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Having a vegetable garden in summer is a great satisfaction but you need to pay attention to a spontaneous plant that is really dangerous to health and that should be uprooted immediately.
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How nice it is to have the own vegetable garden where to plant and grow your own vegetables in a natural way without fertilizers and herbicides? There are many, more and more often (even among the very young), who have adopted this practice so energizing for the mind and physical well-being.
However, if you do not have a green thumb, or rather the experience necessary to be able to grasp the presence of poisonous wild herbs, then follow the reading of this article in which we reveal that very often between tomatoes and cucumbers, salad and basil , can grow one very insidious plant for our health.
This must be recognized immediately and eradicated at the root to avoid inadvertently picking it up and eating it. Let’s see what it is and how to behave if you find it in the garden.
It looks a lot similar to the common salad and it is for this reason that often, if you do not have the trained eye, you can pick it up and put it inside the salad bowl with tomatoes and carrots for the evening dinner.
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We are talking about the Lactuca virosa, a herbaceous plant belonging to the Asteraceae family. So a direct cousin of the Lactuca sativathat is the green salad that we are used to eat frequently almost every day.
The first, however, is a wild and uncommon version of our beloved lettuce, which grows uncultivated in the fields reaching a height of 1.5 meters, both in the plains and in the mountains.
Unlike common lettuce, it has a jagged and bristly appearance with irregularly serrated leaves. It is also poisonous and coughs ingested houses as it possesses a latex bitter white found in the leafy parts.
In fact, this is made up of elements that are best avoided if you do not want to risk incurring digestion or even worse intoxication. These are the sesquiterpene lactonesnamely lactucopicrin and lactucine.
What if we told you that Lactuca virosa until World War II was used as a sedative and was an excellent (and cheap) substitute for opium? In small doses instead composed heartburn, nausea and in the worst cases vomiting.
If you see it in your garden, remove it immediately together with the roots and throw it away so that there is no danger of contamination or insert it without thinking about it in the lettuce bowl to eat in the evening with family or friends. Health First of all.
