Add it to your home screen and it opens full screen: no browser bars, one tap away, and everything stays signed in. Free, nothing to download from an app store.
- Tap the Share button in your browser
- Scroll down and choose “Add to Home Screen”
- Open GrowSomeFood from your home screen
- Open your browser’s menu
- Choose “Add to Home screen” or “Install app”
- Open GrowSomeFood from your home screen
Chickweed
The mild, tender 'weed' that carpets cool-season gardens - one of the gentlest and most pleasant wild greens there is, free for the picking through fall, winter, and early spring.
Safety notes Chickweed is a safe, mild, non-toxic edible green - leaves, stems, and flowers are eaten raw or lightly cooked. Identify it correctly: true chickweed has a single line of fine hairs along one side of the stem (switching sides at each pair of leaves), a stretchy inner thread when the stem is pulled apart, and tiny white star flowers with five deeply split petals. Don't confuse it with the toxic scarlet pimpernel (orange/salmon flowers, no line of hairs) or with milky-sapped spurges.
Overview
Chickweed (Stellaria media) is the low, sprawling green mat that fills bare beds, lawns, and edges in the cool, moist months - and it's one of the friendliest wild foods a beginner can learn. Unlike many foraged greens, it's mild and tender, with a fresh, faintly corn-silk-sweet taste that's genuinely pleasant raw in salads (no bitterness or strong flavor), and it's rich in vitamins and minerals. It's named for how poultry love it ('chick-weed'), and chickens, indeed, adore it.
The one thing to knowUnlike many foraged greens, it's mild and tender, with a fresh, faintly corn-silk-sweet taste that's genuinely pleasant raw in salads (no bitterness or strong flavor), and it's rich in vitamins and minerals.
Quick facts
- Sprouts in
- 10 daysRange: 5–18 days
- Soil temperature
- 55 °FRange: 45–65 °F
- Height
- 5 inRange: 2–8 in
- Spread
- 12 inRange: 6–18 in
- Cold
- Takes hard frostdamaged below -20°F
- Heat
- Struggles above 80°F
- Life cycle
- Annual
- Save seeds
- About 55 days after plantingRange: 40–75 days
- Self-sows
- Yes, expect volunteers
- Soil
- Consistently moist
- Water
- Medium
- Plant spacing
- 8 inRange: 4–12 in
When to plant
Fall sowing is open for 20 more days. Next: spring, Feb 27 to Apr 10.
- Direct sow Sep 13 – Nov 8 Open now · 20 days leftAbout 6 weeks before to 2 weeks after your first frost (Oct 25 here)If growing on purpose, sow in fall (or late winter/early spring) in cool, moist, shaded soil - it's a cool-season plant; far more often it simply volunteers and needs no sowing.
- Direct sow Feb 27 – Apr 10 Opens in 131 daysAbout 6 weeks before to at your last frost (Apr 10 here)Sow in earliest spring while soil is cool; chickweed bolts and fades quickly once warm weather arrives.
Frost here: last around Apr 10 (Mar 27 to Apr 24 most years), first around Oct 25. Zone averages, your own yard may run a week or two either way.
Life stages
From the first start to harvest
Follow the growing sequence. Choose a stage to see its care and signs to watch for.
Stage 1 of 3 · The growing sequence
Cool-season sprouting
Day 0 to 10 from sowing
Care at this stage
-
Keep cool and moist
Chickweed germinates in cool, moist conditions - fall, winter (in mild areas), and early spring. Keep a sowing damp; it comes up fast and easily and needs almost no help.
Stages can overlap; weather, variety, and growing conditions change the pace.
Harvest
- Lush, tender green mats in the cool, moist season (fall, winter in mild areas, early spring)
- Harvest before warm weather makes it stringy and before heavy seeding
- Snip the tender mats for salad · every 10 days
- A cool-season carpet
Picking cut and it regrows
Cook with Chickweed
Watch out for
3 to know. None are high-risk for Chickweed. 2 are active in October.
Herbicide / Pollution ContaminationSeverity Medium DisordernowSeason: Mar, Apr, Oct, NovPlants growing in treated lawns, sprayed beds, pastures or croplands, along busy or polluted roadsides, or anywhere the ground around them looks suspiciously weed-free.
