What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are continuing our

amazing epic week with Marie Phil Yun, a forager, a writer, a gardener, cocktail

master, the author of Forage Harvest Feast, and the blog 66 square feet, which is how she got her beginnings, I believe.

If that's right, Marie, in sort of apartment small space gardening which is really cool right up my

alley today we're talking about common milkweed which is a gardener I think we

always think milkweed and then we think the monarch butterflies it's just such an amazing plant for them but I recently

learned and my recently I mean a one minute ago when I was talking to Marie off

recording that you can actually eat common milkweed and I didn't know that so maybe

we could get the foragers perspective on on milkweed Marie. Yeah I would love

to give the foragers perspective as a forager who eats common milkweed, I'm sometimes used to people looking at me in some horror because they have heard about milk reeds.

They know about monarch butterflies whose populations are in real danger and they think I'm

taking the milkweed out of the mouths of the baby caterpillars. So I'm kind of defensive

about common milkweed.

So I'm making a distinction.

I'm saying common milkweed.

That's a particular name for a species,

one species of milkweed, and that species is Asclepia Suriaka.

It's a very particular species.

The good news is that in North America there are dozens of species of milkweed and the monarch butterfly caterpillars

like to eat them all.

So foragers know about common milkweed because it's one of the very few plants that you can actually eat,

I call it nose to tail eating in a botanical sense. It's not an animal, but you start right at the bottom in the

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