pods, which are so tiny that collecting them separately burn more calories than you can get from them. Besides the plentiful potassium content, the other “don’t eat a whole bale” warning is due to the seeds. The oil contained in the ripe seeds of Cardamine species contains some erucic acid which is pervasive among the mustard family. This oil has been both blamed for a cardiovascular “toxic oil syndrome”, and praised for the beneficial effects of Lorenzo’s oil in treating the X-linked genetic defect that causes adrenoleukodystrophy. You’re not going to get significant erucic acid from those tiny little seed pods :-D and you’re probably getting much more from other dietary sources including rapeseed oil ( or even the (low) 2% erucic acid version, called canola oil). So enjoy those yummy greens, and feel free to share what you find and how you’re cooking them up.
Where We Dig
1. Cardamine (Bittercress) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. Accessed March 18, 2024. https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/cardamine/
2. Cardamine diphylla (Broad-leaved Toothwort, Crinkleroot, Pepper root, Toothroot, Twin-leaved Toothwort, Two-leaf Toothwort) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. Accessed March 18, 2024. https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/cardamine-diphylla/
3. Rojas-Sandoval J. Cardamine flexuosa (wavy bittercress). CABI Compendium. 2020;CABI Compendium:112949. doi:10.1079/cabicompendium.112949
4. Cardamine hirsuta (hairy bitter-cress): Go Botany. Accessed March 18, 2024. https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/cardamine/hirsuta/?key=dichotomous#dkey
5. Cardamine pensylvanica (Pennsylvania bitter-cress): Go Botany. Accessed March 18, 2024. https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/cardamine/pensylvanica/
6. Jordan D. Eat the Weeds: A Forager’s Guide to Identifying and Harvesting 274 Wild Foods. Adventure Publications; 2023.
7. Galanty A, Grudzińska M, Paździora W, Paśko P. Erucic Acid—Both Sides of the Story: A Concise Review on Its Beneficial and Toxic Properties. Molecules. 2023;28(4):1924. doi:10.3390/molecules28041924
8. Hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) | Identify that Plant. Accessed March 19, 2024. https://identifythatplant.com/hairy-bittercress-cardamine-hirsuta/
9. Basumatary S, Narzary H. Nutritional value, phytochemicals and antioxidant property of six wild edible plants consumed by the Bodos of North-East India. Mediterranean Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism. 2017;10(3):259-271. doi:10.3233/MNM-17168
10. Plant Portrait - Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine Hirsuta).; 2014. Accessed March 19, 2024.
11. Thayer S. Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern & Central North America. Forager’s Harvest; 2023.
12. USDA Plants Database. Accessed March 19, 2024. https://plants.usda.gov/home/plantProfile?symbol=CAHI3
13. April 6 SN|, 2017. Weed of the Month: Hairy Bittercress. Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Accessed March 18, 2024. https://www.bbg.org/article/weed_of_the_month_hairy_bittercress
Just snow here in Colorado... but soon, the lion dandies will pop up. :-)
I did I tour of my backyard this afternoon and found sow thistle, horseweed, chickweed, wild garlic, carolina geramium, wild blue violet, and hairy bittercress-- all in one section of the yard. The other side of the yard and the front have different weeds that I need to identify. I plan to go back out to photograph and ID everything and create a spreadsheet of uses.