Portulaca oleracea
Purslane is a juicy, lightly tart green with crisp stems and fleshy leaves. Its texture is more succulent than spinach, even after heat.1
Purslane is one of Maine’s best-known garden weeds; its fleshy leaves, reddish stems, and low mat-forming habit are useful field marks.1
The entire above-ground plant is edible, including the tiny black seeds. Crushed leaves feel slippery because the plant contains mucilage—the same broad sort of texture-making plant material found in okra.12
That mucilage is not merely a raw-leaf oddity. It persists as a soothing, thickening quality when purslane is added near the end of cooking, balancing the plant’s natural tartness.3
Purslane is a warm-weather annual that arrives late in the Northeast, often after the soil has heated in June. It spreads from a taproot in low mats, and pieces of stem can root again, which helps explain why it appears so persistently in cultivated ground.4 Young leaves and tender stem tips are the mildest and crispest parts, but the tiny seeds are edible too. The plant’s watery succulence and slight lemony-green flavor make it feel halfway between a salad green and a vegetable, while its mucilage becomes more pronounced with prolonged cooking.4
Footnotes
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Facts on Edible Wild Greens in Maine,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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University of Illinois Extension, “Purslane: Weed It or Eat It?,” 2003. ↩
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 339. ↩
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University of Illinois Extension, “Purslane: Weed It or Eat It?,” 2003, accessed August 14, 2026. ↩ ↩2