I forgot to mention lamb's lettuce. It grows in lots of places round here, and I'd rather have it in salads than any tasteless shop lettuce any day. The old boy who cooked all of the superb fine-dining dishes in our Lake Como abode in June used it a lot. A few years ago I sowed wild rocket in the garden and since then it pops up as a "weed" wherever it likes and we have a year-round supply. Chives also never needs planting. There's always a clump of it somewhere.

I know you can eat hogweed, Alexanders, hedge garlic and nasturtium leaves but I find them a bit too spicy and assertive. There are seasidey things around here such as samphire (the cliff one) which I find too sharp, though the Tudor dynasty went mad for it, and that salt-marsh samphire that's always pretentiously served with fish. I find it pointlessly stringy, but whatever stirs yer loins... I've never really got into seaweeds but I've tried some sea lettuce and I found it too tough. You could get all the protein you need round here by eating the abundant mussels.