Cats and Trails and Garden Tales
Musings on cats, travel, gardens and life
Summer Weed or Flower?
The dandelion is an herb with medicinal properties, traditionally used to treat various ailments and infections; it can be made into tea or wine and used in soups and salads. I’ve never eaten one. I still consider it a weed, growing tenaciously where it shouldn’t in my garden, its long taproot almost impossible to eradicate so it returns again and again.
Still, isn’t it beautiful?
For Cee’s Flower of the Day
~ Susanne
Cats and Trails and Garden Tales 
I vote for flower 😀 😀
Me too!! 😊😊
And me!!!
They are a diuretic. I used to feed them to my guinea pig in the 80s, and he loved them. But after eating them, he used to ‘Pee for England’! 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
Ah, I heard they are a diuretic but never knew anyone who used it for that. Your guinea pig is the first! 😁
Dandelion tea is good earthy flavored tea to drink. 😀
Good for you too I imagine! 🫖
My grandfather made some powerful wine out of them.
Oh really! How cool! Did you try it?
Oh, yes. The only wine stronger was grandpa’.s wheat wine.
Okay, I’d heard of dandelion wine before but wheat wine is definitely a new one to me!!
I’m encouraging them these days as the goldfinches just love the seeds.
Great idea!! I need to find a place for them in my garden where we can both be happy! 😊
understandable. I have a wilderness, or should I say jungle, and so happy for them to almost go anywhere!
To me, they will always be flowers. My boys used to bring me fistfuls of them which I would put in vases around our house. Such a beautiful splash of yellow! Although in a garden, they may not be as welcome.
That seems to be the consensus! Especially when presented as flowers to mom! And I’m seeing from others it makes great tea and wine!
The bees seem to love the flowers. Since a lot of them come up in spring, it’s sometimes the only flowers available to the bees!
Makes sense to me!🐝🐝
They are the sweetest little happy-faced flowers!
They are, aren’t they? 😊
❤️❤️❤️
What I like is when they turn into seed heads (had to look it up to see what those were called) and you can blow on them and the seeds fly around everywhere. But I guess that’s not a good idea if you count them as weeds!
The seed heads are very photogenic
and fun to blow on.. But it is a dilemma and I find myself trying hard not to disturb them when they’re in my garden.
I loved dandelions when I was a kid. So many things you could do with them. Make a bouquet. Make a bracelet. I still love them.
That’s right, I forgot about the bracelets! 🙂
Horses often seek out specific weeds for health issues, instinctive behavior from what I’ve read. Popular with horses are the dandelions esp. the ones with the thick leaves at the base of the stem. I understand there is a lot of vitamin C in the leaves; unlike humans horses cannot store vitamin c in their bodies so they look to replenish the supply. Their other favorite herbal snack is what the British horse people call “cleavers” or “clivers”, not sure what they are called here even though we have plenty of them here in the PNW. Cleavers are skinny climbing and spreading vines with sticky skinny leaves and those vines produce equally sticky tiny seed pods. Both the leaves and the pods “cleave” to clothing if you happen to encounter them on a walk – and, Susanne, those little pods also cling to cat fur if you end up with some in your garden!
I don’t know much about horses but it makes sense that they instinctively eat what they need. And there’s no doubt Benji and Tiger bring in all kinds of seeds and pods
on their fur. I’ve been grabbed by sticky climbing plants myself! 🙂