permaculture

[kris kaul <kriskaul@yahoo.com>]

Here is a nice article from the current issue of Orion magazine that 
certainly has me planning to grow Apios.
   
  - Kris
    new permie in Michigan
   
  Stalking the Wild Groundnut
  http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/458 
  In case of a famine...a plant that grows everywhere
  by Tamara Dean

Photo by Jason Houston
  Published in the November/December 2007 issue of Orion magazine
  


   
  Once I paid attention to it, the plant appeared everywhere. Its foliage 
clouded our view of the river. Its vines tangled with my pumpkins, twisted 
around goldenrod, jewelweed, cow parsnip—in fact, anything with a stalk—and 
grew so long and intertwined that it was impossible to tease one out to find 
where it sprouted. In August, I was drawn to its maroon-and-cream-colored 
flowers, shaped like pea blossoms and smelling of lilies. I picked a cluster 
and looked it up in a wildflower guide. 
  The plant was Apios americana, also known as wild bean, Indian potato, 
potato bean, and, most commonly, groundnut (though other plants, including 
peanuts, are also called groundnuts). Apios americana is a legume, like peas 
and beans, and prefers moist soil. Where established, it grows aggressively, 
its vines spreading up to ten feet each summer. Cranberry farmers hours north 
of my place in Wisconsin consider “wild bean” a weed and spray it with 
herbicides. But a University of Maine agriculture bulletin suggests an 
alternative: “One way to remove the tubers would be to eat them, just as 
Native Americans and the Pilgrims were accustomed to doing.” 
  Indeed, for centuries Apios americana was a staple in the diets of many 
Native Americans, which explains why it grows profusely where they once 
encamped. Almost every part of the plant is edible—shoots, flowers, the seeds 
that grow in pods like peas, but, most importantly, the tubers. These tubers 
(the groundnuts) are swellings that form along a thin rhizome, like beads on 
a necklace. They can be small as a fingernail or, rarely, large as a melon. 
And as with other root vegetables, they sweeten after a frost and overwinter 
well in a cool, damp place, offering sustenance in a time when the land 
provides little other food. Pilgrims were taught to dig and cook groundnuts 
by the Wampanoags, and these “Indian potatoes” probably spared the newcomers 
from starvation. Henry David Thoreau knew and ate the tubers. He wrote in his 
journal, “In case of a famine, I should soon resort to these roots.” 
  However, neither Thoreau nor the Native Americans nor the Pilgrims could 
have known how healthy groundnuts are. Like potatoes, they are high in 
starch. But they’re also relatively high in protein, containing up to 17 
percent—about three times as much as potatoes. In addition, studies from at 
least two U.S. universities reveal that groundnuts contain a significant 
quantity of isoflavones, chemicals linked to a decreased incidence of 
prostate and breast cancers. Plants for a Future, a British organization that 
educates the public on “edible, medicinal, and useful plants for a healthier 
world,” ranks Apios americana as the fourth-most-important plant in its 
database of seven thousand. 
  Much of this I discovered by searching the Internet long past midnight on 
the day I picked the groundnut blossoms. And then I lay awake thinking. How 
could I not have heard of this wild food? After following my parents through 
the woods looking for morels and fiddleheads every spring? After childhood 
summers at nature camp by the oxbow? Of course, I was curious to taste it. My 
partner, David, and I resolved to dig some of the tubers. But we’d wait until 
after a frost, when they’d be sweeter. 
  THE NEXT DAY WE VISITED OUR FRIENDS Erin and Dave Varney, who operate One 
Sun Farm a few miles from our property. The Varneys practice permaculture, 
which involves the planting of diverse, perennial, interdependent species 
appropriate for one’s locale. For example, Dave plants strawberries between 
his hazelnut bushes. Both will coexist happily for years. And he planted the 
hybridized hazelnuts where he had seen wild hazelnuts grow previously. “I 
kept cutting these things down, and they kept coming back. Then I thought, 
‘Wait! Something’s telling me to grow hazelnuts here!’” A lanky, energetic 
young man, Dave speaks with the arm-waving zeal of a southern preacher. 
  We picked up our dozen eggs and stood talking near the chicken coop in the 
late afternoon sun. I told Dave about the groundnuts, how we found the plant, 
researched it, and planned to taste the tubers. He rubbed his chin and looked 
skyward. 
  “But no one’s cultivated it?” he asked. 
