Weed It and Reap: The No-gardening Solution to Enjoying Wild Vegetables for Free Year-round in Clark County”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once defined a weed as, “A plant whose virtues we have not yet discovered.” Dr. Deever differs from Emerson in only one respect: he discovers, personally tries, and enthusiastically promotes those virtues that he makes known. An advocate of “instant gardening,” Dr. Deever finds it more fun to the let garden come to you, rather than you having to do the gardening. In this enthusiastic talk, viewers will be introduced to the most common tasty and nutritious weeds in the southwest. Discover the weed that grows in almost everyone’s garden that is the second-highest source of natural iron in vegetables, as well as a weed that produces underground nuts that taste like a cross between coconut and raw almonds. Find out about weeds that grow prolifically in the wild, yet are so good that they are profitably cultivated in other countries. In short, find out how to enjoy nature’s harvest wherever you roam, benefiting where no garden preparation or cultivation was involved, but where one happily “reaps where they didn’t sow.” Weeds are truly the world’s best survival foods, which is an important aspect in this post-COVID-19 world, but even more importantly to the guest speaker, weeds present a world of amazing tastes and textures that one can never discover in a grocery store, and can only enjoy when they learn to identify and harvest these amazing wild foods for themselves.

Dr. Don Deever is the Extension educator for Lincoln County and was recently dubbed the “Weed Whisperer” by the USDA. A huge advocate of the benefits of weeds, his philosophy concerning weeds is simple, “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.” An avid wild food forager since the age of 12, Dr. Deever prefers to live the pioneer life, rather than merely research it. In the 1980’s, he quit a high paying job in aerospace, sold all that he owned, and moved to the South Sea islands, where he lived off the land as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe for 26 months. In the years that immediately followed, he also became a televised National Geographic adventurer. His knowledge of wild edible & medicinal weeds have allowed him to live comfortably on a low budget in New Zealand, Australia and England, where he always felt at home by finding familiar friends in the weeds he loves. When he is not collecting and cooking weeds into gourmet delicacies, Dr. Deever is researching “companion weed gardening,” “using weeds to identify weaknesses and strengths in garden soils,” and promoting “the importance of superweeds as the most important potential crops for future space colonists.”