Lamb's Quarters?

Is this ?

Yes , it looks like lambsquarters to me.

Looks like it to me too. Bigger leaves are better cooked, tender young leaves go well in salads. Not recommended as a staple due to high quantities of oxalic acid, but great as an occasional wild treat. I add bits to salads a couple times a week at this time of year - the neighbors always look at me funny for picking things from in between the garden beds as well as from inside them...their loss!

Yup, lamb's quarters. We had some in our lunch

It's high in calcium

Cool, I will cultivate these in my yardens, which is to say o won't pull them when o pull the pokeweed, etc.

No, no, DO pull them! Pull them and eat them. There is almost no risk that they will get eradicated from your garden, if you have good fertility. If you let them grow on to full size, suddenly you'll find that they are crowding out and shading your vegetables, and by then they get a tap root that would disturb the veggies if you could pull it, which might not be possible anyway. So do pull them, and do eat them, and don't worry, there will be more next year.

....or don't pull them:)..........I keep pinching off the leaves to eat (the growing tip, kind of a rosette) and make sure I leave some to go to seed....and if the plants get too large I just cut them to the ground leaving the root to decompose I get several meals off of each plant as they mature...we eat them through the summer until they insist on going to seed.

That sounds good. The rosette is much easier to harvest and eat than individual leaves. And it's good to hear that if you break off a big one at the base, it doesn't grow back bushier and taller than before. But is it necessary to leave some to go to seed? I've always had the impression that it would be impossible to seriously reduce the numbers that will grow next year, whether I'm in Ladakh or US. As your soil gets better, lambsquarters just seems to proliferate.

Rebecca Norman wrote:That sounds good. The rosette is much easier to harvest and eat than individual leaves. And it's good to hear that if you break off a big one at the base, it doesn't grow back bushier and taller than before. But is it necessary to leave some to go to seed? I've always had the impression that it would be impossible to seriously reduce the numbers that will grow next year, whether I'm in Ladakh or US. As your soil gets better, lambsquarters just seems to proliferate.

I have one garden area with no lambsquarters and another with lots........if I don't let some go to seed and then shake it all over I don't have enough show up to eat the next year. I think it only comes back from seed. The original plants did just appear, though...I thought probably through my plant exchange. We may eat more than some folks...we have it as a cooked green three or four times a week. I do thin a lot of plants if they come up where I don't want them too, so really in the end I do both pull them and cut them.