  “They’ve tried, but it takes two or three years to produce sizeable tubers, 
so—“ 
  “It sounds like a permaculture crop! Commercial growers want one season and 
out. They don’t want to wait, to make an investment.” 
  Even after our conversation wandered to other topics, Dave would say, “Oh, 
now you’ve got me excited about this groundnut.” He’d never seen a plant 
matching its description on his property, so we promised to bring him some 
tubers, enough to eat and to plant. 
  The sun was setting when we arrived home. A deer grazed on the hill across 
the road, and in front of the deer and nearly as tall, a pair of sandhill 
cranes pecked and stepped their way through the grass. 
  I went to the shed and found a spade. “We won’t make any judgments,” I told 
David. “We know they’ll taste better in a few months, right?” 
  “Okay, we’ll just try them.” 
  High on the riverbank I grabbed some tendrils and followed them to what I 
thought was an Apios americana stem. David dug a football-sized clod of dirt 
from beneath it, then held up the shovelful for my inspection. Yes! Poking 
out were two strings of dark-brown groundnuts, looking just like the 
illustrations I’d seen online. We tugged to separate them from the thatch of 
grass roots and shook off the dirt. Minutes later we had collected about a 
dozen, ranging from a half inch to two inches in diameter. A few were soft 
and woody—the older ones, we guessed. Most were firm as knuckles. 
  We hadn’t brought a bag, so I made a pouch out of the front of my t-shirt 
to carry them home, where we washed and then examined our harvest in the 
colander. What to do with them? Depending on the tribe, Native Americans had 
boiled the tubers, dried them to make a flour, fried them in animal fat, or 
roasted them with maple syrup. Thoreau also offered hints on their 
preparation: 
  October 12, 1852. I dug some ground nuts with my hands in the railroad sand 
bank, just at the bottom of the high embankment on the edge of the meadow. 
These were nearly as large as hen’s eggs. I had them roasted and boiled at 
supper time. The skins came off readily, like a potato’s. Roasted they had an 
agreeable taste, very much like a common potato, though they were somewhat 
fibrous in texture. With my eyes shut I should not have known but I was 
eating a somewhat soggy potato. Boiled they were unexpectedly quite dry, and 
though in this instance a little strong, had a more nutty flavor. With a 
little salt a hungry man could make a very palatable meal on them. 
  But since we’d dug our groundnuts months before their peak, we decided to 
cook them in a manner that couldn’t fail: fried in butter and salt. 
  With paring knives and great patience we peeled every one of the 
groundnuts, even the smallest. The ivory flesh, dense as ginger root and 
striated with tiny capillaries, left a starchy residue on our knives. We 
sliced the naked tubers on a mandoline, then fried the slices in a cast-iron 
skillet until we had a pan full of little brown coins—penny- and nickel-sized 
chips. After letting them drain on a paper towel, we agreed to take our first 
bites simultaneously, in case they weren’t good after all. But they were 
good. Delicious, in fact. A flavor something like a potato, but sweeter, and, 
as Thoreau had written, a little nutty. 
  IN THE FOLLOWING MONTH I ASKED EVERYONE I encountered—friends, relatives, 
neighbors, foresters, checkout clerks at the food co-op—if they’d heard of 
groundnuts, by this or any other name. I described the plant’s habitat, 
vines, and foliage, its relation to peas, and its tubers, but no one, not 
even an acquaintance who boasts of enduring lengthy survival training and 
uses clamshells as utensils, was familiar with it. How had a once-vital food 
source become invisible, just another weed? 
  I contacted Sam Thayer, a wild-edibles expert who lives in northern 
Wisconsin. He conducts foraging workshops across the nation and recently 
published a book on the subject. Groundnuts, it turned out, were not only 
among his favorite wild foods but also his favorite topic of conversation, 
though Sam chooses to call the plant by its Lenape name, hopniss. I phoned 
him at lunchtime, and he was munching as he talked. I imagined him before a 
large bowl of various shoots, roots, berries, and leaves that I would be 
hard-pressed to identify. 
  “I don’t have all the answers, but this is something I can explain,” Sam 
said when I asked why so few people knew about the plant. 
