During a webinar recently somebody asked me recently whether udo (Aralia cordata) resprouts in the same season if one cuts it. I said I would give photographic evidence that it does. The first picture is the blanched udo ready to eat. It was cut right down on 1st April. It reacted quickly by sending up two new shoots, one of which I ate and the second picture is what it looks like on 24th April (it was kept inside). So, the answer is yes that udo certainly responds quickly to us harvesting it.
Category Archives: Forcing
Horseradish harvest
Preparing dandelions for forcing
Just:
1. Dig up the roots
2. Remove (and eat) any green leaves
3. Plant the roots in soil up to the crown and then cover the crowns in a couple of centimetres of clean sand (I use buckets)
4. Store in the coolest place possible to keep them dormant (it could also be outside if you don’t have a root cellar)
5. Move to a warmer place ( a cool room works well) a couple of weeks before you need the shoots (keep dark if you want delicious blanched shoots)
(This is the same method you can use for forcing chicory, but to my mind dandelions are even tastier and they sow themselves….and all you have to do is NOT to weed and harvest instead!)
More blanched dandelions
Dandelion harvest
Forced blanched Udo Baccalao
I used them both in salads and also in a mixed vegetable baccalao dish. Baccalao is a Norwegian / Portuguese stew based on dried and salted cod.
Extreme winter record salad

Proof one more time that north is best for growing a diversity of tasty salad greens ;) Presenting (and claiming) my new world winter salad diversity record, a salad with over 140 ingredients all harvested locally without using any additional energy than is available in my house and cellar (no greenhouse; no freezer; no fermenting involved and only dried fruit and seed used apart from fresh vegetables!). Despite the snow cover I was able to harvest some 20-30 edibles outside. More on how this can be done will be the subject of a separate post!
The salad was presented and eagerly devoured by those who had bought tickets for the Gourmet Cinema event on 9th March 2017 as part of the Trondheim Kosmorama Film Festival! It went so quickly, I didn’t even get a taste myself!
The film was followed by a Food talk with a panel including the film’s director Michael Schwarz, the head chef at Credo Heidi Bjerkan, myself and Carl Erik Nielsen Østlund, the owner of the biodynamic organic farm that supplies much of the food to Credo, moderated by Yoshi!
http://kosmorama.no/en/2016/12/gourmet-cinema-in-defense-of-food
As Michael Pollan concludes in the film:
Eat Food, Not too much and (as many as possible) mostly vegetables!
The day before, I had prepared a 105 ingredient salad for the festival dinner at Credo restaurant (http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=10184). While preparing that salad, I made a second salad with the same 105 ingredients…and then added almost 40 additional ingredients that I hadn’t had time to harvest the day before!