There is book call Lost Crops of the Incas (Popenoe,
King, Leon and Kalinowski 1989) that includes a
chapter on oca. It’s a great resource for high
elevation tropical subsistence farming and for those interested in little known
crops.
From: livingontheland-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:livingontheland-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of yarrow@sfo.com
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007
9:59 PM
To: Healthy
soil and sustainable growing
Subject: [Livingontheland]
perennial vegetables
I've been reading the new book on perennial vegetables mentioned in the
article below and am a bit disappointed that it doesn't include more detailed
information on the plants I am growing -- yacon, walking kale (tree collard),
lovage, cardoon. Also, most of the plants are subtropical. But it's interesting
to read about the possibilities. Back to the seed catalogues....
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/24/HOFKT0647.DTL
Perennial crops: The garden that keeps giving
Deborah K. Rich, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, November 24, 2007
T here are a lot of reasons to grow perennial vegetables.
For starters, they require less work than annual vegetables. Second, they are
already commercially available. Finally, perennial vegetables bring new flavors
and textures to the home garden, ranging from the lemony tartness of French
sorrel to the creaminess of baked oca, an Andean root crop.
"That oca is incredible; people specifically covet oca," said Brock
Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology
Center in Occidental.
"You roast oca with potatoes and carrots and toss in some olive oil and a
little salt and garlic and crisp it up and you've got something wonderful. Oca
is just one of the great foods. It's not clear to any of us why that plant has
not made its way into the modern cuisine, because it's productive and it's
amazing."
Dolman wears many hats at the center, including as manager of the center's
biodiversity collection, orchards and 70 acres of wildlands.
The land the center occupies has a long history of perennial food crops. Acorns
and hazelnuts were staples of the Pomo Indians who lived there for generations.
Later, Italian homesteaders brought their pears, olives and grapes.
In 1974, the Farallones Institute purchased the land. The early visits by Bill
Mollison, a founder of the permaculture movement, and by Robert Kourik and
Rosalind Creasy, both authors of books on edible landscaping, prompted the
incorporation of perennial vegetables into the Farallones' bio-intensive
gardening.
"I was able to just show up here in 1994 when the OAEC bought the farm,
and there was this amazing scene already under way, and to inherit it, and then
to expand it," Dolman said.
Today, under the care of longtime garden manager Doug Gosling, the center
gardens include a wide array of perennial food plants, ranging from other
Andean root crops like mashua and yacón to cardoon, cape gooseberries, tree
collards, pepinos, nettles and lovage. The perennial vegetables are standard
fare for residents and visitors to the center, and perennial vegetable starts
are available to the public in its annual plant sales.
Once established, they give forth their bounty year after year while requiring
little more than watering and a new layer of compost.
For Eric Toensmeier, manager of an urban farm project for Nuestras Raíces in
Holyoke, Mass., and author of "Perennial Vegetables" (Chelsea Green
Publishing, 2007), that's one of the main reasons to plant them.
"They're less work," he said.
"I have plants in my garden here that I started from seed seven summers
ago, and I've done almost nothing for them since. I mulch them and give them
some compost and harvest. In your perennial garden, you work so much less than
your annual garden."
In the case of perennials, what's good for the gardener is also good for the
soil. Generally, less tillage means less disruption of the soil food web that
recycles and mobilizes soil nutrients. Because perennial roots and plant crowns
remain in place even throughout the winter, they help protect the soil from
wind and water erosion. The relatively permanent roots also provide a nearly
continuous supply of carbon-rich nutrients to the soil food web in the form of
its exudates (compounds that roots secrete to deter pathogenic micro-organisms
and mobilize nutrients) and sloughed-off cells.
Though the year-in, year-out work is less than with annuals, a little extra
care when preparing the soil to receive perennials goes a long way. Remember,
with any luck, the ground won't be laid bare for easy tilling again for five to
10 or more years, depending upon the vegetable and how happy it is in its
location.
Building in good soil fertility is especially important in beds designated for
perennial vegetables.
"Unlike a perennial flower bed, you're going to be harvesting material out
of there," Toensmeier said. Gardeners may want to have a soil test done to
identify any nutrient deficiencies, and to add specific nutrient amendments
with compost.
Any perennial weeds should be removed thoroughly; they'll be harder to grub out
once the vegetables are established. Adding thick layers of mulch after
planting will help keep them down.
Planting is also the time to install drip irrigation. It saves water, aids in
weed control and helps to avoid the fungi and leaf blights that can be brought
on by overhead watering.
