Lamb’s Quarters Seeds | Goosefoot | Wild Hen | (Chenopodium album)

The weed your grandparents ate. The green that grows itself.

Chenopodium album, known as Lamb's Quarters, is one of the most nutritious and widely distributed edible wild greens in the world, a fast-growing annual that appears in gardens, fields, and disturbed ground across every continent except Antarctica. The young leaves taste like a mild spinach with a slightly earthy, mineral richness and are eaten raw in salads, cooked like spinach, or dried and powdered as a nutrient supplement. It is the kind of plant foragers know and gardeners pull out without realizing what they are discarding. Grown intentionally, it is one of the most productive edible greens available for the effort required.

• Highly nutritious edible green comparable to spinach in flavor and superior to it in several nutrients
• Grows quickly from seed in almost any soil with almost no care required
• Young leaves eaten raw or cooked, seeds ground into flour as a traditional grain substitute
• One of the most productive edible plants available for the effort required to grow it
• Historical food plant with a documented culinary tradition spanning thousands of years on multiple continents

Things you probably did not know about Lamb's Quarters

It was a staple food in prehistoric Europe. Lamb's Quarters seeds have been found in the stomachs of bog bodies in Denmark and Germany preserved from the Iron Age, indicating it was eaten as a regular part of the diet in northern Europe thousands of years before modern vegetables arrived. Archaeological sites across Europe consistently turn up Chenopodium seeds in quantities suggesting deliberate cultivation or at least protection of naturally occurring plants.

It is more nutritious than spinach by several measures. Lamb's Quarters contains higher concentrations of calcium, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and protein per gram than commercial spinach. It also contains more iron than most commercial leafy greens and significant quantities of B vitamins. It is considered a superfood in traditional food systems across Central Asia, South Asia, and indigenous North America.

The seeds were ground into flour long before wheat arrived in the Americas. Chenopodium seeds were harvested and ground into a dark flour by Indigenous peoples across North America for centuries. The closely related Chenopodium quinoa, domesticated in the Andes, is now one of the most commercially valuable grain crops in the world. Lamb's Quarters is its wild relative and produces seeds with similar nutritional properties on a smaller scale.

It self-seeds so enthusiastically you only need to plant it once. A single Lamb's Quarters plant can produce 75,000 seeds per season. Once established in a garden, it will return reliably each spring from seeds that overwinter in the soil. Most gardeners who plant it intentionally find that management quickly becomes more relevant than propagation.

Growing Details

• Botanical Name: Chenopodium album
• Stratification: Not required
• Annual: Grows in a single season
• Soil: Extremely adaptable, grows in almost any soil including poor, disturbed, or compacted conditions
• Light: Full sun to partial shade
• Height: 2 to 6 feet
• Harvest: Begin harvesting young leaves when plants are 6 to 12 inches tall, before flowering for best flavor

Grow it intentionally and harvest it before it grows past you. The most nutritious thing in your garden might be the plant everyone else is pulling out.