Edible Weeds in Toledo, OH

My mother said that she had been pulling a weed that she did not recognize from her garden. I took a few samples up to my apartment and checked them on the Internet. In Wikipedia this article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portulaca_oleracea , talked about the beneficial uses of the weed. I picked some, washed it off, and cooked it with onions on the stove top that evening. The onions masked any natural flavor from the "pig weed", but it tasted well. The Wikipedia article states (in part) "Purslane contains more Omega-3 fatty acids (alpha-linolenic acid in particular^[4]) than any other leafyvegetable plant. Simopoulos states that Purslane has .01 mg/g of Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). This is an extraordinary amount of EPA for land based vegetable sources. EPA is an Omega-3 fatty acid normally found mostly in fish, some algae and flax seeds.^[5] It also contains vitamins (mainly vitamin A, vitamin C, and somevitamin B and carotenoids), as well as dietary minerals, such as magnesium, calcium, potassium and iron. Also present are two types of betalain alkaloid pigments, the reddish betacyanins (visible in the coloration of the stems) and the yellow betaxanthins (noticeable in the flowers and in the slight yellowish cast of the leaves). Both of these pigment types are potent antioxidants and have been found to have antimutagenic properties in laboratory studies.^[6]

100 grams of fresh purslane leaves (about 1 cup) contain 300 to 400 mg of alpha-linolenic acid.^[7] One cup of cooked leaves contains 90 mg of calcium, 561 mg of potassium, and more than 2,000 IUs of vitamin A. One half cup of purslane leaves contains as much as 910 mg of oxalate, a compound implicated in the formation of kidney stones."