SUN ROOT, SUNCHOKE, JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE, EARTH ROOT (take your pick)
While doing a google search this morning, I discovered many interesting facts about this native North and Central American tuber. Not only is it far more nutritious than I had thought but its history is full of intrigue.
Native Americans had been using this member of the Sunflower genus as a staple part of their diet long before the establishment of Jamestown on the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States. Settlers soon learned to cultivate this easily grown food and took it back home to Europe where it was enthusiastically co-opted by the ever-experimental French. Europeans still use the Sun Root more than we do and it was one of the foods responsible for saving people during famines.
Sunchokes are a nubbly, ginger root-like tuber that is the underground root system of a type of sunflower. Like other sunflowers, the small yellow blossoms on the 3-10' tall plants, turn their faces toward the sun and follow its arc throughout the day. The roots are attached to the center of the original tuber and radiate outward into a dense mass of tubers connected by sturdy, stiff, cream-colored narrow roots. One starter tuber can amass an impressive amount of mature tubers in one season.
Raw, the sun roots are crisp, crunchy and juicy with a sweet earthy, nutty-flavor. They can be stir-fried, sauteed, roasted, baked and put into soups, breads, salads and other dishes limited only by your imagination. Their cooked texture ranges from water chestnut to baked potato
The easy cultivation of this plant is also its only drawback: it grows like a weed and is best planted in its own area or bed so that it will not take over the garden. Every tiny tuberlet that remains hidden underground will rise the following year and must be weeded out or moved to a select location.
To plant, bury tubers about 4" deep in the soil with preferably near to full sun. It takes them a while to push up the narrow, green, recognizably sunflower shaped leaves on their sturdy stems. Then, just leave them alone through the summer with a nice mulch and regular deep watering. In late summer, if you reside in a windy area like I do, you may want to add some tall stakes with twine to form a wind-proof structure around the clumps because these plants can reach 10' tall in one season and they have been blown over in the late summer's unseasonably early storms we've had the last two years.Some years here, after a wet and cloudy summer, the plants don't bloom but that doesn't affect the root production. After the winter storms have set in, I cut back the stems to about 6" tall just to mark where they are. I also use the stems to help pull them free of the soil when I harvest them.
I find much to love about plants that are effortlessly effusive in producing food. Jerusalem Artichokes store beautifully in the ground all fall, winter and spring. Harvest the roots by digging up the whole clump or whittling away at the tubers from the sides. Here on the Oregon coast, in our sandy soil, I like to leave them in the ground until I need them. They also store well in the refrigerator and though most google sites say they last one or two weeks in the frig, in my experience they last much longer.
Sunchokes have been known for their healing properties and nutritionally, these plants are a treasure trove of iron, potassium, Vitamin C, B-vitamins and more. Sun Roots are an unusual source of vegetable protein, with 3 grams per cup. Diabetics can eat the fresh roots without their usual restrictions regarding carbs as the Sun Root contains Inulin (which can be difficult to digest for some). Apparently, Lewis and Clark, who had to live on these roots during their long journey when other foods where unavailable, complained of flatulence. (Poor dears; at least they didn't have to carry a baby the whole way like their guide).
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
My Favorite Vegetables Part Three: "Eat Your Greens!"
LE GREENS & OTHER LEAVES OUTA MY BOOK:
When I say greens, I am referring to the cooked leafy top of a number of edible plants. Most greens are packed with large amounts of vitamins and other nutrients. Amaranth and Lamb's Quarters are rare sources of leafy vegetable protein.
This is a list of my favorite greens so your list may be shorter or longer. Greens are one of my staple home-grown foods.I eat a number of them but tend to concentrate on a couple of favorites. There are some, like mustard greens, that I'm not a big fan of, but they love the coast so I've grown them. But I noticed that I avoid eating them. They're so pretty though.
This leads me to this advice for novice gardeners: grow what you will actually eat, not the latest in vegetable fashion. If your garden space is limited, adhering to this advice is even more important.
Believe it or not, plants, both edible and ornamental are just as blatantly and seductively advertised as any other commodity. Seed catalogs are my crack. I allow myself to look and circle like mad but when it comes to ordering, I get real. And, I remind myself what plants I habitually eat, not how pretty the latest purple, red or chartreuse vegetable will look in the garden. (OK, I try something new every year).
That said, gloriously beautiful vegetable varieties can be used in the same way as ornamentals and I have designed gardens for restaurants using tricolored corn, blazing red lettuce, wildly colored nasturtiums and other designer veggies. Now I throw those colors around in the permaculture garden, designing little color vignettes as I go. Very pretty and very delicious.
SWISS CHARD
I never met a chard I didn't like. It's one of the plants veggie fashionistas have coerced into wearing neon-colored foliage and stems.
