[Music] hi I'm Maro from Wild food UK I'm in my garden today and it's the 12th of March which means I'm getting some of my flower beds and my vegetable patches ready for spring now for me and the unfortunate ones amongst you viewers there's a weed that we're all having to deal with at this time of year it's just down here let's have a look here we have the very young shoot of ground Elder that will mature into this sort of trifoliate compound leaf which will then grow some extra leaves at the bottom and sometimes those extra leaves split into two so it can be three five or seven leaves in the compound system you can see those leaves have a serrated edge to them and they're in the sort of typical triangular Leaf system of the apacs this is ground Elder iodium podagraria and iodium means um I think the foot of the goat apparently goats have feet a little bit like that shape not totally sure about that now um this is a plant that was apparently brought over by the Romans either as a pot herb a parsley flavored pot herb or as a a fodder for their animals we're not totally sure obviously that was a long time ago it has been eaten in the UK pretty much ever since though certainly Victorian times now the best edible part of the plant are these young unopened shoots they're nice and sweet with a sort of parsley stroke celery type flavor those leaves are going to mature and become much less shiny here's some nice shiny ones and then they'll mature and get maybe five times as big as this one here and the leaves go matte when they go matte they uh have a a slightly different flavor it's slightly less sweet more pungent and then when they get to maturity five times as big as this they also get quite a papery texture so I could still put this in my salads I suppose at this stage but when they get mature you kind of need to cook them boil them up and use them as green or we make span a Cooper out of them so it is a useful edible it'll mature and uh if I didn't do anything about it it would take over this whole flower bed here I'll drop in a photo now of how clustered the leaves can get it really is an invasive weed um the only lookalikes that we have for it really in the UK are wild and Angelica I'll drop in a a photo of very young wild Angelica now you can see it's quite similar but it doesn't have the three and five leaf system the leaves are just that little bit more separated still serrated very quickly though wild Angelica will grow many more leaflets in its compound system as you see there the other lookalike which gives it its name is the elder tree there a leaf of uh an elder tree now the leaves on the choots of an elder tree will be coming from a very treel likee little stem so that's how you tell the difference between those you don't want to eat your Elder that's toxic wild Angelica is not toxic but it is not very tasty at all whereas this are lovely ground Elder shoots I do find nice and tasty and there certainly a welcome addition to my salads um but as I said they're not a welcome addition to my garden they're very high in vitamin C that's another good thing they've got going for them apparently there's four times as much vitamin C weight for weight in ground Elder as there is in a lemon so that's a a nice thing about them when they mature as well the flowers are quite pretty you've got I'll drop in a photo again you've got that umbelliferous flower there it's in the AP your carrot family and uh those flowers are quite pretty that'll be about 2T tall and again they'll take over areas in the wild and in your garden if you let them I've heard you don't want to eat it after it's flowered because it can become a bit of a laxative apparently a bit of a diuretic and also I've heard it might become a bit of a sfic which means that I suppose if all that's true if you ate enough of it it could send you to sleep and you might wake up in a bit of a mess so quite pretty quite tasty quite nutritious but unfortunately the big problem with ground Elder is how invasive it is so I'm sure a lot of you watching this video just want to know how to get rid of it um unfortunately I don't have any conclusive answers for you so in this bed um I uh would love to get rid of it because I have to keep coming back and weeding it um plenty of times in in the year um but I can't dig this bed up it has uh or the plant ground Elder has these risom underground these like spaghetti like roots and if you leave even a centimeter of those in when you're weeding them it will grow back from those and any little offshoot uh from those roots will just continue to grow and any nodes on the ryom they'll produce plants as well so unless you could dig down a foot or so and siiv the soil to get rid of all of the roots you're not going to have much luck getting rid of it um out of a flower bed I've heard of people trying to starve it of light before by putting plastic over the top of areas where it's growing uh apparently you have to do that for two or three or even Four Seasons and then it can still come back after that it'll live underneath weed mats and then as soon as the weed mats start to Decay it'll come back up through those so uh I have heard of one person who assures me that he just kept cutting it back and it never came back after he'd done that for three or four years but I simply don't believe that because I've been trying to control it in my garden for longer than that so uh cutting it back apparently does you no good whatsoever it doesn't weaken the root system and the ryom at all which leaves you one option if you really want to get rid of it and it's an option that I just can't use in this flower bed and it's not one I would like to use at all and that would be using a strong glyphosate weed killer so glyphosate was developed by Monsanto who are now owned by buer uh back in the 70s and that's the weed killing agent in Roundup and things like that there are so many conflicting stories about the potential uh impact on your health and animals health and the environment of glyphosate that at the moment uh I am just not willing to use it in my garden apparently uh to kill ground Elder you can't use just standard shot B um strength life say you have to get stronger stuff and you have to paint it on the leaves now if you do that any animals in your garden that come into contact with those leaves or lick those leaves are at risk for a couple of days it can stay in the soil for uh months and months I think anything up to 280 days um and there are reports I'm not don't shoot the messenger here I'm just telling you what I've read so say what you want in the comments below but there are reports of it being carcinogenic and certainly its environmental impact in this little flower bed would be that my beautiful Peruvian lily here I'm not really an ornamental Gardener but this was here when I moved in and the flowers of that Peruvian lily are my favorite flowers that grow in the garden and if I was to use glyphosate in this flower bed then there's a good chance that I would kill off my Peruvian lily and potentially other plants in this flower bed as well so here's my plea for help people if any of you know how I can control the immense amount of ground Elder in my garden please let me know and everyone watching this video would love to hear your ideas in the comments below at the moment my only way of controlling it is to pick it and eat it which isn't such a bad thing if you want to find out more book a foraging course or go to Wild food uk.com [Music]