by Lisa Giroday, Sandra Lopuch and Sam Philips | Are you feeling adventurous about your veggie garden this year? Want to grow some weird shit this season? One culinary herb we love that isn’t seen in most gardens is, well, lovage, or, botanically speaking, Levisticum officinale.

As mentioned in previous articles, when a plant bears the name “officinale”, it indicates that the plant has medicinal properties. Lovage tea can be applied to wounds as an antiseptic or drunk to stimulate digestion. Lovage apparently has the one of the top highest quotients of “quercetin”, a flavinoid. Don’t ask us what this means on a molecular level, but this mythic substance acts as a bronchodilator for asthmatics and as an anti-inflammatory, reducing the release of histamines and other allergic chemicals in the body. Crazy!

Lovage is easy to grow, prolific (but stays fairly centralized), and one plant will do you for the year. The leaves are quite pungent, and have an aroma and taste similar to celery. Lovage blooms umbels of yellow in late spring and is a perennial, coming back every year. It’s abundant, available until frost, and literally requires no work despite offering multiple benefits!

With the shift towards warmer temperatures, lovage has abruptly started bursting out in the garden and is now officially in season. It is one of the first signs of green to emerge in the veggie garden scene come spring. We welcome it the same as one would welcome tulips and daffodils.

The culinary uses of the lovage leaf as an herb are endless, but it’s especially great when small dosed in a salad. One of our favourite early spring mixes consists of mustard greens, kale, chervil, purslane, kale flowers, and a wee bit of lovage. This mixture of goodness is hard to come by, even at the farmers market; you might have to grow your own or go to a restaurant with good, local sourcing.

Other culinary uses for this wonder herb include lovage pesto, as a chiffonade garnish, and as a base for mirepoix or soup stock. We dry and freeze our lovage in the Fall to get us through the winter. The root is also edible, and the seeds can be used as a spice, similar to fennel.

Conclusion: lovage is super versatile, so try growing it this season!

THE VICTORY GARDENS ARCHIVE

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Victory Gardens is a team of local urban farmers for hire. Lisa, Sandra and Sam help transform tired or underused residential and commercial green spaces into food producing gardens. Their goal is to challenge the way communities use space and to participate in the change needed to consume food more sustainably. For the rest of the growing season, they’ve hooked up with Scout to share some cool tips and tricks on how to get the best from of our own backyards.