Spring Notes
Land Cress, Cold Frames & Cloches, Plant Easy Seeds to Save, Catkin Season
I am starting out with a couple never before published photos of Land Cress, which is a wild edible common in many areas. It has a very variable appearance when young. These photos, and the first note (and the links in comments on the first note) will help you begin to identify it.
Land cress photo 1-12-25. They are edible, nutritious, adaptable, and can be very variable when young. The wild strains don’t all germinate at the same time, so you can find them at different stages of growth in different spots and different seasons. The mature plants develop very distinctive leaves. Watch my notes for more photos as the season progresses. You will also find links to more information on the first note below the second photo.
The next photo is a close up of a single Land Cress leaf, from the above plant, 1-12-25. It is just starting to develop the deep lobes that characterize adult leaves. The adult leaves are super interesting. They appear to be compound leaves, but there is often (but not consistently) a tiny bit of leaf tissue along the midrib /rachis (central rib or stem in compound leaves). This leads to them being described as deeply lobed quite often.
It seems to me that Land Cress’s leaves are an example of an intermediate evolutionarily step between lobed leaves and compound leaves. If you would like a little more basic leaf botany, let me know in comments.
Meanwhile, if you zoom in on the leaf, and look closely at the lobes along the midrib below the terminal lobe (above in the photo—but botanically speaking they are below) you will see that on one side there is a tiny bit of leaf tissue on some side of the midrib, but none on the other. This seems to be a very distinctive Land Cress trait. I have never noticed it in any other plant. I expect, however, that there may be other examples. Send me photos if you find any!
To read the notes below, just click on first sentence, they should open in a new tab or window. (Many have comments you may want to read as well.) At the bottom of this article you will find a link to my notes feed. There are a few new ones not included here that you may be interested in, :)
Thanks for reading, I appreciate all of you! I’ll be back with the promised article next Sunday (at least that’s the plan). In the meantime, you can discover what else I am up to and interested in by checking out my notes here: Gardening & Foraging for Life | Substack. (PS, you will have to scroll down a tad, as the first post on the notes page is always the most recent article.)
~ ~ ~
Please feel free to forward, share, restack, excerpt, or quote this or any of my articles or notes, as long as your post automatically includes (or you add) a link back to the original note or article. If you just want to use my sources without any of my writing, neither links nor permission is required. Do contact me about any other ways you might want to use my writing, as all other rights are currently reserved.
Text & Images- Copyright Harvest McCampbell, 2026, except those found in the news article shares.
 | A guest post by
|