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Chenopodium
Also called Goosefoots, Indet. Goosefoot, Hanemalts
Chenopodium is a genus of annual and perennial herbs, shrubs and small trees found almost worldwide, including edible leaf vegetables and pseudocereals such as quinoa. Commonly grown members include white goosefoot and quinoa, and most species grow best in alkaline soil.
Chenopodium is a genus of numerous species of perennial or annual herbaceous flowering plants known as the goosefoot, which occur almost anywhere in the world. It is placed in the family Amaranthaceae in the APG II system; older classification systems, notably the widely used Cronquist system, separate it and its relatives as Chenopodiaceae, but this leaves the rest of the Amaranthaceae polyphyletic. However, among the Amaranthaceae, the genus Chenopodium is the namesake member of the subfamily Chenopodioideae.
Certain species grow in large thickets, providing cover for small animals. Goosefoot foliage is used as food by the caterpillars of certain Lepidoptera. The seeds are eaten by many birds, such as the yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella) of Europe or the white-winged fairy-wren (Malurus leucopterus) of Australia. Goosefoot pathogens include the positive-sense ssRNA viruses – apple stem grooving virus, sowbane mosaic virus and tobacco necrosis virus.
The genus Chenopodium contains several plants of minor to moderate importance as food crops as leaf vegetables – used like the closely related spinach (Spinacia oleracea) and similar plants called quelite in Mexico – and pseudocereals. These include white goosefoot (C. album), kañiwa (C. pallidicaule) and quinoa (C. quinoa). On the Greek island of Crete, tender shoots and leaves of a species called krouvida (κρουβίδα) or psarovlito (ψαρόβλητο) are eaten by the locals, boiled or steamed. As studied by Bruce D. Smith, Kristen Gremillion and others, goosefoots have a history of culinary use dating back to 4000 BC or earlier, when pitseed goosefoot (C. berlandieri) was a staple crop in the Native American Eastern Agricultural Complex, and when white goosefoot was apparently used by the Ertebølle culture of Europe. Members of the eastern European Yamnaya culture also harvested white goosefoot as an apparent cereal substitute to round out an otherwise mostly meat and dairy diet c. 3500–2500 BC.
Fat-hen · Pitseed goosefoot · Figleaf goosefoot · Fremont's goosefoot · Tree Spinach · Narrowleaf goosefoot · Pitseed Goosefoot · Canihua · Desert goosefoot · Quinoa · Striped Goosefoot · Stinking goosefoot
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Chenopodium by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