  His theory was that the first Europeans who arrived in this country found 
the thought of living like Native Americans abhorrent. Some foods, like corn, 
they recognized as “super important” for survival and adaptable to European 
cuisine and methods of cultivation. Those deemed unsuited to the European 
lifestyle were not only rejected but stigmatized. Sam gave as examples from 
the Great Lakes region acorns, wild rice, hickory nuts, wapato, also known as 
arrowhead, and groundnuts. In the southeastern United States, he said, the 
forgotten food is lotus, whose roots he claimed were delicious. “No European 
would eat it. Now hardly anyone remembers that it’s edible.” 
  Sam estimated that he eats a hundred pounds of groundnuts a year, in at 
least two meals per week. He harvests them in early November before the 
ground freezes and stores them in a root cellar. One of his favorite ways to 
prepare groundnuts is to boil, peel, and cube the tubers, let them dry, then 
grind the dried cubes into a meal, which he later reconstitutes into 
something that, with some taco seasoning and lime juice, resembles refried 
beans. He added, “I also like to make a hot dish of hopniss, grated wild 
parsnip, onions, and wild rice. To be perfect, you should make this with 
squirrel broth, but if you don’t have that you can use something else.” 
  I mentioned having read that groundnuts were exported to Ireland during the 
potato famine, and that many centuries earlier, explorers had tried to 
transplant Apios americana to Germany and France, but these attempts at 
domestication failed. 
  “I wouldn’t say they failed,” Sam said. “They just didn’t produce within 
the traditional monoculture model. Hopniss are easy to transplant, but they 
don’t like to be alone. They want to grow under the roots of other things, 
like elderberry. Or next to Jerusalem artichokes. They’re a twin to Jerusalem 
artichokes. I imagine them fitting into a three-tier system. In Wisconsin, 
you could have hickory, hackberry, or sugar maple as the overstory, 
elderberry in the middle, then hopniss below.” 
  It was just as our friend Dave Varney had said: Apios americana is a 
permaculture plant. But Sam wanted to talk about something else. 
  “I have to tell you, since I’ve been feeding people hopniss all these 
years, I’ve found out some of them will get violently ill after eating it.” 
It had never happened the first time someone tried it, he said, but it could 
happen the second time or even after many years of eating it. “Maybe you need 
to build up a certain dose of the protein. Maybe there’s more of this 
allergen in larger tubers. Or it might have to do with the growing 
conditions.” He estimated that as many as 5 percent of Apios americana eaters 
would be made sick at some point and, once they reacted, would become ill 
with every subsequent bite. “That’s the only thorn on this rose. Otherwise, 
it would be a perfect food.” 
  That weekend David and I had planned a party to celebrate the completion of 
our straw-bale wood-shop and thank our friends and neighbors who had helped. 
After raving about groundnuts for a month, I had promised that I’d prepare 
some. Two grocery sacks full of tubers waited in our cold garage. But on the 
morning of the party, as I ran about town gathering provisions, I began to 
have second thoughts. Was it okay to serve the tubers as long as I warned 
people about the possible effects? What about the children? 
  Finally, an hour before the party, I dumped the groundnuts into a sink full 
of water. I would assume that Sam was right about no one getting sick the 
first time and that this would be our guests’ first taste. As for David and 
me, we would take our chances. 
  According to Sam’s recommendation, I boiled the tubers a long while to 
loosen the skins, filling the kitchen with a musty steam. After peeling them, 
I put the groundnuts in a Crock-Pot with a half stick of butter and about 
three-quarters of a cup of maple syrup, loaded it in the car, and drove to 
our straw-bale building. By the time I arrived, I was late for my own party, 
and in the haste of setting up I simply plugged in the Crock-Pot and forgot 
about it. Later, a friend reminded me of my promise to serve groundnuts. I 
scooped out a few and put them on his plate. 
  “Oh, wow. This is delicious!” he said and quickly held out his plate for 
another helping. 
  Others circled around, and soon I had a full-time serving position as 
people lined up for seconds and thirds. Their groundnut questions became more 
and more specific, until finally I said, “Want to go get some?” 
  Friends grabbed shovels and followed me to the riverbank. Some wanted to 
see the vines, but our first light frost had killed them weeks before, and 
what remained were nearly invisible, brittle tendrils clinging to the weeds. 
Yet in our area you needn’t follow a vine to the ground to find tubers. The 
plants grow so densely that sinking a spade anywhere brings up at least a 
handful. 