Plant placement is as important for perennial vegetables as it is for perennial
ornamentals. Many perennial vegetables grow much larger than the typical annual
vegetables. Artichokes, one of our most celebrated perennials, occupy a 3- to
5-foot-diameter circle when fully grown. Chayote vines can meander for 30 to
100 feet, with one plant producing as many as 100 fruits a year, and the
perennial hyacinth bean likes to climb up pergolas and 18-foot trellises.
Some, like nettles, which spread by both rhizome and seed, can colonize large
areas - a plus only if well placed.
"Nettles can grow in a riparian corridor, and we're actively planting
those in the appropriate wet places around here to get them to grow like crazy
so that we have a lot of them. When you're really trying to eat them as a
mainstay vegetable, you need plenty of plants," said Dolman of the center.
" 'Right plant in the right place' is always the mantra. And if a plant is
out of control, it's not the fault of the plant, it's the fault of the
planter."
Perennial vegetables may be easiest to handle in a separate bed or installed as
a border along one side of a bed of annual vegetables. "If you manage your
garden for annuals and till every year, you're going to need to put your
perennials off to one side so that you're not always having to work around
them," Toensmeier said.
Perennial vegetables range from greens and crunchy stalks to beans, melons,
tubers and tomato-like fruits. Toensmeier cautions that perennials can often
have stronger, "somewhat foreign" tastes. Okinawan spinach leaves,
for example, are "almost piney" in flavor, best served as an accent
flavor in salads rather than as the main green, and lovage has an intense
celery flavor.
On the other hand, cooked nettles reportedly taste like nutty spinach, and oca
is sweet and tart like good star fruit when raw and tastes like potatoes with
the sour cream already added when baked. Yacón is a tuber that is enjoyed like
a fruit for its sweet apple taste and crispness.
"Many people have grown these for a long time," Dolman said. "I
think their apparent strangeness is more an artifact of our industrial food
system. I think it's harder to mechanize some of these perennials. It's one
thing to mechanize a tomato, it's going to be harder to mechanize a tree
collard."
Seed and plant sources. F8
General seed and plant sources
-- Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (ECHO): 17391 Durrance Road, North Fort
Myers, Fla. (239)
543-3246, www.echonet.org .
Seeds of tropical perennial vegetables
-- Evergreen Y.H. Enterprises: P.O.
Box 17538, Anaheim.
(714) 637-5769, www.evergreenseeds.com .
Seeds of Asian perennial vegetables
-- J.L. Hudson: Star Route
2, Box 337,
La Honda. www.jlhudsonseeds.net .
Rare seeds from every continent
-- Occidental Arts and Ecology
Center: Thrice-yearly
on-site sales only. 15290 Coleman
Valley Road, Occidental. (707) 874-1557,
www.oaec.org .
Yacón
-- Seeds of Change: P.O. Box
152, Spicer, Minn.
(888) 762-7333, www.seedsofchange.com .
-- Nichols Garden Nursery: 1190 Old Salem Road N.E., Albany,
Ore. (800) 422-3985,
www.nicholsgardennursery.com .
Mashua
-- McClure & Zimmerman: Spring catalog only. 108 W. Winnebago St., P.O. Box 368, Friesland,
Wis. (800) 883-6998,
www.mzbulb.com .
-- Goodwin Creek
Gardens: P.O. Box 83, Williams, Ore. (800) 846-7359,
www.goodwincreekgardens.com .
Oca
-- Goodwin Creek Gardens
(information above)
-- Nichols Garden Nursery (information above)
Organizing, education center and organic farm
-- The Land Institute: 2440 E.
Water Well Road, Salina, Kan. (785) 823-5376, www.landinstitute.org
.
Developing perennial grains
-- "Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to 'Zuiki' Taro: A Gardener's
Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles," by Eric Toensmeier
(Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2007).
-- "Lost Crops of the Incas: Little Known Plants of the Andes
With Promise for Worldwide Cultivation," by the National Research Council
(Books for Business, 2005).
E-mail Deborah Rich at home@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/24/HOFKT0IEM.DTL
10 perennial veggies to grow
Deborah K. Rich
Saturday, November 24, 2007
California,
especially near the coast, is blessed with a climate suitable for many
perennial vegetables. Many gardeners are already familiar with artichokes,
rhubarb and asparagus, but there are dozens more to choose from. Here are some
top recommendations:
Cardoon: Though it looks like an artichoke plant, cardoon differs from its more
familiar cousin in that it is primarily the midribs of the leaves that are
eaten, rather than its flower buds.
Traditionally, cardoon leaves are blanched by being bent over and buried under
the soil, though they don't have to be. Sliced and cooked cardoon midribs taste
like a plateful of artichoke hearts. Only one or two plants are needed to
produce a pile of midribs.
