The first harvest of sweet potatoes

I pulled up one plant today and here was the haul. Homegrown sweet potatoes, perhaps especially in clayey soils can look quite alien-like, or like organs of the body (as one friend put it today)...but still absolutely delicious!

Choko or Chayote crop on its way

Finally I seem to be on the verge of having a successful crop of Chokos or Chayotes. A long, long time ago (in a garden far, far away etc)  I had a spiky version of Choko that was more cold tolerant than the ones sold commercially and it grew like crazy with hundreds of fruit. My Grandmother even stewed them with Granny Smith apples (as McDonalds was accused of doing with their Apple Pies here in Australia - some people believe this passionately but it's an urban myth). Anyway, I lost this vine and I haven't had much luck since then. I did grow a great vine several years ago which I've written a post about before but the fruiting wasn't very abundant. At any rate my friend Karen Sutherland of Edible Eden Design has a prolific Choko vine. She gave me some fruit last year and they sprouted during winter. I planted two along the fence here and as Choko vines seem to do, it grew slowly and steadily and then exploded once the really hot weather died down. More importantly it started flowering a good week or two before equinox and even more importantly there are lots (hundreds?) of tiny Chokos swelling along the vine (see photos below). I can't wait to eat the first one. More on Chokos down the track.

Sweet Potatoes are coming...

This weekend I'm going to pull up some Sweet Potato vines. I've been bandicooting the occasional sweet potatoes since mid-March because I just couldn't wait but now is the time to get a full harvest happening, at least of the earliest planted crops. I'm going to leave quite a few vines in until May or even June just to see the plants go in the colder weather and to see how much the tubers grow, if at all, going into colder days and nights. The photos below show how the Sweet Potato plants have grown over the course of summer and autumn, from early December until now.

We've had proper rain here for the last few days, the first consistent downfalls for four months. It's been less "rain" than constant drizzle, bringing over 30mm over three or four days which sounds pathetic if you come from anywhere really wet, or even from what seems like a long-lost Melbourne but it's been great. It's also been mild still as well, like being in a cool tropical high altitude world stuck at around 18 or 19 degrees all day, like Bogota (as I imagine it!).

Yams and the Burnley Edible Landscape Demonstration Garden

Over the last few months some colleagues and I have developed an edible landscape demonstration garden in the historic Burnley Field Station. It's an attempt at creating what I call a 'seamless landscape' with food plants - essentially a garden that doesn't look like a functional 'veggie patch' in the conventional western sense. My aim was to show that you could create an aesthetically pleasing edible landscape on basic drip irrigation that could suggest ideas for private gardens as well as for better quality (= well loved and maintained) public spaces. We've used all perennial species in a fairly simple layout. All the plants are tropical except for a border of comfrey and a teepee of American Ground Nut.

Drawing by Lia Degruchy

The plantings of Dioscorea alata are also part of a propagation and culture trial. Because Yams are rarely grown in Melbourne and at this latitude, and are therefore rare or non-existent in Melbourne nurseries I'm trying to work out how best to propagate them. This is so that we can demonstrate to the nursery industry (both wholesale and retail) the best ways to grow this species and in a relatively straightforward manner. My colleague Dr Andrea Kodym came to the rescue and convinced me to try conventional asexual propagation methods, as opposed to tissue culture which I had imagined from the literature would be the best way. I'll discuss what we did in some detail in another post but in the meantime we produced lots of specimens last spring 2013 from divided tubers and subsequent re-division (and then from cuttings) and planted out over thirty individual plants in December last year (the start of our summer) around two teepees.  So along with two types of Taro, Choko, Sweet Potato, Canna, American Ground Nut, Cassava, Lemon Grass, Cranberry Hibiscus, Yacon, Pepino and Comfrey, the Yams add to a kind of tropical dreamscape, more reminiscent of a Melanesian food garden than a ''veggie patch". The whole things will die off in winter and turn
to sludge (by and large) so a big harvest will be a schedule maintenance activity. Here are some more photos.

Water Chestnuts

At the moment I have Water Chestnuts Eleocharis dulcis growing in an old bath tub (along with Arrowhead or Duck Potato), in a fibreglass fake ceramic pond, in an old waste paper bin and in a small fish tank (sans fish). The ones in the fish tank are there to show how the chestnut corms form in autumn, at least that was the idea in spring and it seems to have worked. Through the glass you can see small corms beginning to swell and one is already quite large.