Chickweed colonizes cultivated beds and lawns, so a patch in your own garden is usually the safest source - you know what has and has not been put on it.
Plants growing in treated lawns, sprayed beds, pastures or croplands, along busy or polluted roadsides, or anywhere the ground around them looks suspiciously weed-free. Yellowed, twisted or distorted growth on neighboring plants is a sign something has been sprayed recently.
Do not harvest a contaminated plant - there is no washing this off, and no way to tell by looking. The plant itself is fine, so the answer is simply to choose a different site.
Only forage from ground you know has not been treated with herbicides or pesticides, and stay well back from busy roadsides. Ask before harvesting on land you do not manage. If you are not sure, grow your own patch, or gather only from a clean site you have watched across a full season.
A risk to the forager rather than to the plant. This species grows in lawns, gardens, pastures, croplands, field margins, paths and roadsides - exactly the places that get sprayed with herbicides and lawn chemicals, or that collect road pollution and runoff. The plant itself is harmless; what can make it unsafe to eat is where it has been growing.
Misidentification (Scarlet Pimpernel)Severity Medium DisordernowSeason: Mar, Apr, May, Sep, OctA chickweed look-alike with ORANGE, salmon, or blue flowers, square-ish stems, and NO line of hairs - that's scarlet pimpernel, not chickweed.
A chickweed look-alike with ORANGE, salmon, or blue flowers, square-ish stems, and NO line of hairs - that's scarlet pimpernel, not chickweed.
Don't harvest misidentified plants; learn the reliable ID markers before foraging chickweed.
Confirm the three chickweed markers - line of hairs along one side of the stem, stretchy inner thread, white five-part star flowers; when in doubt, don't eat it.
Not a threat to the plant but a forager safety issue: chickweed can be confused with the toxic scarlet pimpernel (Anagallis/Lysimachia arvensis), a similar low sprawling plant with orange/salmon (or blue) flowers that is poisonous.
Aggressive Self-Seeding & SpreadSeverity Low DisorderSeason: Mar–MayRipe seed heads or stalks shedding onto the ground, and a flush of volunteer seedlings coming up well beyond where the parent plant stood - most obvious in the first weeks of the plant's growing season.
Chickweed completes its cycle fast and reseeds prolifically as a cool-season weed. It is shallow-rooted and trivially easy to pull, and harvesting it is simply the pleasant version of weeding it.
Ripe seed heads or stalks shedding onto the ground, and a flush of volunteer seedlings coming up well beyond where the parent plant stood - most obvious in the first weeks of the plant's growing season.
Hoe or hand-pull volunteers while they are small and before they set seed - the existing seed bank will keep germinating for several seasons either way, so this is an ongoing job rather than a single fix. Where the volunteers are themselves edible, harvesting them is the easiest control, but only ever eat or grow on a seedling you can positively identify.
Cut, deadhead or harvest the seed heads before they ripen and shatter, which is far easier than dealing with what they drop. Where the plant is grown deliberately, keep it in defined rows or a contained bed so that volunteers are obvious, and site it only where naturalizing is welcome.
Not a pest but a management issue. This plant sets and sheds seed prolifically, so anything left to ripen builds a persistent seed bank in the soil and returns as a heavy flush of volunteers the following season. Much of that seed stays viable for years, which is why one season of letting it go can take several seasons to undo.
Good & bad neighbors
All of these are traditional pairings. The evidence is thin, so treat them as a nudge, not a rule.
Plant nearby
-
Two classic edible lawn/garden weeds foraged for greens - dandelion for a bold bitter leaf, chickweed for a mild tender one; together they cover the flavor range of wild salad greens.
-
Both are cool-season leafy greens; chickweed volunteers in the same cool, moist beds as lettuce and can be harvested alongside it as a free bonus salad green (just keep it from smothering seedlings).
-
A cool-season crop that shares chickweed's love of cool, moist, rich soil; chickweed makes a good living mulch and free green between spinach rows if kept in check.
Grower tips
Notes from growers, tagged with the zone they grow in. A person reads every post before it appears.
Nobody has posted about Chickweed yet. The first one usually saves someone a season.
Free account. Your post shows your grower name and zone, never your email.