(Norwegian offer below)
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 PLANTS CELEBRATES ITS 10th BIRTHDAY THIS WEEK!
19th November 2014: I wrote here on FB “I’m proud to announce that on Wednesday 19th November my book arrived at the publishers in the UK who began sending out pre-orders straight away” and “Looking for a Xmas present? IT’S FINALLY OUT: My book, 7 years in the making, Around the World in 80 plants”
The book, which describes my 80 favourite perennial vegetables and edimentals, is selling better than ever and I recently bought more from the publisher (picture). To celebrate, I am selling signed copies of the book in Norway for 10% off plus postage (20% for two or more) until 23rd November and can then be delivered in time for Xmas (kr 270 or kr 240). Please send me your address, mobile number and email and any instructions for a dedication in the book.
I will be able to send a few signed copies in time for Xmas in the UK (orders by 1st December) or direct from the publishers (not signed) at https://shop.permaculture.co.uk
In North America it can be bought from Chelsea Green (https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/around-the-world-in-80-plants)
Norwegian
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 PLANTS FEIRER 10-ÅRSDAGEN DENNE UKEN!
19. november 2014 skrev jeg her på FB “Jeg er stolt over å kunngjøre at onsdag 19. november kom boken min til forlaget i Storbritannia som begynte å sende ut forhåndsbestillinger med en gang” og “Leter du etter en julegave? DEN ER ENDELIG UTE: Boken min, 7 år på vei, Around the World in 80 plants»
Boken, som beskriver mine 80 favoritt flerårige grønnsaker og edimentals, selger bedre enn noen gang, og jeg har nylig kjøpt mer fra forlaget (bilde). For å feire selger jeg signerte eksemplarer av boken i Norge til 10 % rabatt pluss porto (20 % for to eller flere) frem til 23. november og kan da leveres i tide til jul (kr 270 eller 240 kr for boken). Vennligst send meg din adresse, mobilnummer og e-post og eventuelle instruksjoner for en dedikasjon i boken.
World Garden November Salad
14th November 2024: Although the World Garden I’ve created at the Væres Venner Community Garden in Trondheim is mostly perennials, I fill up gaps with some annuals and biennials and some of them continue right up to the first frosts when they become mush. Most of next week is forecast to be sub-zero day and night, so this was the last chance to harvest. See below the pictures for the ingredients list. 
All the following were used in the salad and all were harvested in the World Garden!
Perennials:
Rumex acetosa subsp vinealis (wine sorrel / vinsyre)
Rumex acetosa “Abundance” (sorrel / engsyre)
Taraxacum tortilobum (Moss-leaved Dandelion / mosebladet løvetann)
Allium sativum (garlic / hvitløk)
Cirsium canum (Queen Anne’s thistle / Dronning Annes tistel); tubers
Helianthus tuberosus (Jerusalem artichoke / jordskokk); tubers
Annuals/Biennial:
Anthriscus cerefolium (chervil / hagekjørvel)
Petroselinum crispum (parsley / persille)
Fedia cornucopiae (horn of plenty)
Glebionis coronaria (chopsuey greens / kronkrage
Daucus carota (carrot / gulrot)
Brassica rapa “Målselvnepe” (turnip / nepe)
Flowers:
Calendula officinalis (pot marigold / ringblomst)
Malva moschata “Alba” (musk mallow / moskuskattost)
Fedia cornucopiae (horn of plenty)
Raphanus sativus (radish / reddik)
Allium dispersal
Allium dispersal?
Well, this week was the week when vegetatively propagated onions from the Allium Garden Chicago in Trondheim were dispersed to members of the Norwegian Seed Savers organisation (KVANN; kvann.no) across the country for safekeeping (backup) and, hopefully spreading onwards in a year or two to other members! It’s been a very busy week digging up, sorting and packing altogether 271 portions of 62 varieties to 54 members! In case you were curious, below is the list of Alliums and a few other things I had promised folks. There were sent many land races of Allium x proliferum (luftløk / walking onion) and also many sand leek land races (Allium scorodorprasum)
It’s too late to order now, but seed will be offered in the new year.
