Goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri) is a wonderful little plant that produces edible everything. You can cull some plants for greens in the spring and summer, eat the flowers, harvest the seeds — or all three! A favorite of foragers, this native species is closely related to crops grown in Mexico and South America, including quinoa. The hardest thing about growing it is making sure other critters don’t eat all of it before you get any.
Planting
Experiments investigating best practices for treating goosefoot seeds to promote germination have yielded conflicting results. The most in-depth study was carried out by Sarah Halwas in her dissertation. She used various cold-wet treatments but had low overall germination rates (1-37%). Experiments to get to the bottom of this are underway in my lab and I will be updating this guide soon to reflect new results. For now, I recommend a cold stratification of at least four weeks. I had good success in 2020 with stratifying seeds in a normal fridge on wet blotter paper from March 3 to April 18. Stratification can be accomplished in a few ways:
- Plant seeds in the fall to mimic natural dispersal.
- Plant seeds in the late winter, as soon as the soil is thawed.
- Mix seeds into wet top soil, store this mess in a refrigerator, then spread it over your garden bed. I had good success in 2020 in St. Louis with planting pre-stratified seeds out in mid-April. If you’re further south or north, adjust accordingly.
- I’ll be adding a guide on stratification methods for controlled experiments that I’ve used soon!
I do not recommend starting goosefoot in trays and transplanting. We had a lot of dead seedlings using this method in an experiment we ran in Illinois in 2019. If you do it, try to transplant when its still cool and make sure you’re ready to water a lot until they get settled in. Goosefoot seeds are very small, so you might think it would be best to just scatter them on the surface of a well-prepared seed bed. But actually my preliminary data suggest that you’re better off covering them in about 1/4 inch of soil. In 2020, I did an experiment comparing three different treatments to control plots. All but the “deep planting” treatment were planted under just a sprinkling of soil. About 1 month after I planted these seeds, the plants in the plots where I had planted the seeds more deeply (1/4 inches of soil) were bigger and approximately the same density as the other plots. Unfortunately, I never actually counted how many plants germinated in each plot before this experiment got eaten by deer, but here are the plant heights in late May:
This data also suggests that you should also add some fertilizer to your soil. I used cow manure in this experiment, but compost would probably work just as well.
And one more thing — protect your goosefoot babies with a nice tall fence if there are deer around! Everything likes to eat goosefoot, not just you.
Tending
In my 2018 experiments, there wasn’t a correlation between plant density and yield. Oddly, mean yield wasn’t even that different between my 2018 experiments where mean plant density in monocrop plots was 100 plants/m2 (74 g/m2)and my 2019 experiments where plant density was only 5 plant/m2 (66 g/m2) — you’d really think it would be! So, do whatever you want and let me know what works best, please. It’s nice to thin out some plants early in the season so you can eat their delicious leaves, and it looks like this won’t effect your seed yield much one way or the other.
Harvesting
In Ithaca, NY, I harvested my goosefoot between September 19 and November 11, as the plants senesced (died). You can tell that they are senesced when all the leaves fall off, there aren’t any more flowers, and the seed heads are dried up. You should harvest senesced plants reasonably quickly to get as much seed as possible, though they hang onto their seeds for a few weeks at least (if nothing eats them!) In 2018, I ended up harvesting the last plants before they had actually senesced because there was about to be a major snow storm. In Illinois the next year, I started harvesting later, on October 29, but wrapped up around the same time (November 15) and for the same reason: incoming snow storm. Again, the plants weren’t senesced and some were actually still flowering.
In the Ithaca experiment, I couldn’t be sure that all the plants in my plots were the same species (read on here if you’re interested in the details), and I thought maybe one species senesced earlier than the other. However, my 2019 experiments in Illinois clearly showed that there is variation in the timing of senescence even within plants from the same population growing in exactly the same conditions — so be prepared to spend the whole fall with your goosefoots if you want to maximize your seed yields. I can’t show you the results yet because my brilliant student is working on publishing them, but it looks like you want to harvest as late as possible if you’re looking to maximize yield. Get yourself some mittens and put on your game face.
I harvest by cutting off the entire plant at the base of the stem with a pair of shears. I stuff the plant or plants into paper grocery bags and let them dry in a cool, dark place for a week or so. Then I hand strip the seeds, and dry them further on trays lined with chiffon that I made to fit a pizza dough rack.
Processing and cooking
See my guide to threshing and winnowing (coming soon) for instructions about how to proceed from here for the seeds you want to cook. As for cooking, you can do many of the same things with these seeds that you can do with quinoa. Stay tuned for recipes!
The next generation
Goosefoot will probably come back in the same place you grew it last year, even if you try to harvest all the seeds. But just in case, make sure to save some seeds. Store them in the freezer if you’re not planning on using them right away.