Common garden weeds in Southern California
gregalder.com
gregalder.com
If you know you have it, break a bunch off, wash it in a bowl to clean it, and also to harvest the tiny black seeds - dump the water+seeds out where you want more.
It does literally grow like a weed, and it's pretty good for you, with a fair amount of ALA/EPA omega 3's for a plant and vitamin C.
There are plants of a family called spurges that can be mistaken for purslane and are toxic. I don't have enough expertise to talk about how likely it is that you'll mistake spurge for purslane or how to identify.
Article describing differences between the two plants: https://lawnphix.com/lawn-care/spurge-vs-purslane-lawn-weeds... unlike mushrooms or potential poison hemlock lookalikes I don't want to discourage foraging this, just take it slow (try small amount of anything new before eating a lot of it) and you'll be fine.
Thanks for writing this, it’s been bothering me for a year, and without your comment I wouldn’t have thought about the possibility of a connection.
Over in Adelaide, South Oz, an extremely common weed is 'Oxalis' (TIL: a type of 'Wood Sorrel'[1]) It's also called 'Sourgrass' or 'Sour-Sobs', colloquially around here. It seems to pop up nearly-anywhere-that-it-can and very quickly too once it's rained a bit at the start of winter. Also dies-off completely for a good chunk of the year and I think it has a bulb-like way (as well as its tiny seeds) of staying-there.
We also have bigger-than-garden-level problems (in the state) with stuff like Gorse, Broom, Blackberry (which seems especially invasive), Patterson's Curse, loads more! Heck even Nasturtium gets a pretty-good-go around here, though it's apparently not considered invasive yet [2].
One of the pieces of information the app gives you is what is the plant considered every where in the world. The types of categories I've seen on it are native, cultivated, exotic, invasive, and potentially invasive. The app is called Picture This. I do not want to endorse it, cause it is annoying to use sometimes. But I cannot lie that it has been extremely useful. I am very close to paying for it, since as a fellow programmer I understand the people making this need to make a living.
I have jasmine as a ground over and sour sobs through it are very difficult to weed out each year. Drives me nuts.
Those from the article that we get here are thistle and mallow AFAIK.
Sure, it's a hardy-AF plant in SA (stays green, yaay) but it also completely dominates the landscape that it grows in, and has a particular smell (I'd call a stink, surely there are some that probably like the smell, so this is just an opinion).
I guess it also just doesn't seem to be going-anywhere to me, sorta stuck in its meme, especially if it's meant to be there as an ornamental plant. I know it has lots of plant-relatives over in Southern Africa where it is from.. and there's some cool variety there.. where's the breeding? It seems like people in SA planting them everywhere just fell into some default-standard-Agapantha-attractor and can't climb-out. Seems like a bit of a lack of imagination to me.
The photo for what the article called thistle looked a bit more like a dandylion-of-sorts to me, I'd usually expect thistle to be spikier, but maybe this is what young ones do look like? I've certainly seen some (very spiky, vaguely artichoke-like) thistles about in SA as well!
I think there might be a huge variety of thistle forms. You get the gamut from small and smooth up to the thicker, spikier ones as far as Scotch Thistles, plus low, flat ones that escape the mower like stemless thistle - https://www.google.com/search?q=stemless+thistle&tbm=isch
In a backyard garden sense, I can cope with thistles, but things that infest soil like soursobs, mint, dichondra can get annoying. Watsonia, ivy and couch grass also give me grief.
The leaves are edible (but sour, as its nicknames suggest) and can make a nice addition to a salad.
I have a type of bentgrass in my lawn (South Carolina, Transition Zone) lawn considered to be either a weedy grass or a desirable grass used on some golf courses. Of course, when I looked to buy seed for it this year to see about filling in some patches left by Po Annua I found it to cost several multiples of typical “proper” species (Bluegrass, Fescue)
So you have the gamut of worthless to worth-weight-in-gold depending on who bought them the house.
The acorn woodpeckers and/or squirrels keep planting them in places I cannot afford to have a tree. Its roots would eventually cause a lot of damage.
It can be useful to distinguish between weeds, which are wrong plant in wrong place, and invasives, which cause problems everywhere. Dandelion can be a weed, but also can be useful, Purslane is like that. None of those are considered invasive in San Diego, that requires removal. But the other aren't useful and spotted spurge is toxic.
I am adding more areas to my yard where I put a small garden fence and let whatever grow (minus trees), which will be mostly weeds I presume. This will help the local bees and insects and birds. I think there is a movement to do more of this, but don't recall the name of it.
After we destroy a piece of land, its gonna be weeds that will bring it back to life.
If you’re in our usda zone he’s worth a follow.
Edit: did some research, looks like he's right. Difference between the two is alternating leaves instead of side by side, and spurge has a milky sap. But otherwise appear the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cannabis
SoCal is not one of the places you would expect to find much of it, according to the article. "the plant has re-seeded naturally and grown wild in states such as Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, with Indiana reporting the largest concentrations nationally"