1 Allium “Wietses onion”
2 Allium brevistylum
3 Allium caeruleum (bulbils)
4 Allium carolianum
5 Allium cernuum «Alan Kapuler»
6 Allium cernuum «Dwarf White»
7 Allium cernuum “Tall White”
8 Allium cernuum x stellatum “Hammers Planteskole”
9 Allium douglasii
10 Allium fistulosum «Ex-Salatnyj 35»
11 Allium flavum “Blue Leaf”
12 Allium flavum var minus
13 Allium hookeri var muliense
14 Allium hymenorhizum
15 Allium ledebourianum
16 Allium moly
17 Allium angulosum x nutans “Norrlandsløk fra Lund”
18 Allium nutans
19 Allium nutans “Isabelle”
20 Allium ochotense “Tei, Japan”
21 Allium schoenoprasum subsp boreale Stonglandseidet, Senja (Siberian chioves)
22 Allium scorodoprasum unknown variety
23 Allium scorodoprasum Abrahamsplassen
24 Allium scorodoprasum Bornholm, Danmark
25 Allium scorodoprasum Grums, Sverige
26 Allium scorodoprasum Homborsund Fyr
27 Allium scorodoprasum Kvinnherad /Uppsala
28 Allium scorodoprasum Møvik, Kristiansand
29 Allium scorodoprasum Slovakia
30 Allium scorodoprasum Tjörn i Bohuslän, Sverige
31 Allium tuberosum “Sibbo” (Swedish heirloom)
32 Allium victorialis
33 Allium victorialis “Røst”
34 Allium wallichii
35 Tulbaghia “Cosmic”
36 Luftløk unknown
37 Luftløk 5-story
38 Luftløk Amish Spreading
39 Luftløk Beito
40 Luftløk Borøya, Tvedestrand
41 Luftløk Egyptian USA
42 Luftløk Grandma Pfeifer USA
43 Luftløk Labråten, Asker
44 Luftløk Lachmanns vei, Oslo
45 Luftløk Landeskogen Tuberkulose Sanatorium, Agder
46 Luftløk Lindesnes Fyr
47 Luftløk Malvik
48 Luftløk Ottawa Canada
49 Luftløk Sandholmen, Dønna
50 Luftløk Sola
51 Luftløk Sunnfjord
52 Luftløk Øyer, Innlandet
53 Luftløk Udøy, Mandal
54 Luftløk Forsand i Lysefjorden, Sandnes
55 Luftløk Varaldsøy, Kvinnherad
56 Luftløk Volga German
57 Luftløk Vollsveien på Jar, Bærum
58 Luftløk Tungenes Fyr, Randaberg
59 Luftløk Øyvind Erland
60 Tricyrtis sp. (toad lily)
61 Aralia cordata
62 Allium x cornutum “St Jansuien, Nederland”
63 Elaeagnus umbellatus
64 Sagittaria latfolia
65 Papaver somniferum Miks
50 Garden Pea Varieties
Every year I grow 15-20 different garden pea (Lathyrus oleraceus / Pisum sativum) varieties and they’ve now all been dried, I’ve taken seed of those I want to continue with or share with members of KVANN (Norwegian Seed Savers) and the remainder will become delicious multivariety pea soup in winter:
It turns out that I altogether have exactly 50 varieties in my seed vault (i.e, the cellar), some of which are only grown every 3rd year. Some are modern varieties, others Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish and UK heirlooms. Today I was sorting the packets and peas in old packets (more than 4 years old) were added to the soup mix! I recycle seed packets, so not many of these packets were originally for peas!
Edible Gothenburg
On my way back from the Future Heirloom event in Copenhagen, I had a few hours between trains to visit one of my favourite Botanical gardens in Gothenburg, Sweden, Göteborgs botaniska trädgård. Apart from a very short visit on my way to Austria and the UK by train in January 2020, the last time I had visited was on 30th August 2017 when I did an edibles walk and talk with my friend Bosse Blomquist (see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=13658). Afterwards, I did two talks (as the first was sold out) and even got to stay the night in the flat in the gardens!
Thanks again to Johan Nilson for showing me around behind the scenes and telling me about the big changes happening at the gardens with new glasshouses being built where the old ones had been!
Below are pictures of edible plants I spotted in the gardens during my latest visit:
First Chestnut
I have a 20+ year old sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) tree in my garden. I didn’t really think it would make it here, so it was planted in not the best spot in the garden. To my great surprise, it has only suffered a little frost damage at the tips in the first few years. It even survived the record cold winter in 2011 here when the entire root system would have been frozen solid for up to 4 months. Last year, I noticed both male and female flowers for the first time, but no nuts resulted. Then, I was leading a tour of the garden in September and took the participants into the lane below the garden from where there’s a good view of the chestnut, a mulberry, Chinese walnut, Carya ovata, Cornus kousa and Rhus typhina. My eyes rested on a chestnut at the top of the tree! I cried out in my excitement and did a little dance to the amusement of those present! The 20 year wait to see if chestnuts could ripen up here was perhaps over! With only one tree, I hadn’t expected this and had planted a second tree next to it, but that is also growing slowly and it will be some years before it flowers.
Last week, we had another look and it looked as though it was slightly open and looked mature (darker colour). I therefore decided to knock it down. There is thick vegetation below the tree, and despite searching I could find no chestnut….just the open husk (pictures). It was presumably not pollinated, but it does give me hope that it is possible in this area. This tree came from woodland in southern England. I’ve now planted good varieties at the community garden (Væres Venner Felleshage), so will just have to wait!
