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...

Cocoyam or Tannier or Yautia and Goodbye Tahitian Spinach

Fiji Taro (Tannier) in Vanuatu

Fiji Taro in Vanuatu planted on a dry-ish slope under big trees

Yautia/Tannier leaf in Vanuatu

Tannier leaf at my place autumn 2013

From underneath - petiole at the bottom of the leaf, not off-centre in the leaf like Taro

Growing in semi-shade in my backyard

Tahitian Spinach - time to go (sorry)

Young Yautia/Tannier with Brazilian Spinach in the foreground

Newly planted Yautia replacing Tahitian Spinach

Yesterday I dug out five or six Tahitian Spinach plants I had tendered carefully for the last 18 months. Tahitian Spinach is a interesting form of Colocasia esculenta. It has very little calcium oxalate in its stems and leaves and can therefore be eaten like spinach without much cooking. In fact you can eat it raw and feel none of that itchiness or pain (!) you would feel from eating any other aroid leaf, including normal Taro. Having experienced the thousand needles piercing my lips after gently chewing a Taro leaf I can vouch for the fact that Tahitian Spinach is quite safe to eat raw although it's not especially appetising. It's stems appear frequently in Vietnamese groceries looking bundles of celery. In fact that's another name for this variety - Celery Stem Taro.

When I first planted Tahitian Spinach I was convinced it would become a summer spinach in my garden...well, there were a few problems. One, I grew too attached to the plants as they developed and couldn't bring myself to cut off the leaves and stems and spoil the look of them underplanted with Brazilian Spinach (see photo). Second, in a relatively dry spot under the plum tree I just couldn't get them lush enough to truly thrive. Lastly, and most importantly I discovered that other Taro leaves, while needing to be cooked, are also a great to eat and you get tubers into the bargain (not so in major way with Tahitian Spinach). And this especially applies to the South American version of Taro, Tannier or Cocoyam or Yautia- Xanthosoma sagittifolium. This is a beautiful plant which I first encountered in Vanuatu where it is mysteriously called Fiji Taro. I've blogged about this before - http://peopleplantslandscapes.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/how-vanuatu-inspired-me-to-grow-taro.html - where I think I may have confused Alocasia spp. with Fiji Taro. Anyway, not to worry I have this all sorted out now.

I bought some very small Tannier several years ago but they were poor specimens, possibly diseased, and I threw them out. The in 2012 I came across some huge specimens in the hills west of Ballina/Byron Bay in Alstonville on a friend's partner's organic farm. I yanked off a few cormels (with permission) and they came back to Melbourne with me. Potted up in winter they emerged in late spring and by autumn 2013 had produced nice sized leaves as the pics reveal. By winter my curiosity got the better of me and I bandicooted (dug) around and broke off a few small sized cormels, which were surprisingly well developed. They tasted great, with a creamier taste than Taro and a smoother texture. I dug them all up and potted up as many cormels as possible. It was time to get into serious production mode with this species. The obvious appeal of course was Tannier is a multi-functional plant that produces edible leaves and stems and delicious tubers.

One of the other great features of Tannier is that it does better in dry soils than Taro and for this reason it has become popular in West Africa where periodic droughts make Taro cultivation difficult in some seasons. So Tannier seemed the no-brainer choice for my planting zone under the plum tree. Hence yesterday morning's manic digging over the bed once the Tahitian Spinach were removed. It's the last month of official summer in Melbourne and it's 37 degrees outside but with about 8 -10 weeks of active growing season left the Tannier or Yautia should look great by May (late autumn).

American Ground Nut or Hopniss

It's hot again in Melbourne this week although it won't head into the 40s again thankfully. I love summer and the long evenings but I have begun to dream a little of autumn already. One of the plants that I look forward to seeing flower as summer fades away is American Ground Nut, Apios americana. This is another one of these rare gems here in Australia, obscure to us and very hard to find in cultivation. I first read about it in Eric Toensmeir's Perennial Vegetables and liked the idea of an easy-to-grow climbing bean with a potato like tuber that would form long term colonies and never disappear. (For a great overview of Apios americana see http://penstemon.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/hopniss-or-groundnuts/.)

