39 Common Weeds That You Can Eat or Use for Medicine

Step outside your door and look around at your lawn and garden. You probably see a few common weeds. Now look again. You might also be looking at dinner or the ingredients for a poultice to ease that rash that’s been nagging you.

It’s easy to disregard weeds as a troublesome nuisance to be yanked out or poisoned at the first opportunity. But many weeds are not only edible, they’re also medicinal and can improve your health, as well.

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Consider the dandelion. A few decades ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the US who was happy to see the yellow flowers in their garden.

Today, so many foragers delight in using the leaves, flowers, roots, and even the buds. You can even buy dandelion greens at the grocery store. It’s a rags-to-riches success story for a plant that was once mercilessly destroyed.

Now, this list could go on forever, so we’ll stick to the North American species that you’re most likely to find in your yard or nearby spaces like abandoned lots or roadsides.

Here are the “weeds” we’ll discuss coming up:

You might be surprised by how many edible wild plants are out there.

Of all the known plants, edibles make up about a quarter of them. A vast majority – about 70 percent – of edible wild plants are used primarily for the greens, with just five percent of wild foods being made up of seeds and nuts.

That means you probably can’t survive by eating weeds alone. But every single weed on this list has at least one medicinal use, so even if you don’t plan to eat all of these, they still have value.

It goes without saying