There couldn’t be more flowers on my oldest 17 year old Hablitzia tamnoides (Caucasian spinach / stjernemelde)!
Tag Archives: stjernemelde
Variegated Habby on Nesodden
A year ago, I reported on variegation on a Hablitzia in my son’s garden on Nesodden near Oslo (see http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=18162). I gave him this plant a few years ago and I really didn’t believe it would thrive here as the spot appeared very dry with poorish looking soil, but this year it’s clearly thriving and is sprawling in different directions (they plan to paint the house, so it’s not been trained up the wall). I discovered for the second year running that one of the shoots is variegated, similar to Mandy Barber‘s plant a couple of years ago reported on the Friends of Hablitzia forum on FB!
Has anyone had success (or not) with layering Hablitzia to propagate?
Previous posts on variegated Habbies here (on Facebook):
https://www.facebook.com/
9th April veggies
Tonight’s garden foraged perennial veggies for an oriental stir-fry!
Lots of Hablitzia (stjernemelde), ground elder (skvallerkål), Svenskelauk (a form of Allium fistulosum), sweet cicely (spansk kjørvel), dandelion (løvetann), day lily shoots (daglilje), blanched horseradish shoots (pepperrot) and a variety of Allium victorialis (victory onion, seiersløk) which is the earliest form I grow along with one from the Kola peninsular in northern Russia; other varieties have hardly grown yet!
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
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!
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!
Hardy Habby
Hablitzia tamnoides (stjernemelde) is a pretty tough plant! These plants in a bucket have been like this exposed to this colder than average winter, totally frozen for probably 3 months and exposed to the swings in temperature as not buried in the insulating soil. Now waterlogged as the temperature has increased, frozen still lower down. I’m impressed that it has still managed to sprout.
I love my Habbies
