I didn’t take many pictures on Sunday’s guided garden tour at the botanical garden in Bergen at Milde, but here are a few! I was very impressed in particular by the Andean vegetables including mauka and maca! Thanks to Heidi Lie Anderson, Bjørn Moe and, in particular, skilled Andean gardener in Bergen, Bodil Oma!
It was also great to have the chance to harvest and share the Gunnera (Nalca) leaf stalk….the verdict was that it was surprisingly good, sweetly acid flavour! Here’s an album of pictures I took of the amazing Nalca food forests of Chiloe Island in Chile (including being shown by a local how to eat it!): http://www.edimentals.com/pictures/index.php?/category/10
We were very pleased that over 100 people turned up for the Milde edimentals tour and all my heavy load of books were sold out!
Introduction and welcome from the garden’s Heidi Lie Andersen
After we sampled the Gunnera tinctoria from Chile (surprisingly tasty said several who tried!), and Vossakvann (the heirloom Norwegian selection of Angelica archangelica), we moved on to the South American garden where we saw an impressive bed of Mauka (Mirabilis expansa) with edible tubers and leaves!
The MACA (Lepidium peruvianum) also had impressively large roots! We also saw and talked about quinoa, Oca, Madeira vine and Canna edulis and Oca, before finishing with the multiple uses of caraway and, finally, Allium victorialis which has a large naturalised population at Granvin in Hardanger!
After the talk some of us went to Blondehuset in a different part of the garden for refreshments and nearby we found a nice patch of udo (Aralia cordata)
…and there were other edimentals in full flower, this diverse group of Hordalanders posed for me in front of a flowering Devil’s Walking Stick (Fandens spaserstokk) a great forest garden edible (Aralia elata) from the Far East!
Devil’s Walking Stick (Fandens spaserstokk)
Devil’s Walking Stick (Fandens spaserstokk) self-seeded (?) in a rock crack!
Chuño, Andean freeze-dried potatoes!
http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=677
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
