donkeyherder , 5 days ago

I’m pretty sure this beauty is Queen Anne’s Lace and not one of its more feral cousins.
Watching the clover patch grow out this year has been even more fun than last year, because all the biennials I didn’t even recognize last year are flowering now.
Two summers ago, when I first got the landscapers to help me turn the back yard into a garden, this was just grass around the dogwoods. We were putting in lots of stone borders, so I had them border this area, rip out the grass, and put down a couple inches of bulk topsoil. I sowed white clover and topped the dirt with some straw. Last year the clover came in strong, and there were a few daisies. I didn’t pull any weird plants that I didn’t recognize as baddies. This year I’ve got the clover and daisies, and both foxgloves and snapdragons (but don’t ask me to put the right name to them, lol!), and now this QAL!
These guys are carrot cousins. All the seed sites say they’ll cross pollinate with domestic carrots and make toxic hybrids. But when I was looking them up just now, I was surprised to see that the herbalist/wild foraging internet says QAL is edible??
I’m not very good at growing carrots, so I don’t think I’ll try to save seed. But I am curious - does anyone know for sure if QAL is edible?
Maybe #grownforagedharvested people would know? #gardening

Another plant, this one with many smaller flower head still unfolded. We’re looking at it from the side, to see the hairs on the stems of the plant. The smaller flower spikes look interestingly alien, with little green stems radiating out from the immature green cup of buds. From the back they look like a kid’s drawing of the sun!
One more umbel, with just the outermost flowers open. It’s got a flying insect of some kind bedded down for the night near the center. It’s brown, honeybee sized but not a bee.