PlantFiles: Dandelion, Lion's Tooth, Bitterwort, Chicoria, Fortune-Teller, Wild Endive, Puffball
Taraxacum officinale

Who didn't love playing with dandelions as a kid? blowing the seeds, "tests" for butter (or boys or whatever). What parent hasn't gotten at least one of these as a gift from a small child? And as a parent isn't it nice to know that if your child decides to taste test a plant this one won't be the one responsible for the hospital trip?

I don't feel like a yard is healthy if it doesn't have some dandelions and clover in it at least. blank carpet of green? must be something wrong......

A fabulous wild food, the Dandelion plant is edible in it's entirety. The young spring leaves are a great salad green, and the older leaves are great cooked or as a pot herb. The flowers are great for fritters, in any baked good, and made into wine, the roots are great in stews or roasted and ground into a coffee substitute. High in vitamins, and widely available, they are a great and tasty way to supplement a diet with a little colorful fun.

Easy to grow with little-to-no care or attention, gets bigger and more prolific if fertilized with an organic fish emulsion solution and not mown down regularly.

We have problems keeping these lovely "weeds" in our yard because we spend so much time eating them, and we usually have to not only reseed often, but also go hunting elsewhere for them.

Dandelions are also a great marker for a toxin-free area, as they are sensitive to pesticides and herbicides. A Dandelion free yard is surely one on which poisons have been sprayed.

If dandelions had most if not all of the compounds that gives it a bitter taste it would had been more of a heavily used cash crop. Many different kinds of dissimiliar crops comes from one lowly weed . The crops includes brussel sprouts, kale, and cabbage! Image doing the same thing with dandelions but as a perennial crop.

fields of these grow here, and they look so beautiful, just not when they are in your yard. it is an all out battle to Irradicate them from my yard. still i rate it neutral, just because of all of its uses, and some even bloom in winter. (a nice surprise after no other blooms for months)

If they sold a plant like this, so easy to grow, so tolerant of abuse, so interesting and so edible, it would be a favorite. But because it comes into those putting-green lawns uninvited, it's a weed.

They are a weed around here, but that isn't really a bad thing for me. My guinea pig loves flowers, stems, and leaves.

Lion's tooth is native and abundant in Switzerland. It's used to make a kind of honey from.
Soak a few hands full of open flowers in water and filter it through a towel the next day. Mix this Liquid about 1:1 with sugar and cook slowly until slightly viscous.
A salad of young leaves in spring is also a good use for it.

A nasty weed here. I've bent/worn out several dandelion diggers trying to eradicate them from my yard. One of those fluffy seed heads sends numerous seeds floating in the wind to sprout in new areas.

They grow all over the place! They are VERY invasive, they are considered a weed here in Canada. If you would like seeds, let me know, we have plenty of them here.

I love Dandelions! Not only do they look nice and smell good, they're also pretty tasty!
Ah! To be in Russia, where dandelions are prized and left to grow where they will- or Hokkaido, Japan, where one of the only plants more abundant in the city garden-things is the horsetail! What of Australia, where they are cultivated as a major cash crop?
Botanically speaking, communities of dandelions may be genetically identical, since each plant can, um, clone itself. And depending what you belive in the way of categories, each population of dandelion may be considered its own sub-species or species. Most people consider this to be going too far, though...
I don't care, I will continue to try to plant dandelions, and my family will continue to pull them up when I'm not looking.

Dandelion, Lion's Tooth, Bitterwort, Chicoria, Fortune-Teller, Wild Endive, Puffball is Naturalized in Texas and other States and is considered an invasive plant in Texas.

Dandelions have deep taproots that can be dried to make a substitute for coffe. Young leaves and flowers are used in salads, stir-fries, and cooked like spinach for a very nutritious vegetable full of vitamins and minerals.
It is a proven diuretic and a laxtative,and has also been used as tonic and blood purifier. They are wide spread and most people hate them in their lawns, but in the proper place they are very lovely and useful plants.
The flowers are beautiful and children love to play with the seed heads by blowing on them.

The common English name "Dandelion" is a derivation of the French Dent-de-Lion, ("tooth of the lion"), a reference to the deeply serrated edge of the leaves.

In modern times, this perennial is the poster child for unwelcome plants (aka "weeds") in most gardens. A persistent broad-leaf plant that is especially difficult to eradicate because of its long taproot. Some tout the edible and medicinal qualities of the dandelion as redeeming features, but most of us with a turf lawn see it as a formidable foe.

Children love to blow on the fluffy ripe seedpods and watch the seeds drift away on the slightest breeze until landing, probably on a well-manicured expanse of turf.