Hey, sluts!

I'm Jeanette.

And I'm Jonathan.

Welcome to our special bonus episodes where we try weeds. So what weed do you have to try today, Jonathan?

Okay, so I have a question for you. What is one common garden weed that you have that maybe you're pulling up or whatever? that you could sometimes mistaken for a beneficial plant?

Oh, interesting. Do I even pull any weeds up?

Yeah, I guess I should have started with that.

I think I get a little confused sometimes with flowers and like if it's the start of maybe like a cosmo or something else. I tend to consider everything beneficial and rarely think of things as weeds. Like, so it's tough, but what, what is one?

It's not a trick. It's not a trick question.

Okay.

So it's common yellow wood sorrel. Do you know, do you know what I'm talking about?

Common yellow wood sorrel.

So it's often mistaken for a clover. So it has, it has like 3 very lobed composite leaves and it has little tiny yellow flowers in the middle. Sometimes you find them like quite small. Sometimes they're like quite tall and they have, the taller ones will have like a fuzzy stem. Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

And they're sometimes called, like, I've seen it named nature's Skittles or sour grass because it has, it's actually high in oxalic acid, like purslane and spinach and rhubarb. So you have to be careful, right, with oxalic acid. If you eat too much of it, you can get kidney stones. So what I did is I took the wood sorrel and I had read in a book that you could blend it and steep it in cold water and it makes a really nice refreshing lemonade. I did that. This is what I got.

Okay.

It kind of looks like pee.

Or Gatorade.

Right. Gatorade. You're right. Yellow Gatorade.

Gatorade. Gatorade. So you, you took it and just blended it or you steeped it?

So what I did is I have like a stick blender, you know, an immersion blender, and I just pulsed it a couple times. Then I let it sit for a couple minutes and then I, I I strained it and I put a little bit of maple syrup because I thought it might be a little bit too sour.

Yeah.

So this is what it comes to.

So you're trying your yellow wood sorrel.

And it smells like— I feel like we say this all the time, but it smells really grassy.

All the weeds, they're just different types of grass.

But it does smell like wood sorrel. Like when you pick it, it smells quite like sour. There's like a distinctive sour smell.

He's trying it. He sipped it. Is he? Is he going for a second? He's going for a sassy second.

I really like it. Okay. So at first, when you take a sip, at first I get like the sweetness, the sweetness comes first, but then there's like at the back of, like at the corners of your mouth or my mouth at least, there's like a, like definitely salivation action going on. Like in the way that a lemon would make you salivate a bit.

So I guess that's why it's like a lemonade, not like a tea.

And it does kind of get a bit of like a, there's some grassy notes, only like a subtle, light, like non-bitter grassy notes, the same way that a good olive oil would have those green bright notes. Bright.

How do you know it's not poisonous or are there any poisonous—

I don't know, actually. That's a really great question. So I've eaten it before. Like I've eaten it just like I've grabbed it up and like munched on it. Later in the season, the seed pods look like tiny little like pea pods. And you can eat those too. I just know what it is because I like, I I've often mistaken it. I think there was like a time where I realized it was not clover, and then since then I can't unsee it. So basically one of the distinctive features is it looks like clover, but it has like a really— it has an indent in the middle of the leaf. Does close slightly at nighttime.

Yeah. Interesting. And so are you eating just the leaves or the flower?

You can eat all of it. And I just, I pulled it out from the soil. I cut off the roots and the whole stem and leaves are in here. I think I have some more sitting on the kitchen table that is probably a little bit stronger because it's been steeping for a lot longer.

Cool.

I love it.

We're like survivalists now. We can just go out in our yard and make a salad. Any emergency, we have drinks, we have a salad.

Still want to be like refreshed, right? Like on those hot climate catastrophe, hot fiery days. Yeah.

The last speck of dirty water, you turn into a pleasant lemonade. We'll have to post your recipe for Jonathan's Yellow Wood Sorrel Summer Lemonade Spritzer.

Yes, totally. Our recipe book will be coming out at the end of the season and you can buy it from our gift shop.

Or our 2027 Plant Slots Almanac. Maybe we'll have recipes in the back of that.

Right. Wait, I have to get on that.

Yeah. I'll just need a couple extra weeks vacation.

Well, thanks for getting slutty with us.

If you liked this bonus episode, make sure you listen to our regular long audio-only episodes anywhere you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to like, subscribe, send to your friends. Listen to it while you're trying to sleep, send it to your aunties, your grandma, play it on the loudspeaker and like drive around your neighborhood blasting it.

Oh, that's a good one too.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right.

Bye, sluts.