You Can EAT Milkweed?!
The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers
Epic Gardening
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2019
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most of us know about milkweed in terms of growing it for the monarch butterflies, but did you know it’s actually edible? I had NO idea until Marie turned me on to it, so now I want to cultivate it in my garden to EAT and I hope you do too.
Connect With Marie Viljoen:
Marie Viljoen is a forager, writer, and cocktail master (that last one is my own personal opinion - Kevin). She’s the author of Forage, Harvest, Feast: A Wild-Inspired Cuisine and an urban gardener as well.
Order Field Guide to Urban Gardening
My book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, is available for sale! It's a complete guide to growing plants, no matter where you live. Here's how to order:
EPIC Raised Beds
I'm carrying Birdies Garden Products raised beds, the ones I use exclusively in my front yard garden. They're a corrugated Aluzinc steel, powder-coated raised bed designed to last a lifetime.
Follow Epic Gardening
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are continuing our |
| 0:06.4 | amazing epic week with Marie Phil Yun, a forager, a writer, a gardener, cocktail |
| 0:11.0 | master, the author of Forage Harvest Feast, and the blog 66 square feet, which is how she got her beginnings, I believe. |
| 0:19.0 | If that's right, Marie, in sort of apartment small space gardening which is really cool right up my |
| 0:23.6 | alley today we're talking about common milkweed which is a gardener I think we |
| 0:28.3 | always think milkweed and then we think the monarch butterflies it's just such an amazing plant for them but I recently |
| 0:36.0 | learned and my recently I mean a one minute ago when I was talking to Marie off |
| 0:40.0 | recording that you can actually eat common milkweed and I didn't know that so maybe |
| 0:43.9 | we could get the foragers perspective on on milkweed Marie. Yeah I would love |
| 0:49.2 | 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. |
| 1:00.0 | They know about monarch butterflies whose populations are in real danger and they think I'm |
| 1:06.1 | taking the milkweed out of the mouths of the baby caterpillars. So I'm kind of defensive |
| 1:12.0 | about common milkweed. |
| 1:14.0 | So I'm making a distinction. |
| 1:16.0 | I'm saying common milkweed. |
| 1:18.0 | That's a particular name for a species, |
| 1:21.0 | one species of milkweed, and that species is Asclepia Suriaka. |
| 1:26.0 | It's a very particular species. |
| 1:28.0 | The good news is that in North America there are dozens of species of milkweed and the monarch butterfly caterpillars |
| 1:35.8 | like to eat them all. |
| 1:38.5 | So foragers know about common milkweed because it's one of the very few plants that you can actually eat, |
| 1:45.2 | 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 |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Epic Gardening, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Epic Gardening and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.