Creeping Wheatgrass: Identifying the Couch Grass Weed and Its Medicinal Uses

Couch grass (Elymus repens) is a widespread, hard-to-eradicate weed that quickly overruns plots of land, as the photo below makes clear. It colonises fallow fields, set-aside land, gardens, vegetable plots, thinned-out woodland, meadows, roadsides, gully slopes and river floodplains.

On neglected arable land, thickets of couch grass can cover dozens of hectares.

What does couch grass look like?

Couch grass is recognised above ground by its thin, cylindrical stems standing 50–100 centimetres tall, with alternate, flat, linear leaves that are rough on the upper surface, smooth underneath and green in colour. The inflorescence is a spike measuring 7–15 centimetres long. The fruits are light-brown caryopses (grain-like seeds) that ripen in August and September.

Gardeners know that a hoe is useless for clearing couch grass from a vegetable plot — here you cannot manage without a spade, because the plant spreads through its roots rather than its top growth.

The rhizome of couch grass

Couch grass has a creeping, branched rhizome with numerous nodes, and new stems sprout from each of those nodes. The thin rhizomes reach up to one and a half metres in length. In gardens and fields planted with potatoes, couch grass does serious damage by piercing the potato tubers with its roots, as shown in the photo below.

How couch grass rhizomes are used in folk medicine

The roots of couch grass are used for medicinal purposes. They contain essential oils, fructose, a polysaccharide, organic acids and their salts, saponins, glycosides, carotene, vitamin C and other compounds.

In folk medicine, a decoction of couch grass rhizomes has long been used for respiratory tract conditions and gastrointestinal complaints, as a diuretic and a diaphoretic, and as a blood-cleansing remedy for metabolic disorders. It has also been used traditionally for scrofula, rickets and diathesis in children, and for furunculosis, chronic constipation, dropsy, jaundice, fever and rheumatism.

Couch grass is harmless to the human body, and its rhizomes — first washed and boiled — can be eaten as part of a vegetable salad. Such a salad is considered very beneficial for gallstone disease, gastritis, furunculosis, skin rashes and chronic constipation. Once you are familiar with this description and the photos of couch grass, it is easy to spot the plant among the weeds on a garden plot.

The collection times for couch grass are listed in the calendar for gathering medicinal plants.