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Recent Transplants

The first plant is quinoa, one of the ‘Lost Crops of the Andes’. This is rainbow quinoa, from Real Seeds in the UK. The plant is very similar in appearance, and is related to, lambsquarters a common garden weed. I tried growing this a few years ago, and it didn’t come up. At the same time I noticed the garden was full of lambsquarters, so now I’m beginning to wonder if I didn’t set quinoa free into the garden back then.

Quinoa

In most places in the world, quinoa is easily available in natural food stores, and it’s worth trying if you’ve never had it. It’s sometimes called Incan rice, and it’s a direct replacement for steamed rice in many cases. It has a softer taste than normal rice, while at the same time can taste a little ‘soapy’. The soapiness comes from a water soluble alkaloid that you can remove from home grown quinoa by soaking overnight and rinsing thoroughly. Purchased quinoa has usually been processed to remove this alkaloid and doesn’t need to be rinsed.

The next plant is Amaranth. This too can be a garden weed, commonly called pigweed. Unlike quinoa, I’m not really sure of a nice way to eat this. I understand it can be mixed in with rice or other dishes. I guess I will have to experiment with this. The seeds for this also came from Real Seeds.

Amaranth

Last but not least is Good King Henry, also called Mercury. These seeds came from Søren. I understand you can eat the leaves like a spinach, and in the spring it sends up shoots that can be eaten as a ‘poor man’s asparagus’. The plants seem fragile, and are having a hard time establishing themselves. I understand they prefer partial shade, and they will be growing in the shadow of my Jerusalem artichokes.

Good King Henry (Mercury)

I think lots of people are growing this, so if anyone has any tips please let me know.

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Jerusalem Artichokes

Jerusalem Artichokes

Several people have been posting pictures of Jerusalem artichokes they’ve planted recently.  Here are mine, 8 plants.

For all the complaining I might do about the messes the previous gardener left behind for me (and there were a lot of them), this will surely be an issue for the next gardener.  Oh well, one gardener’s dinner is another gardeners weeds.

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Perennial Onion Harvest

Perrenial Onions

These are mostly Amish Onions, with a few Egyptian Walking Onions mixed in.

I’ve posted before about perennial onions, and now in my garden I have Amish, Egyptian Walking and Fleener topsetting onions. The Fleener onions aren’t doing well right now, and struggling along.

I’ve been growing perennial onions for a few years now, and I really like them. Basically you can eat any part of the plant you want to, at any time. The onions I have now are all topsetting onions, and leading up to the summer solstice will send up a scape similar to a garlic scape and form topsets that can be eaten or replanted for more plants. Sometimes the plants also form root divisions. You can leave the plants in the ground, and they will continue to produce new topsets year after year. Anytime you want, you can dig up the whole plant and eat the root which is an onion with a unique and special taste, but then the plant will be gone.

The plants are very disease resistant, so it’s not necessary to rotate them and they can be left in the same spot year after year. They also tolerate transplanting very well, and can be dug up and moved almost anytime. They are carriers of some of the same diseases that are a problem for other members of the Allium family like garlic and onions, so where you grow them has to be taken into account when planning crop rotations for these other plants.

Honestly, if you don’t like eating onion greens, this kind of onion is probably not for you. The greens are the best part, and really have a nice taste. The greens are also available early in the spring, when there aren’t often other sources of onion available. The roots and topset, while edible, are not really spectacular.

I am still trying to find the best way to serve the greens. The flavor is wonderful, but delicate and easily overwhelmed by other food flavors. They disintegrate quickly when cooking. So far, I have enjoyed them most in salads (as long as you don’t have a strong tasting dressing), as well as a garnish in many places.

Except for the handful that went into dinner, the onion greens you saw in the picture above, after going through my dehydrator, became this:

Perrenial Onion

They turned into something similar to dehydrated chives.

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Holland’s Three Most Important Exports

According to police in the Netherlands, the three most popular export products are:

  1. Cucumbers
  2. Tomatoes
  3. Marijuana

Dutch marijuana is reportedly flooding international markets, and displacing products from other countries such as Morocco, Lebanon and Pakistan.

For decades now the sale, use and possession of small amounts of marijuana has been allowed in the Netherlands, and in recent years the growing of marijuana has also been increasingly allowed. For personal consumption, the growing of five plants per adult living in the same household is currently permitted. There has also been a degree of laxness when it came to enforcing the law in larger growing operations.

The situation has now changed, and the police are currently closing down about 15 growing operations per day.

It’s Different

The marijuana that’s being produced in the Netherlands now is different from anything that’s ever existed before. I know we’ve all heard this before, the warnings that marijuana is getting stronger and becoming less safe, but it’s really important to understand this time is different.

For a number of years now, a lot of attention has been paid to breeding new cannabis plant varieties in the Netherlands. A lot of money has gone into it, and big name plant science laboratories have become involved. The approach has been the same as with other food crops, trying to develop marketable varieties.

Most of the new super varieties are F1 hybrids, and they are patented!

The emphasis has been on strength, because to have a patented product that is the strongest means you will control the market. After all, if you are a marijuana consumer (or wholesaler or distributor) offered a choice between a stronger or weaker product, the natural thing to do is choose the stronger one.

The Problems

Besides the underlying commercial greed that goes into this sort of plant research, the most immediate problem with current varieties seems to be the balance between two chemicals THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (Cannabidiol).

The strength of marijuana is normally measured by it’s THC content, and this appears to be the focus of the research on the new varieties. Unfortunately, this appears to be at the expense of the CBD content, which is lower in the new varieties.

The THC is what makes you ‘high’. The CBD on the other hand makes you more relaxed, reduces paranoia, and most users report a higher CBD content makes the high more pleasant.

The true importance of a good balance between THC and CBD is only recently coming to light.

The local media has been full of stories recently of dramatic increases in the levels of mental illness and psychosis associated with the use of these new super varieties. Police have associated an increase in crime as well.

Discussions have been taking place in both the Netherlands and the UK as to if the laws need to be changed in order to protect users from these new plant varieties. As is usual with this type of situation, a clear link is not being made with the new commercial varieties, but rather with marijuana in general.

It seems very unlikely that any government is prepared to only ban the commercial varieties of a particular product, while continuing to allow the non-commercial variant. It seems unlikely any government will take the necessary steps to provide the necessary quality control in this situation.

If you are a consumer, you should be looking for other sources besides Holland!

Perhaps if you are a consumer of Dutch cucumbers or tomatoes you should also be looking for other sources, but I think this is a topic for another post…

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Important Information for People Growing Ulluco

I know there are a few readers of this blog growing Ulluco now.

Frank just left a very informative comment on the previous post. There’s more information in this comment than I’ve been able to find on the entire Internet to date.

So far I have several plants that are surviving, but I can’t say much more than that. Since I was expecting to hill them up like potatoes, I planted them in trenches. This means the ground is a little wetter than the rest of the garden, the plants are a little shaded by the sides of the trench (I dug them east-west), and so are staying a little cooler in this hot spell we are having.