I’m in Florida this morning, and found a patch of Bidens alba we could pick and eat for breakfast.

Rachel sautéed the greens and we put them on our scrambled eggs and sausage.

The taste of Bidens is rich and green. It tastes like it’s good for you, but not in a bad way.

The plant is easy to identify, with its daisy-like flowers and prickly seed heads. There seems to be some confusion between B. alba and B. pilosa, but I don’t think it really matters. It’s this thing that we’re eating:

We harvest the new growth, pinching out the top leaves and stem. This is what I look for to harvest:

I filmed a video on Bidens alba long ago:

It’s the Florida weed I miss the most. Bees love it, the greens are good to eat, and it grows rapidly and produces plenty of new leaves all through the year – unless a frost takes it out.

I don’t find the leaves to be particularly good raw, but I like them a lot when stir-fried. They are not bitter, but earthy.

At one point when we lived in the Sunshine state, I realized that during most of the year, Florida provided us with so many nutritious greens we could forage that there was really very little reason to grow our own greens, other than a few we really liked, like moringa and collards.

If you learn how to forage, there’s always free food for the picking. EatTheWeeds.com is a good place to start.

Now I need to see if Bidens alba will grow in my Alabama backyard.