French sorrel: The leaves of French sorrel add a lemony tang to soups and
salads. In mild climates, the leaves are edible year-round, especially on
varieties that never flower. Cutting back the flower stalk will ensure a long
supply of tender greens.
Jerusalem artichoke: (a.k.a. sunchokes) The Jerusalem artichoke grows 4 to 12
feet tall and produces small flowers resembling wild sunflowers. Its tubers are
crisp, nutty and sweet, and can be eaten raw, baked, boiled in soups or mashed
along with potatoes. When harvesting, simply leave some tubers in the ground to
produce the following year's crop. (If the tubers are not thinned by
harvesting, Jerusalem
artichokes can spread rapidly.) Inulin, a storage starch in Jerusalem artichokes, can cause gas,
especially for those unaccustomed to eating them. Inulin is believed to improve
the body's ability to absorb calcium, and to increase beneficial microbes in
the digestive tract.
Lovage: Lovage is a large celery-like perennial that grows up to 6 feet tall.
Its flavor is very intense. The young leaves and stems lend themselves well to
soups (later growth is too strong-tasting to eat), and the seeds can be used
for flavoring. In cold areas lovage, like French sorrel, is often one of the
first greens to emerge.
Mashua: An Andean root crop, mashua is a relative of the nasturtium. Mashua is
a vigorously growing vine; give it a trellis to climb. Its red and yellow
blooms are favorites of hummingbirds. After the frost kills the aboveground
part of the plant, it's time to dig out the long, white, fingerlike tubers,
which can be baked, roasted or put in a soup. Mashua has a unique peppery
flavor. Plants produce dozens of tubers; the best can be saved and replanted
like potatoes, but since it is hard to find all the tubers, mashua, like the
Jerusalem artichoke, often becomes a "true" perennial, regrowing from
unharvested tubers.
Nettle: Be warned that nettles are covered with stinging hairs; wear gloves and
use scissors to harvest the leaves and fresh shoots. A quick cooking will take
away the sting, and the cooked tender leaves and shoots taste like spinach.
Steam, boil or use like spinach. Nettles are high in protein, vitamins A and C,
iron, magnesium, calcium, potassium and fiber. Nettles spread by both rhizome
and seed, forming a dense patch.
Oca: Another Andean root crop grown similar to potatoes. The tubers are
harvested at the end of the growing season. Yields will be higher if tubers are
dug and replanted. Oca not only tastes delicious both raw and cooked, but it
also produces high yields in small spaces. With leaves that look like clover,
oca grows in clumps about 1 foot high. The California
coast is one of the few locations suitable to grow oca in North
America because oca does not begin to form tubers until late in
the summer, and then still needs at least two to three frost-free months to
ripen them fully.
Pepino dulce: The pepino plant actually produces a fruit rather than a
vegetable, although unripe fruits are sliced and eaten like cucumbers. When
ripe, pepino fruits are about the size of a large tomato with beautiful yellow
skin bearing purple, gray or green stripes. The flesh tastes similar to
cantaloupe. Like the tomato, the pepino benefits from staking. A frost below 28
degrees will kill the pepino to the ground, but it will resprout in the spring
if the roots weren't damaged.
Tree collards: Tree collards produce a kale-like brassica leaf year-round in
cooler climates. The leaves are good steamed, braised and in soups, stews and
casseroles. Tree collards may not be as productive where summers are hot. Tree
collards can be left to spread out along the ground, eventually occupying a
large area with a mini-thicket 3 feet tall or so. Alternatively, where space is
tight, tree collards can be trellised.
Yacón: An aster, and yet another Andean root crop, yacón produces small, football-like
tubers that are mostly eaten raw, similar to a jicama. Yacón is crunchy, juicy
and a bit sweet, lending itself to crudites. Yacón grows into a lush
6-foot-tall shrub. The large storage tubers form below a crown of smaller
tubers, which are broken apart and replanted at harvest. Like Jerusalem artichokes, yacón contains inulin.
This article appeared on page F - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/24/HOFKT0670.DTL
The potential for growing food from perennial crops
Deborah K. Rich, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Perennial crops have great potential. Yet they hardly figure in the world's
calorie consumption.
The world's major grains, food legumes and oilseeds - including all of its
wheat, rice, corn, barley, soybeans, cottonseed and dry beans - are annuals.
These crops covered 80 percent of harvested cropland in 2004.
A food system based upon plants that start each growing season anew from seeds
is inherently risky.
Farmers' efforts to reduce the risk often degrade soil and water and accelerate
the buildup of greenhouse gasses.
