Wild buckwheat sprouts

My favourite seed to sprout in winter is wild buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum), supposedly the wild ancestor of Fagopyrum esculentum the common buckwheat grown for the gluten free grain. I sow it repeatedly in large pots in earth on the window sill in the leaving room. The plants self-sow on my vegetable beds and each plant produces a lot of seed, so i just leave a few to grow and collect all the seed I need.  Harvested some sprouts for lunch today:

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Riceroot and Hog Peanuts

I like the comment by Eve Emshwiller in the interesting article http://whyfiles.org/2012/farming-native-american-style  looking at how to learn from how the Native Americans had developed stable, sophisticated food-gathering systems:
“There were a lot of people who were not considered agriculturalists, who were [supposedly] just gathering from the wild. But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them.”  This is a message that I try to get across in my book where many examples are given of this continuum between foraging and gardening.

I grow a couple of the wild gathered tubers mentioned in the article. First, Riceroot is a really hardy edimental  and an important foraged food plant across its range (the first group of pictures below). The last three pictures are of Hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata).

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A beautiful yellow flowered form of rice-root
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The rice is the small bulbils just below the surface
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Fritillaria camschatensis with the normal coloured flowers known as Svartlilje (Black Lily) here in Norway

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