More than 95% of invasive weeds are edible and/or they possess powerful medicinal properties. The plants still widely used in the country of their origin in traditional medicine and for their culinary value. In fact, tomorrow, March 3 and April 14th, the Parks department invites volunteers to take part of a beautiful gourmet invasive- Garlic Mustard. We announced “Free Garlic Mustard harvesting”  and made a 2-page booklet “Medicinal and Edible Invasive plants of Van Cortlandt Park”, describing 5 most notorious and precious invasive weeds of the park. Unfortunately, I don't have enough personal resources to print more professionally made educational materials. This is where i hope the ioby.org will help.

The goal of this project is to educate American people about the useful qualities of the noxious weeds. This will help to relief hunger, experience new incredible flavors and bring people closer to Nature. Harvesting them for our own good would be a wonderful way to control the weeds instead of pouring hundreds of gallons of pesticides, poisoning our land and drinking water.

As I did my research about the traditional use of the invasive plants in their courtiers of origins, I was amazed at the range of medicinal and culinary properties they possess. It occurred to me that these plants win competition with others and spread widely in the new territory because they possess many powerful qualities that make them stronger than many other species. Not accidentally they were used to treat deadly diseases for centuries in traditional medicine of many cultures. They were brought to U.S. by settlers for their useful qualities, their beauty and few – accidentally. We only need to remember and re-learn what our ancestors knew about these plants, - they are the nature’s great resource.

We would like to publish a brochure about the edible and medicinal uses of invasive weeds, a result of our extensive research. This will bring many more volunteers to help control very useful, yet invasive weeds in suffering native ecosystems of NYS.

Currently we teach about Invasive weeds both kids and adults at our free classes at ThePoint.org

The free information available at www.SAVEFarms.org and www.VIFarms.com , where every week we post another edible invasive on our blog. We would like to have resources to make a brochure, explaining about the sustainable way to control weeds while getting a free and nutritious food.