Many crop seeds won't germinate if the soil is too hot, cold, wet, dry, crowded
or full of clods. With plow and disc, farmers clear the soil of weeds and
debris and slice it into a fine crumb. If it's a spring planting, they wait for
the soil to warm. For a fall planting, they wait for it to cool. In the arid
West, farmers "irrigate up" before planting; in the changeable Midwest, they squeeze in planting between thunderstorms.
Weeds enjoy the farmers' carefully prepared seedbed just as much as crops.
Farmers cultivate, spray herbicides or hoe to keep weeds under control while
their crops get established.
There is a beginning for perennials as well, complete with seedbed and coddling
of seedlings. But the initial soil disturbance and fieldwork pay off for
several years.
Alfalfa, a legume grown for animal feed, often produces for five years or more.
Without the need to disc and plant each year, tractor use is less, fuel use
declines and the soil suffers less degradation.
Agroecologist Jerry Glover of the Land Institute demonstrates the power of
perennial plants.
Arms outstretched, he holds up a clump of annual wheat in one hand and a
handful of wild perennial wheatgrass in the other. While the slender roots
hanging from the clump of wheat fall barely to Glover's elbow, the boisterous
tangle of wheatgrass roots tumbles down to his feet.
"You can visualize roots as a series of safety nets for the soil," he
says. "Safety nets not only with depth, but extending over time."
Within the first year of planting, the roots of perennial crops leave little
room for weeds. Glover thinks that a reduction in herbicide costs of four to 8
1/2 times is a conservative estimate.
"I have 5-year-old wheatgrass plots that are weed-free and have never had
herbicides," says Glover. That saves money, reduces tractor passes and
benefits environmental health.
Perennial crops extend the growing season, partly by already being in the
ground as winter is ending. In states such as Kansas, where the Land Institute is located,
it isn't unusual for only half the days in a month to be suitable for planting.
Perennials start growing first. "Root activity can take place at much
cooler temperatures than seeds can germinate," he said.
They also stretch out the growing season. In late September, Glover's
wheatgrass had already regrown 4 to 6 inches after being harvested in August
while he waits to reseed his wheat field.
"Our annual winter wheat won't do well at all in July or August,"
says Glover. "It doesn't even matter if we can get the seed to germinate;
the winter wheat just can't grow in those temperatures, and the surface of the
soil is too dry for the seedlings. Yet our perennial wheatgrass, because its
roots are deep down, is able to reach where the soil is more buffered against
extremes in temperature and moisture."
Reaching deep into the soil year-round, perennial roots make more efficient use
of nitrogen inputs, half of which can leach out of the root zone before plants
can make use of it.
"Nitrogen in the soil typically moves with water," says Glover.
"You don't want to have water flowing through the system unused. Picture Iowa in April or May.
There's no crop growing because it's too cold, but yet they're getting a lot of
rainfall."
Not only are nitrate losses a waste of an expensive input - the price of
nitrogen is on the rise along with the price of oil - nitrates draining into
waterways fuel the spread of coastal dead zones.
Spring and summer nitrate flows out the mouth of the Mississippi River cause
massive algae blooms that rob the water of oxygen and create dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
The perennial web of roots holds onto more than nitrogen.
The roots anchor the soil and reduce erosion. A study begun in 1888 at the University of Missouri measured the depth of topsoil
remaining after 100 years of continuous farming.
Topsoil under plots of perennial timothy grass (a crop cut for hay) was more
than two times deeper than the topsoil remaining under annual corn, and almost
1 1/2 times deeper than the topsoil remaining under a six-year rotation of
corn, oats, wheat, clover and timothy grass.
With the world's population growing, agriculture must anchor all the soil it
can as ever more marginal land is pushed into production.
"We get away with a lot here in North America
because our soils are so rich, fertile and deep. The thinner or more poor your
soils are, the more you need perennials there to safeguard them," says
Glover.
Conversion to perennials cannot happen overnight.
The Land Institute began its perennial breeding programs in 2000. Today it has
four breeders and total funding of approximately $2 million.
Glover estimates that the institute is probably at least 25 years out from
having a high-yielding perennial substitute for a major grain. The world may
come asking for seed sooner.
"How far out we are from having a product partly depends on
expectations," says Glover. "Our wheatgrass, for example, right now
out-yields some of the world's minor annual crops, such as Ethiopian teff, in a
good year. Also, for some of the non-food-crop oilseeds, you don't have all the
taste and handling requirements that you have for wheat. You want a very
consistent bread, but for oil you're more flexible. And how far we are from a
commercially viable crop will partly depend upon world resources."
This article appeared on page F - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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