permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

>Is there some reason this doesn't get talked about much, or am I 
>missing some problem with it? N-fixing and 17% protein! Is it any
>good? Seems like I hear from time to time about various lost crops 
>of the incas but not about this lost crop of the native north 
>americans...

Lawrence asks, "Isn't there a lot of work involved in making it 1) palatable 
2) safe to eat? Maybe it is used to make flour."

Wikipedia says of the groundnut, a.k.a. hog peanut or potato bean, that it 
"is a perennial vine native to eastern North America, and bears edible beans 
and 
large edible tubers. It grows to 3-4 m long, with pinnate leaves 8-15 cm long 
with 5-7 leaflets. The flowers are red-brown to purple, produced in dense 
racemes. The fruit is a legume (pod) 6-12 cm long."

 "The tubers are palatable and nutritious, with a high content of starch and 
especially protein. The plant was one of the most important food plants of 
pre-European North America, and is now being developed for domestication ".

Yet another example of how the presumptuous Westerner cleared his fields of 
perfectly good crop materials, to replace the hardy local vegetables with 
exotics that may or may not acclimate as well to local conditions.

When the Boers came to South Africa they went to quite a lot of trouble to 
clear the land of antelope, creating mountains of useless carcasses where 
there 
used to be a stable ecology of eight or nine endemic species-- now, I 
believe, 
all extinct. In their place they introduced European cattle, which promptly 
caught the rinderpest, and died from it.

There's a lesson here, somewhere.