But where to get any in Australia? As with so many obscure medicinal and culinary herbs and vegetables here the only supplier was Isabell Shipard in Nambour, Queensland. In the winter of 2010 I bought various species from Isabell and American Ground Nut was one of them. Out of the package she sent down was a small forestry tube with no foliage. As Ground Nut are deciduous this was OK and when I potted this specimen on the small ground nut itself was revealed. I lived in a flat at the time which was incredibly cosy and warm in winter with a large north facing window which let in lots of sunshine. (I really hate to think what it was like during our recent heatwave - it truly was hellish in summer.) Plants took off early on the window sill and the Ground Nut emerged quickly with a thin shoot.

This single specimen was planted at Sophia's garden and established itself quite well over the growing season. In autumn 2011 I dug up a few small ground nuts all growing along the roots like balls on a string and felt reasonably happy with this, thinking that these could form the basis of one of these ''colonies'' that Eric Toensmeir and others talked about. Given the relatively small size I thought that over time I could create enough plants to have a kind of novelty foraging zone with some tasty tubers but not a serious crop.

But then in spring of that year I noticed those thin emergent shoots of ground nut popping up everywhere at Sophia's, metres from where the original plant had gone in. I carefully transplanted these to my garden and over 2011-2012 these plants grew very strongly producing much bigger and more prolific tubers that I found delicious and a much more serious crop than I had ever anticipated. The better growth is attributable to the clay loam here in Alphington which retains moisture for much longer than the sandy loam of Armadale. For 2012-2013 I established a line of bamboo poles for the ground nuts and they produced a bumper crop with large, potato sized tubers.

The autumn flowers on these plants are a seasonal highlight. They are bronzey, pale red and held tightly like a condensed wisteria flower. Once flowering is over and nights gets colder, Ground Nut foliage slowly begins to yellow off and by the time winter has arrived the lush green leaves have collapsed into a yellow sludge and fallen off - this plant is seriously and spectacularly deciduous! The other exciting thing about last year's crop was I managed to get two seed pods from the flowers (with two seeds saved) and I now have one baby Ground Nut plant from seed with another on the way I hope. Growing these plants from seed (via clonal plants produced from that one original tuber from Isabell) introduces some limited extra genetic variability into the mix. I'd love to import the various varieties that have been produced in the USA and I'll investigate that possibility. Meanwhile, my plants and the ones now growing at the Burnley Campus of the University of Melbourne and in a couple of community gardens all come from that first tuber.

Sweet Potatoes in mid January following record heatwave.

1. Three purple sweet potatoes , just planted into pea straw early December 2013

2. Christmas time

3. Purple Sweet Potatoes January 19 2014

4. Beautiful, lush and tasty foliage on Purple Sweet Potato

5.

6. Mystery variety

7. Mystery variety up-close

8. Beauregards just planted (behind the clothes horse) in early December. Blue the Dog sniffing for rats under the house.

9. Beauregards January 19 2014

10. Beauregards in mid-summer

11.Beauregards

This year I have around 20 sweet potato plants in - four purple ones, two of a variety unknown and 14 orange Beauregards. These have all been growing well and went bananas during last week's heatwave. Melbourne had four days in a row over 40 degrees celcius, or 104 Fahrenheit + , namely 43, 42, 44 and 44. At night the temperature stayed in the mid to high twenties. Quite a few plants in my garden were scorched including my favourite the Abyssinian Banana which finds itself fried at least twice a year, either by frost or extreme heat. (It always bounces back though.) Anyway, as I was saying the Sweet Potatoes put on strong growth during the heatwave even though I'm sure no plants really like 44 degrees. The purple sweet potato is from cuttings I took from Karen Sutherland of Edible Eden design last winter (see http://edibleedendesign.com/blog/ )while the Beauregards are from my own stock. The mystery variety is from slips sold as leafy greens at the Preston Market. The photos below show various stages of growth over the last 6-8 weeks. I think the mystery variety may turn out to be the white skinned but purple inside type sold at the Preston Market and elsewhere.

