A very unusual garden weed to know of. Healthy and tasty medium stellate - eat as much as you can, but do not confuse!
Everyone who has weeded the beds is familiar with this simple weed, which my grandmother calls the wood lice. Weeding the beds, and here - a valuable garden treasure! It’s time not to pull it out, but to sit it down, because the medium stellate (Stellaria media) is a tasty and very healthy herb from which you can prepare both food and cosmetics.
If before flowering you may not immediately notice this plant in abundant greenery, then when star-flowers appear, it becomes clear - this is the summer treasure in front of you!
Juicy and tender greens of starfish - very tasty. It is especially good fresh, as a base for salads, green sauces, filler for soups.
The greenery of this herb contains a whole bunch of benefits: beta-carotene, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, nicotinic acid, potassium, vitamin C, zinc.
In addition to being a valuable addition to the diet, this herb is also used externally in the form of lotions, creams and ointments. This plant has a pronounced soothing and anti-inflammatory effect, unlike many other herbs, chickweed has no contraindications even for children. An ointment for insect bites is made from it, for example.
Stellate is a harmless grass, but it has a poisonous counterpart with which it can be easily confused - it is a full-time field color. The leaves and stems look like twin brothers, but the flowers of the poisonous plant are completely different - bright, purple, orange, red. But before flowering, these herbs can be distinguished only by the hairs on the stem: in stellate, the stems are covered on one side with tiny hairs, while in full-time color, the stems are completely bare.
You can also confuse the stellate with the common chickweed - just look how similar its flowers are! But, unlike full-time color, it is not poisonous and even edible. She has a distinctive feature - the leaves are covered with hairs. We have a sapling growing abundantly on the lawn, it is a perennial.
Stellate is also dried for teas, but herbalists claim that the benefits remain in the raw material for only a month.