Here in 5b/6a Kansas, both cilantro and fennel will self-seed. I get usable cilantro a lot earlier this way, which is nice! It does tend to bolt more quickly, so I still plant more cilantro every spring. I use the self-seeded plants first, then when they bolt, I will have newly planted cilantro coming up I can use.
3 Likes
Public Service Announcement: Do not eat massive amounts or juice Cilantro.
I know a couple people that have had issues from eating massive amounts of cilantro. One lady juiced Cilantro and had a permanently enlarged thyroid (Goiter). Other cases I heard of people getting bad toxicity, headache etc. Cilantro mobilizes heavy metals into the blood and if too much at once is consumed it can had negative effects. I am talking about a pound or multiple lbs of cilantro in a day or two to be clear.
I don’t know the specifics, just want to say be careful not to go crazy if you have a big patch of cilantro.
2 Likes
That is probably the case with most herbs which are very often medicinal in nature as well. In general, herbs should be ingested in small quantities.
3 Likes
Is it bronze fennel? I usually have enough reseeding for the zebra swallowtails and me to share.
My understanding is this is unproven/pseudoscience, it was something that was spread by a few of those “doctors” who engage in fearmongering about heavy metals being linked to various other medical issues like Alzheimer’s, but it was based on a single “study” involving a single person without any controls, and has never been tested in a proper scientific way.
And yes, it’s adherents of that pseudoscience that then do silly things like ingest pounds of an herb and instead end up poisoning themselves.
My family eats “a lot” of cilantro, by which I mean more than a fistful per day during the summer months, when we make big batches of pico de gallo weekly.
1 Like
https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=research_bio
This one is interesting, about Cilantro absorbing lead from soil.
That’s good to see more modern attempts to test the theory, though I’m not familiar enough with those particular journals to know if they are peer-reviewed, trustworthy, etc. But they do seem to show at least some chelating effect, at least for lead specifically, and they are much better than the old study that was the basis for people using it for “detox” effects.
1 Like
Everything you eat has something bad in it if you look hard enough.
I’m looking forward to eating fist fulls of it myself. Love cilantro.
1 Like
Florence Fennel, I think.
I let a lot of dill reseed so the swallowtails will lay eggs on it. If I don’t, they lay so many eggs on the parsley, there’s not enough of that for me to harvest. I guess the preferred food for the caterpillars is plants within the carrot family, so I try have several options growing for them, as well as the native plants that grow around here.
3 Likes
Same here with dill, also. I added yellow Uzbek carrots for them, roots are to bent and forked in my clay to harvest but some overwinter and I reseed.
1 Like