Well of course you can eat caragana flowers. They have a pleasant, mildly sweet flavour. Kids on the prairies have been doing it for generations without ill effect – though they generally stop after they realize the blossoms sometimes harbour little crawlies.
Found a way to get rid of them for you (slightly prune).
We used a good size trackhoe this week then tandem disks and cultivators. Took out 300ft of them. I expect only about 1/2 of them to come back up so we can hit with more cultivators.
Like the war on terrorism it is a slow and hard-fought battle. But I am winning 🙂
Weeds with bark!
Perhaps Caragana are a little like the portulaca weed that we continue to try and control in our fields and garden. They thrive in hot dry conditions so did very well through the drought. Someone said “I am sure that you could dig them all up, put them in a pile, pour gasoline over them and burn them, only to have them come back from the ashes.
Daniel
Not only would I eat the flowers, but about a month after the flowers were gone, little pods approximately 1/10 the size of peas would grow and I would eat those too. mmmm tasty.
You can eat the flowers of zucchini plants too, esp. pan fried in an egg batter.
qwerty,
You didn’t eat enough of them, they’re still spreading.
I liked to chew on the green pods, but don’t remember if I ever tried the yellow flowers. They grew all around both my homes as a child, and now I own land with them as the primary “hedge”. My Dad’s taken to cutting them down with his newly modified electric to gas chainsaw. He had been cutting them by handsaw for excercise, but found it was taking much too long.
In the right place they are a good windbreak and hedge, but I can see why some people consider them weeds.
Oh, and you’re not a rural SK expert until you’ve been smacked in the eye with a caragana branch. It’s right up there with shooting your first gopher…