I transplanted a 3 year old pot grown Hablitzia plant yesterday and this video shows the many replacement shoots ready to grow quickly if the main shoots are harvested or grazed, presumably an anti-grazing strategy which we can use to our advantage!
Tag Archives: Hablitzia tamnoides
Hablitzia tour
A tour of my garden on 2nd April 2019 talking about one of my favourite perennial vegetables, Hablitzia tamnoides (Caucasian spinach). It’s extremely early yielding, productive, tasty, can be grown in complete shade, is very hardy and is nutritionally great too. I have currently about 11 different plants, 6 from old gardens in Scandinavia where people have been using Hablitzia as a spinach and salad crop for over 130 years and three wild accessions from the Caucasus. My oldest plant that you will see in this video was planted in 2002 and I’ve been harvesting since January this year, the reason the shoots are not very long! Nutritionally, Hablitzia is also definitely worth eating and contains particularly plenty of carotenoids, folates, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and zinc. Also many other nutritional components were larger in Hablitzia than in spinach and New Zealand spinach (from a Finnish study). See http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=8606
Snow harvest
It snowed all day yesterday, but it’s unfrozen underneath and spring bulbs like snowdrops (snøklokke), coltsfoot (hestehov), winter aconite (vinterblom), Crocus tommasianus and Hepatica transylvanica are in flower under the snow. Remembering where the edibles are located, I can still harvest food under the snow:
Hablitzia tamnoides, Allium carinatum, Ranunculus ficaria var chrysocephalus (lesser celandine / vårkål), Alliaria petiolata (hedge garlic / løkurt) and (forced inside) dandelions (løvetann)
The first garden forage of the year!
After 3-4 weeks of snow cover, the weather this week changed dramatically and we had the second warmest February day over the last 100 years with over 10C! Together with rain and wind, almost all of what was close to 50 cm of snow has disappeared. For plants, this has been a very mild winter and the ground has hardly been frozen. As soon as the snow had disappeared I could dig the soil. Some edibles such as nettles and chickweed haven’t been killed by frost. Here are some pictures of (apart from the snowdrops) edibles in the garden today.
H for Hablitzia Extreme Salad
The Less than Extreme Salad Man has been in action with the year’s multi-species salad! A few hours before the polar low storm hit and snow covered the greens, I did a forage around the garden, finding about 15 species, mostly onions, but there were fresh dandelions, perennial kales and the first Hablitzia shoots. These were added to a selection of stored vegetables from the cellar, including blanched dandelion and chicory shoots which had grown in the above average temperatures. About 30 different veggies!
Artikler om grønnsaksarven fra Hagetidend
I 2011 skrev jeg en serie artikler om vår grønnsaksarven til Norsk Hagetidend. Etter Skog og Landskap sidene ble nedlagt er artiklene ikke lenge tilgjengelig på nettet. Derfor dette innlegget hvor alle artiklene kan igjen bli lastet ned! Artikelene blir også etter hvert lagt ut hos kvann.org (Norwegian Seed Savers/KVANNs webside).
English: In 2011, I wrote a series of one page articles about Norwegian heirloom vegetables in Norsk Hagetidend (the magazine of the Norwegian Horticultural Society) in Norwegian. The complete series can be found below.
- Fjellmandel og takløk (Mandel potato and the roof onions of Gudbrandsdal)
2. Aleksandra hvitløk (Garlic Aleksandra)
3. Hagemelde “Backlund-Bly” fra USA (Garden orach Backlund-Bly from Seed Savers Exchange i USA)
4. Stjernemelde (Caucasian spinach, Hablitzia tamnoides)
5. Vossakvann (Voss Angelica)
6. Seiersløk fra Lofoten (Victory onion, Allium victorialis from Lofoten)
7. Luftløk fra Udøy (Walking onion, Allium x proliferum from the island Udøy and Catawissa onion)
8. Jordskokk fra Ontario (Jerusalem artichoke from Ontario that travelled the world)
9. Maries høje ært (Marie’s pea…from Norway to Denmark and back)
10. Tante Cis tomat (Tante Cis or Ansofs Gule tomat)
Old Growth Hablitzia today!
My oldest Hablitzia (Caucasian spinach) planted here in 2001 is the right of these two plants, the one on the left is self-sowed!
Variegated Hablitzia on Nesodden
I visited my son today on Nesodden (Oslo) and was impressed by how much growth his Hablitzia had put on and then I noticed that one of the stems had variegated leaves…I’m not sure if this is the same plant as the stems with normal leaves…will try to check on my next visit!
Ragged Jack kale and Siberian onion sourdough pizza
Last night’s veggie whole grain sourdough pizza had amongst a few other things Siberian onion Allium nutans shoots, Ragged Jack kale seedlings, Hablitzia tops and French sorrel Rumex scutatus!
Happy Habby Pizza
Last night’s dinner was a 100% wholegrain sourdough pizza with Hablitzia, four cheese and poppy seed topping…
The dough was made from a selection of whole grain organic flours including: coarse rye, emmer, barley, coarse spelt, svedjerug and a few barley and svedjerug grains added.
It was accompanied by a blanched salad – sea kale, dandelion “Vert de Montmagny Ameliore” and Allium tuberosum!
Sooooo tasty….
The Hablitzia once again impresses with its incredible productivity and early growth in one of the driest, shadiest places in the garden!
