I'd like to advertise on behalf of the lambsquarters posted by
@okieheart.
This plant is a powerhouse! It's a native edible, in the spinach family. It attracts aphids in mass quantities and doesn't get slowed down by them at all, so it acts as a guardian plant to catch these pests very early in the season protecting your young and more tender plants. These aphids attract beneficial insects early on in the season. I call them my lady bug factories, because I put the first four or five ladybugs I find onto these aphid colonies and they never leave. Come June, these plants are covered with ladybug larvae, and lacewings, and parasitic wasps, and more, and just pump out good bugs all season long.
Nesting birds will grab gobs of these bugs like they're at the farmers market to take back to their babies for quick protein, and then when they fledge, you will get to see them teaching their babies how to find food in the safe cover of these plants. Hummingbirds need these kinds of tiny little bugs for their hatchlings and if you make it easy for them, they will sit in one spot and pick them all up here.
They get tall enough I used them as a green wall to shade my house and patio before I got anything else going in new gardens. And they were easy to trim to keep out of sidewalks and places to sit or from touching the house, without the plants blowing down.
During migration, they are proving a very important pit stop for bug and seed eaters alike. Mine have been full of adorable ruby crowned kinglets and warblers for days ahead of this cold front loading up on the aphids before they have to keep going. After the first front comes through, they are full of juncos, white throated sparrows and song sparrows.
Come fall, they make a chia-like seed that is very popular with small birds all winter long if you leave the plants standing. Chickadees especially really love the seeds and will hammer these plants in the hardest weeks of winter while chipping sparrows will scratch out the seedfall.
They're not much to look at, which is their only fault, but you might enjoy the hot pink and bluish streaks they get on their stalks when mature. They do reseed pretty avidly, but you can scrape the mat that forms with a hoe and that's that, or trim it to use as sprouts or baby greens.
Deer also really like this stuff. Not that we need more of them, but when we were having a wicked drought this year while they were nursing, this was one of the only native plants growing for them that they could keep coming back to browse.
They're made of stern stuff, so you can plant them where nothing else will grow because it's too hot and dry, as long as they can get started, they will get big and juicy for the bugs. Consider having a few lambsquarters all year round in your garden!
**Edit to add, depending on which species it is, there are also a number of little butterflies that will put caterpillars on lambsquarters, like common sootywing and western pygmy blue.
I am just on the cusp of their zone and spent so much $ trying every single variety available that is supposed to survive okay in zone 5. I even got cuttings from the famous Jerry Lehman (God rest his soul- he was a kind, generous man). He was in Terre Haute & sent me cuttings of special breeds that he created that he thought might do okay for me here (a little bit north of him). Unfortunately my skills at rooting cuttings was immature then, and they all failed.😭