Asteraceae: valuable autumn flowering edientomentals!
When giving talks I like to renew myself and talk about something different each time. For my talk in Copenhagen at the Future Heirloom event last weekend I focussed during part of my presentation on edimentals in the Asteraceae or Compositae (the aster or daisy family / kurvplantefamilien). These are tbe edible perennial vegetables that are most obvious in the autumn garden and often underutilised by chefs in the west. Visiting the World Garden a few days before my talk on 17th October, I gathered flowers from all the flowering Asteraceae and here they are with names:
Most are used for their tasty spring shoots and leaves, used cooked and raw, and most have a characteristic fragrant taste / aroma loved in the Far East (as also Chrysanthemum tea is popular and a refreshing accompaniment to spicy dishes). Aster scaber and Ligularia fischeri are nowadays both cultivated in a big way as “sannamul” in Korea and even exported to Korean markets around the world. Young shoots of other Aster sp. are foraged in Asia as is big-leaf Aster, Aster macrophyllus, in North America. Also from North America, cutleaf coneflower Rudbeckia laciniata or sochan was a popular vegetable for the Cherokee first people and in recent years has, maybe not unsurprisingly become a commercial vegetable in Korea. Annual shungiku or chopsuey greens Glebionis coronaria hails from the Mediterranean but is today an important vegetable in the Far East! Others currently in flower are best known as root crops, including (in the picture) Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) and Dahlia. Yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia) is also autumn flowering but doesn’t manage to flower here (is moved indoors to flower and bulk up). The final flower in the picture is marigold Calendula officinalis, whose culinary use includes decorating and flavouring salads, soups and other dishes.
Late flowering also means that the Asteraceae are also particularly important for a range of insect pollinators like hoverflies, drone flies and bees as can be seen in the pictures below, all taken in the World Garden:
The Big Fungi Haul
It’s ridiculous but it’s been such a busy summer that I hadn’t found time for foraging mushrooms in the forest this year until last Saturday 12th October. We took advantage of our helper Aleksandra Domańska from Sweden / Poland to harvest the ridiculous amounts of winter chanterelles / traktkantarell Craterellus tubaeformis in the forest at the moment. The first we picked were frozen but it became warmer as the day progressed. We returned to our car pool vehicle after several hours with 24kg of fungi, mostly winter chanterelles but also with a good number chantarelles / kantarell. two types of hedgehog fungi / piggsopp, one sheep polypore / sauesopp (Albatrellus ovinus), one cep / steinsopp and a few yellowfoot / gul trompetsopp (Craterellus lutescens). Some of the pictures in the forest were taken by Cathrine Kramer from The Center of Genomic Gastronomy who has been filming my autumn activities for a couple of days.
Traditional Wapato Harvest
Last year a garden helper, Daniil, helped me to harvest the wapato or duck potatoes (Sagittaria latifolia) which originate from the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. I grow them in a large bucket every year. There was ice on the water when Daniil harvested the tubers with his hands. This year my helper Aleksandra Domańska from Sweden / Poland was up to the task of trying to harvest them in the traditional way with her feet and bravely stepped into the muddy bucket, sinking quickly to the bottom in the only slightly warmer water than last year! She then used her hands to harvest a good crop of tubers. See the bottom of this post for links to other wapato posts. These tubers are one of the tastiest root crops! This was an experience that none of us are likely to forget, not the least Aleksa! It was also filmed by another visitor Cathrine Kramer from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy who is making a film of 4 seasons in my garden (see us all in the last picture!)
LINKS:
Daniil and the duck potatoes
https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=31597
Freezing Wapato and Chinese Arrowhead harvest: https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=30703
Sam Thayer and Mississippi wapato:
https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=30714
Autumn berries and fruit
As far as possible, I like to eat fresh fruit and berries from the garden, usually with muesli for breakfast. I’ve been self-sufficient for many years, mostly home grown but augmented with wild foraged bilberries / blåbær. From when the cellar stored apples are finished, usually in April to the first haskaps and strawberries are ready, we go over to rehydrated dried fruit. Currently these are the berries and fruit we are eating now in autumn as the first frosts threaten:
1. Elaeagnus umbellata (autumn olive; Japansk sølvbusk)
2. Rubus ‘Sonja’ (blackberry; bjørnebær) – the only blackberry cultivar I am aware of that is hardy enough for our climate, not freezing in winter. Productive with tasty berries too!
3. Ribes divaricatum “Worcesterberry” (Worcesterbær)
4. Ribes biebersteinii (Ribes petraeum var. biebersteinii) (black redcurrant; svartrips); isn’t truly black, more dark purple coloured; hang a long time on the bushes and don’t seem to be taken by thrushes (like blackcurrants)
5. Malus domestica (apple; epler) – eating the windfalls that won’t store long.