Water Chestnuts are easy to grow and always seem to form here in Melbourne without any problems. I have met quite a few people who have tried to grow them with only limited success and the reason for failure is always the same on further investigation: they've been grown in the shade. This doesn't work, Water Chestnuts definitely need full sun. They are worth it though aesthetically and for the crunchy corms. Through the growing season the tall bright green grass-like stems look great and even as they brown off they look good before the foliage collapses and they turn to brown mush. From late autumn they are ready to harvest although they are not really super sweet until mid-June through to July. At this point they honestly taste of coconut. In fact, they're quite good as a raw snack as well as for cooking in stir fries. Peeling them is a bit of a hassle but worth it. For some people pulling them out of a muddy old bath or pot on a cold winter's day might not be fun either but I like being a grub so it's a seasonal delight. The harvest pics below are from last year. Grown in a 20cm diameter small pot one Water Chestnut from the previous season grew 20 new ones. In larger containers or ponds the productivity is probably higher.

Sacred Lotus

A few weeks ago I went to the Blue Lotus farm at Yarra Junction. It's a nursery and a series of large ponds and dams filled with profusely flowering varieties of Lotus. I bought my original specimens from here several years ago and they have become one of my annual highlights when they flower. They produce edible rhizomes but Blue Lotus do not sell any of the cultivars with large rhizomes bred for eating. Nevertheless they're so beautiful and easy to grow they're worth having as a token edible. I have been growing a large flowered pink/mauve type at Burnley. Here are some photos I took a couple of weeks ago.

Taro leaves

Not all varieties of Taro have huge elephant ears but the ones that do are spectacular. I'm lucky enough to have a variety which produces 80-90cm long leaves with slightly red/light purple stems. I almost don't care if they don't produce many tubers they're so beautiful. Here are some recent photos:

Down the Taro leaf shute into the watermelon vine

Edible Duds - Mexican Tree Dahlia

Some plants are edible, perennial and beautiful and I get very excited about their prospects but then they turn out to be duds in some way. Mexican Tree Dahlia is one of these plants. As an ornamental it remains one of my favourites. I love the bamboo-like canes emerging in spring, pushing skywards all summer until sprays of pink star flowers float in the air on grey autumn days. But as for edible tubers, forget it!!! I dug some up, of varying sizes (mostly enormous) and tried to bake them. The resin smell was off putting and they were as hard as a rock. It would have been easier cooking a pine log. It's hard to believe that anyone who has ever promoted this species as an edible has actually tried them. I suspect that people have taken a guess that they're OK to eat because smaller dahlia tubers can be cooked up and eaten. A comment from David on my last post on this species said that he had never eaten a Dahlia tuber of any type worth eating and I think he's probably right.

Intrigued about this supposed edible quality of Tree Dahlias I did an extensive search through Google Scholar of accounts of their use as food in the species' original habitat. Finally I found a paper (sorry, don't have it handy now) which had Tree Dahlia in a table of foods eaten by the descendants of the Mayan people. However, the edible portion used was the leaves not the tubers and these were boiled then fried. So out I went into the garden to pick some Tree Dahlia leaves. These I simply boiled and ate (no frying) and they were passable at best.

So I officially recant my first post on Tree Dahlias except for one thing, they're beautiful to look at. So in short: do not bother with the tubers, if you are desperate you can cook the leaves but if you want the a plant with seasonal drama and autumn display then plant away....(final caveat: it's hard work removing them once they are established.)

I'm the tall one in the background

Hi, I'm beautiful but not worth eating

Celery Stem Taro tubers are tasty

In my previous post I talked about removing plants of Celery Stem Taro/Tahitian Spinach and essentially turfing them out in favour of Coco Yam. Well this wasn't quite the whole story as although Tahitian Spinach is grown primarily for its leaves and stems, I noticed that the tubers on the oldest specimens I dug up were quite large. So I cut them off and prepared them for cooking and once boiled up they were yummy. As might be predicted there was no hint of "cheekiness" in any piece of the cut tubers (given the low calcium oxalate content of this variety)...so photos below show the whole process. Perhaps Celery Stem Taro is not as useless as I thought...