Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
Sue recently left a comment on my fava bean post, and asked the following question:
Can Fava Beans (dried seed) be used to feed cattle? And if so is there anything that needs to be done to them?
It’s a great question, but unfortunately I don’t have the answer. Is there anyone out there with cattle experience who could answer the question?
So I started asparagus last year from seed. There’s not a lot of information about this on the Internet, and what’s there is often conflicting. I thought I would do a post here about some of the things I’ve learned.
I decided to start my asparagus from seed, because crowns here tend to be overpriced and of unnamed varieties. I wanted to grow OP varieties, so getting seeds seemed the best way to get started. When you start asparagus from crowns, you need to wait 2 years before you get a normal harvest, and with seeds you have to wait an additional year. I was prepared to wait 3 years for a normal harvest.
Asparagus likes rich ground, and I discovered last year I had problems with not enough nitrogen in my garden. I decided to address this by planting beans as companion plants with the asparagus. This may not have been the best decision, because in the first year the asparagus plants were very small and weak, and the beans grew over and crowded them. Many of the asparagus plants didn’t survive, and this may have been part of the problem.
When I started this I was under the impression most of my asparagus plants would survive, and in any case I was expecting it to be black and white, either they would survive or not. I planted 2 beds with 12 plants each, expecting to perhaps lose a couple of plants in each bed. This is certainly not what happened.
What happened was different asparagus plants grew with different degrees of success, and quite a few simply died after the first year. It’s not completely clear how many survived, but it’s certainly less than 50% and many that are still around don’t look healthy and strong. A few of the plants are doing fine, like the one in the picture above.
Another one of the issues I’m aware of is there are male and female plants. I’m quite happy to have a few female plants in my garden, because I would like to have seeds for future planting, but most people only want male plants as they produce better asparagus spears. I’m under the impression when you buy crowns, they’ve usually been sexed and are always male.
I also started my seeds indoors. I’m under the impression this wasn’t necessary and I didn’t really gain anything by doing it.
Lessons
Starting asparagus from seed is certainly possible, but it’s a little bit more trouble.
I suggest planting seeds with about 6in (15cm) spacing in rows 1ft (30cm) apart. For the first year plan on growing crowns for transplant, so don’t worry too much about providing the perfect spot for the plants. Plant at least 4-5 times as many plants as you expect to need crowns for. You will want to be able to pick the best and strongest plants for transplanting, and will probably want to discard female plants. You can direct seed in the garden, about 2 weeks before the last frost date in your area. Germination rates can be low, so consider sowing more thickly and thinning out the plants later.
The following spring, transplant the crowns. Soilman recently did a great video on this.
One of the plants I’m really excited about at the moment are hops Miss Fuggles just sent to me. She sent me rhizomes from her three different varieties; Fuggles, Mathon and Cobb. I don’t honestly know a lot about hops, but I’m eager to see how they grow. I understand they can grow to 25ft (6 meters), but I understand these varieties won’t grow so tall. At the moment I’m planning on about 16ft (4 meters). If they get bigger, I’ll have to figure something else out.
I understand hops also like to grow vertically, but I don’t have any good way of building a 4 meter tall vertical structure in my garden, and the best I could come up with is what you see in the picture above, a pole with rope tied to the top at an angle.
Has anyone else grown hops? Am I doing something terribly wrong?
All three varieties survived the trip in the mail, and have started to grow. They all look a bit like this right now.
As always, once these become established in my garden, I’ll be happy to send out more rhizomes to anyone else interested.
I’ve posted a couple of times about the yacon plants I grew this year with stem tubers from my friend Frank in Belgium. Of all of my Lost Crops of the Incas, this may have turned out to be the most interesting.
In the picture above you see the large tuber on the right, weighing in at about a kilogram. The white things you see on the left are ‘yacón chips’, made by slicing the tuber thinly and drying the pieces in the dehydrator. The small thing on the bottom right is a small cluster of three stem tubers, one of which has started growing already.
This plant is incredibly productive. Supposedly it’s three times as productive as potatoes in the same space, and each plant yields about 10Kg of tubers! Partly as a result, the plants take up a lot of space in the garden. Each plant needs 90-100cm is all directions. The tops of the plants are quite large as well, and can shade other nearby plants. Growing the plants in a block, can help them provide support for one another, and in any case some extra support may be needed. In my garden they grew to about 1.5m in height.
The basic procedure is to start growing the stem tuber indoors in February, then plant out after the last frost date. When starting them indoors, keep in mind the plants will grow pretty quickly, so be sure to give them a large enough pot. The first frost in the fall will kill the tops of the plants, which are quite frost tender, and they will shrivel soon afterwards. You can then cut the stem at about 20cm from the ground and carefully dig up the roots. The roots are very easily damaged, so be careful when digging them. If you don’t get a frost before the winter solstice, you should probably dig the plants around then anyway.
