Parasenecio hastatus

I’ve harvested seed of a distinctive tall oriental woodlander this week,  Parasenecio hastatus.  It’s taller than I am and reminds me of some of the tall Lactuca species I saw in North America recently, perhaps growing in similar habitats in the Far East.

It’s a wild species in China, Japan, Korea and the Russian Far East.  My most comprehensive Japanese foraging book says something like this (thanks to Chris Sonnenschein for the translation): “shoots are harvested when 20-30 cm long. Then when ready to cook, like asparagus, break/snap the shoots with your hand and discard the more woody end. Dice up the remainder into chunks. Boil in salted water. Rinse. Parboil in normal water just briefly. Eaten with Bonito flakes (fish), Soy Sauce & Mayonnaise. Also the leaves from the new shoots (this year’s growth) can be eaten, especially as tempura, through summer”.

I’ve posted summer pictures of hastata  in an earlier blog post, please see http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=18758.

I wouldn’t recommend eating a lot of these as they may contain alkaloids, but they are an interesting woodlander for occasional harvest from a species rich forest garden.

I have 5 or 6 Parasenecios in the garden currently including the variegated cultivar  Parasenecio hastatus subsp orientalis “Shiro Sankou Hakikomi Fu”

 

More waxwings

More waxwing (sidensvans) videos from the garden.
1)  Eating elderberries
2) Displaying flycatching skills
3) A dazed bird on the ground outside the front door; presumably it collided with the house in a drunken state…it ended well, flying off after the video ends.

Winter ready perennial kales

This week I’ve spent a lot of time preparing various less hardy plants for winter, laying down blackberry canes and covering with leaves and jute sacking to hold the leaves in place and similarly with sea kale which is marginally hardy here.
Even though it was under -5C it was dry and quite pleasant to work outside raking leaves from the wild part of the garden.
I was a bit late this year, the cold spell with 10 days below 0C every day means that there’s already 10cm or so frozen solid in parts of the garden, so crossing fingers that I wasn’t too late.
Here’s part of my collection of perennial kales which are marginal here even with the roots protected. In my world, kales are of the least hardy vegetables :)

The canes of my 30 year old blackberry are almost as long as the south facing wall of my house:

…and my 35 year old seakale bed, covered as maybe 1 in 10 winters they wouldn’t survive!

 

 

Moon rise

Only 9 hours after the sun rose, it was dark again and a beautiful orange moon rose in the north east!
This week, the moon is below the horizon for as little as 4.5 hours (the opposite of the sun which disappears for a similar time in summer)…and being near full moon we get maximum moonlight at the moment!

Still hanging high in the sky at 8:30 this morning!