What’s the most unexpectedly useful thing growing on your property right now?

This spring at Willow Acre I’ve started noticing something interesting: some of the most valuable and fascinating things on the property are not necessarily the things I intentionally planted.

Brittlestem (inkcap) mushrooms erupted from last year’s wood chips after rain. The comfrey is feeding bees and building biomass faster than I expected. Even the “weeds” are beginning to tell me things about soil, moisture, and succession.

Permaculture changes the way you look at land. You stop asking:

“How do I control this?”

and start asking:

“What is this place trying to become?”

So I’m curious:

What’s the most unexpectedly useful, beautiful, edible, medicinal, ecological, or otherwise surprising thing growing on your property right now?

The most unexpected thing was three cockle-bur plants.  Mr Google says it is used in medicine though I will pass.

Last year I actually used bindweed to bind plants to vertical supports.

This year I hope to finally use mulberry branches for the hoops in a low tunnel.

The tendrils on my grape vine are my favorite garden snack, very lemony.

My wife has been feeding the bunnies wild lettuce, they really like it!

Comfrey is the one that keeps surprising me. I planted it as a chop-and-drop and now it's basically running the whole fertility side of things. The bees are on it constantly too, which I didn't expect at all.

Stinging nettle, stinging nettle, stinging nettle...!

I love the tea. I love teaching people how to pluck it and eat it right off the plant. It won't be eaten by deer. And despite its fantastic taste and flavor, it also happens to be quite nutritious.

Birds drop a lot of stuff. I let most of it grow. After identification, I know its value for me and it's ecological value. When it is not in the way, I let it grow. Otherwise I replant, or just chop and drop.

The most surprising useful plants are bay leaf, which starts to pop up everywhere. They are supposed not to grow well in my climate, but I have more bay leaf than I can ever use. I want to dig them up, to give away, but they grow very close to the trunks of my fruittrees. So I chop and give away.

The most ecological surprise is Enchanted Nightshade (Circaea Lutetiana). All kind of folklore goes with this plant. The Dutch name translates as "witch herb". After identification, I read that people used to see it as a warning that one went too deep into the woods. I must be doing something right, when it grows under my grapes and blackberries right next to my paved path on my urban alotment (just to be sure, I take care not to step on it, because I might be lost forever).

I second stinging nettle! It abounds on my property and along the local creeks, and so I have never actually cultivated it due to how prolific - and prickly - it is. I rely on it heavily for nutrition in the winter, and harvest many pounds to blanch and freeze. I tend to remove it from my garden areas, since it does so well on its own. But this year, life conspired to change that.

My wild nettle patches have been hit by some sort of pest and are greatly stressed - I was devastated to find the majority of plants yellowed and stunted.  Meanwhile my feral property patches have thinned markedly due to beaver intrusion in the creek bottom and a resulting change to the overall moisture level.

For the first time in many years, there does not seem to be enough nettle, and desperation began to creep in as I imagined a winter without that gorgeous green to lean on.

But wait - there is a small patch in the garden near the house, in an unwieldy spot. It has been existing and continuing to establish a bit more as each year I give it a stay of execution, my fondness for the plant itself leading me to plant other, easier spots first. “Next year my dear”,  I whisper, “you’ll have to go.”

Well this year, that nettle patch is the healthiest one I’ve seen in this county, and it is ten steps outside my door. The close proximity means I can visit this patch every couple of days as a cut and come again crop. My time is not spent traveling to forage spots, and my gas tank remains full. And my freezer is slowly filling….unexpected, delightful, and a reminder that the things you allow, encourage and even cultivate in your world don’t have to be the things that make sense to everyone else.

Dandelions.

They are edible, medicinal, and assist in improving the soil. I never plant them yet they tend to appear where they can do the most good. I mostly utilize them as biomass for compost and to help aerate soils that are compacted.

I've learned to welcome catalpa seedlings.
They grow like crazy, apparently able to survive being entirely denuded by the larva the aptly named  of the catalpa sphinx moth (Ceratomia catalpae).
I've never seen these famous catalpa worms on any of the trees around here, but I've taken to stripping them their of leaves and green branches and using that  mulch on nearby crops.

I've gone as far as to pot up very young catalpa seedling, with biomass production as an end goal.

Right now nipplewort, we use it as a secondary green in our salads.