Chard is related to beets and has a beet-like bulbous root below ground though it's the flamboyant puckery green, bronze or red tops that are eaten as greens. Yummy!
I've grown many of them: "Fordhook Giant", an enormous plant with wide, cream-colored wavy gigantic stems of the large tropically lush green leaves; "Bright Lights" are yellow, orange, gold, red, pink or white stemmed;"Ruby Red Chard", gorgeous red stems and dark foliage and "Perpetual Chard", available through Territorial Seed Co. which is supposedly last to go to seed but was first in my garden. It comes back though and winters over well. The leaves are small and more substantial than other chards, making them excellent in soups or stews as they don't melt down.
Once chard is out of the ground and up in the air it's less vulnerable to slugs. I like to start it in pots and get it up to a six pack or a 4" pot. After they've grown all summer, I leave them in the ground over the winter and put manure around them. Right now in February, they are pushing up small new succulent leaves which I love in quick stir-fries. They will continue into the early summer until the newly planted ones are big enough to harvest. Eventually the old ones go to seed and I pull them or let a couple make seed and fall where they may.
BEET GREENS
Beets, like chard, pack a lot of nutrients in their leaves. The flavor of their leaves is earthier and a little more bittersweet than chard. I love the greens in salads when small and steamed chopped with Ume Plum vinegar as a condiment (actually, on all my greens).
I grow open pollinated seeds as much as possible so that I can potentially allow some plants to go to seed and have my own source of some vegetable seeds. Last summer I had an overwintered "Bull's Blood Beet" plant (with purple leaves) produce a pint of seed which I will be planting soon this spring.
KALE
There are so many types of kale it's mind-boggling and they seem to morph within one's own garden. I do have my favorites though.
Top of the list is "Nero di Toscana', also called Black Palm or Dinosaur kale. In the early spring I eat the little palm trees (the budded flower sprouts) growing out of the storm-beaten sturdy 3' tall over-wintered plants that have few mature leaves and are trying to go to seed. These can be eaten in salads or steamed and used until the newly planted spring crop gets big enough to eat. Later in the summer, the long, dark green narrow nubbly leaves can be harvested and steamed, stir-fried, baked, made into kale chips, put in soups and stews and on and on. Very versatile, great flavor, sturdy but tender texture and hold up in longer cooking without being woody. I pretty much live on this kale all winter.
"Redbor" kale made its debut in the P garden this winter. It's a stunning red-purple and has sturdy stems and crisp frilly leaves. it held up in storms well. We have several other kales with soft leaves, also troopers throughout the stormy weather. If you like kale, there's no such thing as a bad one. Kales are very much at home in our maritime coastal climate.
Slugs, cabbage moths (worms) and aphids are the primary pests. Once kale gets a big stem and is above the ground, slugs are less of a problem. At the farm, we are using Khaki Campbell ducks to combat the slug problem.
Using permaculture advice, I no longer go after the aphids that occasionally appear and bide my time until their predators, lady bugs, have a chance to swell their ranks and gobble up the aphids. This has worked for the last two years. The ladies eat the aphids, the plants recover and life in the kale patch goes on and nobody got sprayed or yanked out.
The cabbage worms are a bit more frustrating but, again, I stay my hand from interfering and though the mid-summer kale sometimes has lots of holes, eventually the worms leave the tops alone and perfect leaves reappear. Using a row cover would keep out most of the moths. I don't like looking at the cloth. I design the vegetable garden to look as gorgeous as an ornamental garden so any accoutrement has to be functional and arty
The hands-off approach works well because it allows the natural order of things to find a balance. It's a zen-patience thing. Not a bad spiritual practice.
SPINACH, FRENCH SORREL, ORACH & QUINOA
I plant spinach every year but get tired of the slugs. I have yet to make sorrel soup but I hear it's delicious. A new Permaculture member is a cafe owner and I'm going to see if she will lend a recipe or two to this blog.
Orach and quinoa are on my list of things to try in the P garden soon.
LAMB'S QUARTERS & NETTLES; A TASTE OF THE WILD SIDE
These are two of the most nutritious greens you can gather or grow. Lamb's Quarters was already growing in the P garden when I took over management. It's a common weed in poor soils. My mother gathered and cooked it when I was a kid so I'm used to it. The plant has a strange sparkly crystal texture on its silvery-green leaves that goes away when the greens are steamed. It has a deep-green flavor packed with nutrients. If you're looking for a daily vitamin, here it is!
I've been tempted to grow nettles in the garden but I hesitate because it can be invasive. The wild place along a nearby creek where I gather it in the early spring has been taken over by this loved/hated plant.
It's a European native and the stems are beaten and used to make a fiber, (the same one used in the fairy-tale about the brothers who were turned into wild swans by an angry sorceress and were saved by their sister who made magic shirts out of stinging nettles which turned them back into men).