After digging up the plant, place it in a wooden or plastic container with some holes at the bottom to let water drain. It’s probably best not to disturb the tubers by washing them. Place the plants in a root cellar or unheated room, protected from frost. Leave uncovered and don’t eat for at least the first month, because in this time the tubers will become sweeter. After the first month, you can cover the tubers with sand or peat if you want, but I didn’t find this necessary. In any case you do need to keep them from drying out too much, and I did this by covering them loosely with a damp towel. Simply eat tubers over the course of the winter as desired, and in February harvest the stem tubers for next years plants.
Eating
The taste is nice, but not really outstanding. In fact the biggest problem I had was Steph doesn’t care for it at all, so I was stuck eating both of the plants I grew on my own, and that was just too much for me. I’ve still only eaten about half of what I grew, but it’s still storing well. I’ve even given some of it away already.
It’s a bit of a problem that most of the tubers seem to weigh more than a kilo, too much for just me to eat, and they don’t store well after being cut open.
The skin is a little bitter, so I think most people will prefer to peel it. It is nice raw, crispy juicy with the taste of a melon but not so intense. It is very high in sugar, but not ordinary sugars.
It can also be sauteed in butter, until the sugar carmelizes a bit. This is probably my favorite way to eat it.
I understand it can also be added to stirfrys, but I haven’t tried this. I don’t like sweet things in my stirfrys, and since Steph won’t eat it I would have to make a one person stirfry, which I don’t do often anyway.
You can make yacón chips, like in the picture above by putting it in a dehydrator. I didn’t pretreat the yacón before drying it, just sliced it thinly. The taste of the chips is similar to dried fruit, perhaps well suited as an exotic party snack. The taste becomes more intense after drying. Time will tell if I still like eating the chips in a few months…
Beyond this you can make yacón wine, and there are some companies selling yacón syrup. I understand in theory at least, it has the potential to be a good plant to make biofuel from, because the sugars can easily be converted to alcohol.
Because the sugar is not ‘real’ sugar, it tends to leave you a little unsatisfied after eating it. I understand the special sugars can also give you wind if you eat too much, but I don’t seem to have that problem. Eating too much can give you a real empty/full feeling.
Tubers Available!
Okay, so if after reading this you are convinced you want to try growing it, you’re in luck because I have some stem tubers available.
I’m a little concerned about making an offer like this, because among other things there’s been lots of interest expressed over the Internet and a lot of people are looking for tubers. Real Seeds in the UK just reported they had a crop failure this year, so I seem to be the only source in Europe at the moment! I don’t have enough to send out hundreds and hundreds of stem tubers, and I’m probably going to disappoint a lot of you who ask for some. I probably only have 30 or 40 in total, and I’ll probably send most people who ask 2 of them.
At this point I don’t know for sure how many I have, and I don’t think I’ll know for sure until I start cutting the stem tubers off in a couple of weeks. I would like to start collecting a list of people who are interested, so if you want some please send me an email now. In the email please be sure to give me your address. One way or another I will get back to you and let you know.
I’ve already promised a number of people I would send them tubers, and they have first priority. After this, I will give priority to people who are closest to me geographically and/or express an intent to reoffer tubers next year via the Blogger Seed Network. After this, I’ll give people who participate in this blog with comments or links from their own blogs. After that it will be first come first served.
If I’ve already talked to you and said I would send you some tubers, I will send you an email in the next day or two. If you don’t get an email, please get in touch. My memory for this kind of thing is not very good!
I recently came across this very gruesome and graphic article, after following a link in a post Robbyn made.
What was originally estimated to be a few thousand farmers, now recognized as 125,000, have killed themselves after getting into financial trouble growing GM crops. According to Monsanto, regardless of the problems of individual farmers, cotton yields have doubled in the last seven years and suicide is a part of life in rural India. So what’s the problem here?
The problem is Monsanto and other seed giants are promoting their products in a misleading way, leading farmers to expect larger yields and higher profits than are realistically possible. Farmers are also promised, or the suggestion is made in promotion of the products, that pesticides will not be needed, which couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact the GM crops grown by farmers often promote insecticide resistant pests, meaning farmers have to buy even more expensive insecticides than would otherwise be necessary. This leads to financial ruin of the farmers, who escape their debts by killing themselves.
Prince Charles of the UK, mentioned in the article, really deserves a lot of credit for drawing attention to the problem as well as setting up a trust fund to help impoverished farmers in India. Of particular interest to readers of this blog may be that Prince Charles is also an avid gardener and seed saver, who has also drawn attention to the loss of heritage crop varieties.