  We and our friends and neighbors and their children huddled in a circle, 
the evening sun glowing pink on our cheeks and hair, and took turns with the 
shovels. A mound of freshly upturned dirt prompted outbursts from those who 
spied the tubers first. “There’s some! Here!” 
  Just as Sam had predicted, the tubers were nestled between the roots of 
other plants—in this case, Jerusalem artichokes and the finger-shaped 
rhizomes of cow parsnip. The kids clawed through the dirt to get at the 
tubers, which we then passed around, inspected, and cooed over. Once the 
larger groundnuts were snapped off and stowed in a pocket, we watched 
expectantly as the next shovelful was overturned. 
  For a moment it seemed crazy to me that everyone had gone straight to 
collecting food from the riverbank at my suggestion. But of course this is 
how people learn about foraging. Although there have been a handful of books, 
and now websites, describing which plants are edible and how to prepare them, 
foraging remains anchored in oral tradition—staked on a communal shovel, a 
trailside tutorial. But oral tradition lasts only as long as teachers and 
listeners keep communicating. Sam had told me about the time he prepared 
wapato, historically a staple of the Ojibwe diet, and brought it to Ojibwe 
friends in northern Wisconsin. They loved the starchy tuber, but confessed 
they’d never heard of it, much less tried it. Eventually one of the older men 
said, “You know, I think I remember my grandmother making a dish like that 
when I was a kid.” But sometime in the twentieth century his clan forgot 
about wapato, forgot how it was cooked and how it tasted. 
  Today most of us have forgotten what our forebears surely knew: that we can 
find our food in the wild if we need to, that we don’t have to rely on those 
giant tracts of soybean and corn that dominate the rural Midwest. Few of us 
carry Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus on nature hikes. We seldom 
look at a prairie or forest and think “lunch.” I wondered if, the next time 
they walked in the woods, members of our digging party would taste-test 
anything besides the obviously edible wild raspberries—if they’d snap off 
fresh basswood leaves for a salad or gather wild parsnips for soup. 
  From five clumps of dirt, our party collected more sizeable groundnuts than 
we could carry. Luckily, one of the children was wearing cargo pants with 
side pockets as big as saddlebags. These were soon filled, and the wearer 
waddled his way back to our shop, where he dumped the groundnuts into a sack. 
  In the end, no one fell ill, either from the groundnuts served at the party 
or those they took home. 
  GIVEN HOW TASTY, NUTRITIOUS, AND PROLIFIC groundnuts are, I wasn’t 
surprised to learn that someone had tried to adapt Apios americana to modern 
agricultural practices. Sam told me about Bill Blackmon, a professor who led 
such an effort at Louisiana State University from 1984 to 1996. Bill, 
however, chooses to call the plant simply “apios.” “It’s like a friend once 
told me,” he said when I called him. “‘You’d better be careful using some of 
these Indian names. You don’t really know what you’re saying.’” 
  Bill’s voice is soft and shaped by a southern accent. He spoke with 
reverent specificity about germplasms, plant strains, propagation techniques, 
and about his program. “We had a lot of success,” he said. “It took years to 
domesticate our potato.” 
  His Apios americana rivals any Idaho potato plant; the tubers in photos he 
mailed me are burly and thick on the rhizome, making my foraged versions look 
puny. When I remarked on the contrast he said, “But that’s what we started 
with.” 
  Bill and his colleagues bred Apios americana for larger tubers and more 
tubers per rhizome. Their most productive strains yielded as many as fifty 
sizeable tubers and up to eight pounds of edible mass per plant. His group 
also aimed for greater disease resistance and later attempted to develop a 
non-twining variety, so that plants needn’t be staked or trellised (which 
requires more labor) and could be cultivated in rows like ordinary potatoes. 
  Bill’s writings in the 1980s, in publications like the American Journal of 
Botany and HortScience, reflect almost giddy enthusiasm for the plant’s 
potential: “We are in search of the golden nugget buried among Mother 
Nature’s tuber cache” and “domestication would be a benefit to mankind.” An 
issue of the “Apios Tribune,” a dittoed newsletter published in 1986 out of 
Bill’s LSU department, lists several recipes for groundnuts, including Joan 
Blackmon’s Apios Cornbread, which calls for “1 cup cooked Apios, well 
mashed.” But in the mid-1990s, despite leading phrases such as “the prognosis 
for developing A. americana as a food crop looks outstanding,” Bill’s apios 
paper trail came to an end. I asked what happened. 