Gathering nettles if best done with rubber gloves or plastic bags over your hands or long handled scissors. Don't touch the plants with bare skin or you will experience the fire of the nettle. Nettle leaves and stems are covered in tiny hairs that inject the familiar "sting" that most people have unwittingly experienced at some point while out walking. The ability to sting is disarmed as soon as the leaves are cooked. Until they go into the pot, handle them carefully. If you get stung, it will go away in a few hours or within one day if you really got a good swipe.
So, why on earth would anyone even bother with such an intimidating plant? NUTRITION, with all caps! Nettles are a traditional "spring tonic" food in many European cultures and that's how I use it.
I once when I was younger, I made negative remarks about nettles to an herbalist who gently, but firmly, explained what a gift to humanity the nettle plant is. I never again disparaged the remarkable nettle.
She gave me her simple recipe for nettle soup:
NETTLE SOUP
Pick several handfuls of tender young nettle tops in early spring (with gloves or plastic bags)
Remove any woody stems or dead leaves
Wash and place in a vegetable steamer with a small amount of water
Steam until tender, saving the water in the bottom of the pot.
Heat up ready-made broth (Chicken or Vegetable) I use chicken.
Put the steamed greens, with the liquid from the pot and some of the broth, into a blender
Buzz until the greens make a fine-textured puree
Add to heated broth and stir
Ladle into bowls, adding a dollop of sour cream and a little chopped chives
This is one of the prettiest soups on earth! It's a brilliant living green and you will feel like Popeye after you have a bowl. The flavor is musky, earthy and unique. I'm happy to have one or two pickings a year of nettles and my body tells me that's enough.
Jump-start your spring with a little weedy magic!
When I say greens, I am referring to the cooked leafy top of a number of edible plants. Most greens are packed with large amounts of vitamins and other nutrients. Amaranth and Lamb's Quarters are rare sources of leafy vegetable protein.
This is a list of my favorite greens so your list may be shorter or longer. Greens are one of my staple home-grown foods.I eat a number of them but tend to concentrate on a couple of favorites. There are some, like mustard greens, that I'm not a big fan of, but they love the coast so I've grown them. But I noticed that I avoid eating them. They're so pretty though.
This leads me to this advice for novice gardeners: grow what you will actually eat, not the latest in vegetable fashion. If your garden space is limited, adhering to this advice is even more important.
Believe it or not, plants, both edible and ornamental are just as blatantly and seductively advertised as any other commodity. Seed catalogs are my crack. I allow myself to look and circle like mad but when it comes to ordering, I get real. And, I remind myself what plants I habitually eat, not how pretty the latest purple, red or chartreuse vegetable will look in the garden. (OK, I try something new every year).
That said, gloriously beautiful vegetable varieties can be used in the same way as ornamentals and I have designed gardens for restaurants using tricolored corn, blazing red lettuce, wildly colored nasturtiums and other designer veggies. Now I throw those colors around in the permaculture garden, designing little color vignettes as I go. Very pretty and very delicious.
SWISS CHARD
I never met a chard I didn't like. It's one of the plants veggie fashionistas have coerced into wearing neon-colored foliage and stems.
Chard is related to beets and has a beet-like bulbous root below ground though it's the flamboyant puckery green, bronze or red tops that are eaten as greens. Yummy!
I've grown many of them: "Fordhook Giant", an enormous plant with wide, cream-colored wavy gigantic stems of the large tropically lush green leaves; "Bright Lights" are yellow, orange, gold, red, pink or white stemmed;"Ruby Red Chard", gorgeous red stems and dark foliage and "Perpetual Chard", available through Territorial Seed Co. which is supposedly last to go to seed but was first in my garden. It comes back though and winters over well. The leaves are small and more substantial than other chards, making them excellent in soups or stews as they don't melt down.
Once chard is out of the ground and up in the air it's less vulnerable to slugs. I like to start it in pots and get it up to a six pack or a 4" pot. After they've grown all summer, I leave them in the ground over the winter and put manure around them. Right now in February, they are pushing up small new succulent leaves which I love in quick stir-fries. They will continue into the early summer until the newly planted ones are big enough to harvest. Eventually the old ones go to seed and I pull them or let a couple make seed and fall where they may.
BEET GREENS
Beets, like chard, pack a lot of nutrients in their leaves. The flavor of their leaves is earthier and a little more bittersweet than chard. I love the greens in salads when small and steamed chopped with Ume Plum vinegar as a condiment (actually, on all my greens).
I grow open pollinated seeds as much as possible so that I can potentially allow some plants to go to seed and have my own source of some vegetable seeds. Last summer I had an overwintered "Bull's Blood Beet" plant (with purple leaves) produce a pint of seed which I will be planting soon this spring.
KALE
There are so many types of kale it's mind-boggling and they seem to morph within one's own garden. I do have my favorites though.
