Chenopodium album
Lamb’s-quarters is a common wild green that shows up in Northeast gardens, field edges, and other disturbed ground, where it is usually gathered young and cooked like spinach.12 It is one of those volunteer plants that reads as a weed in one context and as dinner in another.
The leaves are mild enough to mix with stronger greens, and UMaine’s wild-greens guide notes that the younger shoots are the ones worth seeking out.1 The pale, mealy coating on the foliage is more than a visual quirk: it is one of the easiest field marks for separating lamb’s-quarters from the saltier coastal orache that appears in the same guide.1
Botanically it is white goosefoot, Chenopodium album, and Arthur Haines records it as widespread across all six New England states in roadsides, gardens, cultivated fields, and waste areas.2 Vaughan and Geissler also place it in the old goosefoot family alongside orache and Good King Henry, all of them part of a long tradition of useful greens that sit just outside the standard market-vegetable canon.3 That family relationship helps explain why lamb’s-quarters feels familiar on the plate: it has the mineral, spinach-adjacent quality of a domesticated leaf crop, but it still behaves like a volunteer.
Footnotes
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Facts on Edible Wild Greens in Maine,” accessed July 24, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Arthur Haines, New England Wild Flower Society’s Flora Novae Angliae (Yale University Press, 2011), PDF page 358. ↩ ↩2
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John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 210 (PDF p. 245). ↩