Lawn Food

A weed, as the saying goes, is just a plant growing where we don’t want it. Every civilization has been based on grain, so you might expect people to be glad when grains grow all by themselves, but no way.

Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi) is a minor weed in this country. In eastern Asia, it’s widely grown for its large, starchy seeds, which have a flavor more like beans than grain. The dried seeds are sometimes made into beads.

Echinochloa crus-galli is a major weed over here--it’s the barnyard grass so earnestly hated in the Western states--but one variety (E. crus-galli var. frumentacea) is a grain crop in Japan. The Japanese name for it is sanwa.

To us, some members of the genus Paspalum are lawn grasses, some are weeds. In Japan, the seeds of P. scrobitulatum are an edible grain called koda.

Some species of familiar grains are weeds to us, although technically they’re edible--usually they’re just harder to harvest and process than their cultivated brothers and sisters and don’t taste as good. The common weed known on the West Coast as foxtail is a variety of barley, Hordeum jubatum. And although some people may not know there really is such a thing as wild oats, gardeners are all too aware of Avena fatua.

Finally, the native grain of West Africa, known in various languages as fundi or fonio, is any of several species of the genus Digitaria. In other words, it’s a crab grass.