Top of the list is "Nero di Toscana', also called Black Palm or Dinosaur kale. In the early spring I eat the little palm trees (the budded flower sprouts) growing out of the storm-beaten sturdy 3' tall over-wintered plants that have few mature leaves and are trying to go to seed. These can be eaten in salads or steamed and used until the newly planted spring crop gets big enough to eat. Later in the summer, the long, dark green narrow nubbly leaves can be harvested and steamed, stir-fried, baked, made into kale chips, put in soups and stews and on and on. Very versatile, great flavor, sturdy but tender texture and hold up in longer cooking without being woody. I pretty much live on this kale all winter.
"Redbor" kale made its debut in the P garden this winter. It's a stunning red-purple and has sturdy stems and crisp frilly leaves. it held up in storms well. We have several other kales with soft leaves, also troopers throughout the stormy weather. If you like kale, there's no such thing as a bad one. Kales are very much at home in our maritime coastal climate.
Slugs, cabbage moths (worms) and aphids are the primary pests. Once kale gets a big stem and is above the ground, slugs are less of a problem. At the farm, we are using Khaki Campbell ducks to combat the slug problem.
Using permaculture advice, I no longer go after the aphids that occasionally appear and bide my time until their predators, lady bugs, have a chance to swell their ranks and gobble up the aphids. This has worked for the last two years. The ladies eat the aphids, the plants recover and life in the kale patch goes on and nobody got sprayed or yanked out.
The cabbage worms are a bit more frustrating but, again, I stay my hand from interfering and though the mid-summer kale sometimes has lots of holes, eventually the worms leave the tops alone and perfect leaves reappear. Using a row cover would keep out most of the moths. I don't like looking at the cloth. I design the vegetable garden to look as gorgeous as an ornamental garden so any accoutrement has to be functional and arty
The hands-off approach works well because it allows the natural order of things to find a balance. It's a zen-patience thing. Not a bad spiritual practice.
SPINACH, FRENCH SORREL, ORACH & QUINOA
I plant spinach every year but get tired of the slugs. I have yet to make sorrel soup but I hear it's delicious. A new Permaculture member is a cafe owner and I'm going to see if she will lend a recipe or two to this blog.
Orach and quinoa are on my list of things to try in the P garden soon.
LAMB'S QUARTERS & NETTLES; A TASTE OF THE WILD SIDE
These are two of the most nutritious greens you can gather or grow. Lamb's Quarters was already growing in the P garden when I took over management. It's a common weed in poor soils. My mother gathered and cooked it when I was a kid so I'm used to it. The plant has a strange sparkly crystal texture on its silvery-green leaves that goes away when the greens are steamed. It has a deep-green flavor packed with nutrients. If you're looking for a daily vitamin, here it is!
I've been tempted to grow nettles in the garden but I hesitate because it can be invasive. The wild place along a nearby creek where I gather it in the early spring has been taken over by this loved/hated plant.
It's a European native and the stems are beaten and used to make a fiber, (the same one used in the fairy-tale about the brothers who were turned into wild swans by an angry sorceress and were saved by their sister who made magic shirts out of stinging nettles which turned them back into men).
Gathering nettles if best done with rubber gloves or plastic bags over your hands or long handled scissors. Don't touch the plants with bare skin or you will experience the fire of the nettle. Nettle leaves and stems are covered in tiny hairs that inject the familiar "sting" that most people have unwittingly experienced at some point while out walking. The ability to sting is disarmed as soon as the leaves are cooked. Until they go into the pot, handle them carefully. If you get stung, it will go away in a few hours or within one day if you really got a good swipe.
So, why on earth would anyone even bother with such an intimidating plant? NUTRITION, with all caps! Nettles are a traditional "spring tonic" food in many European cultures and that's how I use it.
I once when I was younger, I made negative remarks about nettles to an herbalist who gently, but firmly, explained what a gift to humanity the nettle plant is. I never again disparaged the remarkable nettle.
She gave me her simple recipe for nettle soup:
NETTLE SOUP
Pick several handfuls of tender young nettle tops in early spring (with gloves or plastic bags)
Remove any woody stems or dead leaves
Wash and place in a vegetable steamer with a small amount of water
Steam until tender, saving the water in the bottom of the pot.
Heat up ready-made broth (Chicken or Vegetable) I use chicken.
Put the steamed greens, with the liquid from the pot and some of the broth, into a blender
Buzz until the greens make a fine-textured puree
Add to heated broth and stir
Ladle into bowls, adding a dollop of sour cream and a little chopped chives
This is one of the prettiest soups on earth! It's a brilliant living green and you will feel like Popeye after you have a bowl. The flavor is musky, earthy and unique. I'm happy to have one or two pickings a year of nettles and my body tells me that's enough.
Jump-start your spring with a little weedy magic!
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