Jeff and Wilma on cooking Canna tubers

I've been growing and eating Canna rhizomes for several years now but they've always seemed like survival or filler food. I've always thought there must be better ways to use them and sure enough I've found Youtube videos where Jeff and Wilma from Buderim have nailed it. The simple trick is to boil Canna rhizomes for at least 20-25mins before adding them to stews or soups or before frying. In other words they're much better when pre-softened. This is something of a no-brainer really but it's actually quite hard to find information on cooking with this plant. So thank you Jeff and Wilma for showing us how you do it. And as they demonstrate in one of these videos Canna can make quite good mash when cooked thoroughly enough.

Abyssinian Banana at the end of spring

Much happier now!

Abyssinian Banana

I've blogged about these before but here's a picture of my specimen after a mild but weirdly frosty winter (for Melbourne that means about five nights where it got to 0 degrees Celsius - the end of the world!) ...I'll post what it looks like now in late spring soon...

I don't feel so good at the moment

In Praise of Feral Plums

In Melbourne there are many 'plum trees' that come up in gardens, along train tracks and in parks and creeks. My own garden is part of a property that has always been rented. In that way that tenants rarely get to make big changes to a backyard, nature often takes up the slack and I have eight plum trees, most of them self-sown over the 90 year life of this house. The trees are largely a kind of generic green, in foliage and plum colour although the fruit does get a flush of red as they ripen. One small tree has apricot flavoured plums while another with exactly the same habit and form and plum shape was entirely flavourless - I have since removed it. The best specimen is the classic purple leaved Prunus cerasifera with dark red fruit which is just beginning to ripen. (The late winter blossoms are beautiful too.) The fruit bats and lorikeets are already into them, not in a feeding frenzy yet, but with enough enthusiasm that as soon as the plums are ready for humans I will pick as many as I can for stewing.

We've had good winter and spring rain this year and there is a large crop but even last year with drier conditions there were more than enough plums to go round for humans and wildlife alike. So I rate these tough old trees that can survive and thrive with zero inputs. No extra irrigation, no fertilising and no pruning...perfect!

Growing Sweet Potatoes in Melbourne

It's been a long, hot summer and there's lots to tell about my garden and how lots of different plants survived and thrived or otherwise. Let's start with Sweet Potatoes. The truth is that I picked up two small seedlings at Bunnings and planted them around October, almost as an afterthought. Here is the harvest from one of those plants, gently dug up over the weekend on April 13...I was rapt to say the least, especially considering that I had already bandicooted one large tuber in January.  I had already taken a lot of comfort from the following blog - http://suburbantomato.com/2012/05/growing-sweet-potatoes-in-melbourne-part-2/ - where a local grower had proved you could grow sweet potatoes in Melbourne. But still!










I have friends from the tropics who regard sweet potatoes as so easy to grow they're almost boring, but I'm still in the first flush of total joy that the harvest was so good. It's always like that when a food plant is regarded as marginal for your city or region and then, exceptionally hot summer aside, you show that it works as a fantastic crop.

And of course what's so great about sweet potatoes is that they're perennial plants, easy to strike from cuttings or via layering (which the species does itself naturally) and the young shoots are edible - I've been cooking with all summer. It's time to make sweet potatoes "mainstream" in Melbourne and perhaps, one day, boring... 

My True Yams (Dioscorea alata)

Just for now some images of my Yams, and I don't mean Sweet Potatoes or Oca or Taro but big, gnarly Dioscorea Yams with their beautiful foliage and colourful or enormous tubers dug during winter. I'll write more fully about them soon because I think they have great potential down here in Melbourne (at latitude 38 degrees south) as an ornamental plant and as a bonus source of carbs when the weather goes grim...

Images of Oca or New Zealand Yams

So I finally learned some degree of patience and stopped "bandicooting" the Oca. As a result I can finally show images of fully grown Oca. They really are delicious and as they harvested during the late autumn and early winter gloom of May-June, ferreting out these pinky-purple grubs on a chilly afternoon was a seasonal highlight. I am on a mission now to increase my own production of Oca but to convert all of Melbourne to these tuberous wonders!