  “I left the program in 1996 to take a position closer to my family, in 
Virginia,” he said. However, he left the program vigorous, under the capable 
oversight of a research partner and a team of committed graduate students. 
They had been close to landing big grants, they were on the verge of 
releasing strains to growers, and then, somehow—it seemed unclear even to 
Bill—support faltered and funding was withdrawn. 
  “I thought it was going to go on. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have left the 
university.” 
  His last hope had been a grad student who planned to continue to research 
Apios americana at another university, but she decided to study horticulture 
therapy instead. 
  “A lot of potential doesn’t always equate to realizing something,” he said, 
adding, “I haven’t been able to let it go.” 
  When Bill left the program he took approximately forty strains of Apios 
americana with him. He maintains them in his home garden, where they go on 
producing tubers like the ones he grew at LSU. There, groundnuts were 
everyday fare for him and his colleagues. Now he eats them only occasionally. 
  In his twenty years of working with the tubers, he hasn’t known them to 
make anyone ill, but he doesn’t deny Sam’s claims. “If I were still working 
with apios, I’d try to figure out why that happens,” he said, and then added, 
“Maybe you could put together some assays . . . it takes someone who’ll grit 
their teeth and stick with it.” 
  Never had I wished so earnestly to be a horticulture postdoc. 
  Bill offered to send me five or six strains of his domesticated tubers, but 
warned that they might not yield as abundantly or even survive as far north 
as Wisconsin, and because of the shorter growing season, they probably 
wouldn’t produce seedpods. He also cautioned me to keep them in a cold place 
until I could plant them in spring. Naturally, he would appreciate it if I 
shared my observations. 
  THE FOLLOWING MAY I CLEARED A CORNER of my garden, a fifth of an acre on a 
bench of fertile land near the river, for domesticated apios. I unpacked 
Bill’s samples, gritty with Virginia sand, from their plastic bags. I sowed 
them according to his handwritten instructions and watered them well. Then I 
carefully penned his lab’s monikers, like “LA-784” and “LA-7190,” on the 
corresponding stakes. Would these apios take to our clayey soil? Would they 
produce prolifically enough for meals as well as for sharing with friends and 
relatives, as the wild groundnuts had? Bill told me he’d envisioned the 
market for apios beginning with home gardeners who would tell their 
neighbors, who would tell their neighbors, and so on, eventually creating a 
demand for apios that would prompt larger market growers to adopt them. Now I 
was part of the chain. 
  Bill, however, was not the only one hoping to introduce groundnuts to a 
wider public. In 1994, Frieda’s, a distributor of specialty produce that 
boasts of bringing us kiwifruits and sunchokes (aka Jerusalem artichokes), 
offered groundnuts as part of its Lost Crops of the Americas collection along 
with appaloosa beans, quinoa, and other historically indigenous staples. 
“Apios” were sold, washed and unpeeled, in eight-ounce bags. “We had a 
release party for Lost Crops in San Antonio,” Frieda’s president Karen Caplan 
told me, “and we were met with a great big unblinking disinterest.” All the 
Lost Crops products were discontinued after a single season. They simply 
didn’t sell. “Apios came and went,” she said. Even a brief mention of apios 
in a 1994 episode of Food Network’s Iron Chef didn’t boost its popularity. 
  But that was before the resurgence of farmers’ markets, whose number in the 
United States more than doubled from 1994 to 2004. It’s here that America has 
rediscovered many of its lost foods, including heirloom tomatoes, ramps, and 
garlic scapes—and, in fact, where Frieda’s founder discovered Jerusalem 
artichokes. Farmers’ markets might be the next best thing to foraging. They 
have in common free taste-tests, a near guarantee of freshness and local 
origin, and, most important, a relationship with others who know about 
preparing, growing, or finding food. One slow morning at our local market a 
neighboring farmer—and a man who’d been part of our riverbank groundnut 
expedition—taught us how to inoculate oak logs with shiitake mushroom spores 
and grow them in our backyard. As we lingered beside his pickup bed, he went 
on to share advice about milling our own lumber and making our own 
large-scale maple syrup evaporator, and before we left he was urging us to 
stop by his place
 and visit. One day, perhaps, we’ll have similar conversations over tubs of 
groundnuts, those gathered from near the river’s edge or the larger variety 
dug from a garden. 
  BILL’S APIOS DID TAKE TO OUR SOIL. Now, in late summer, beyond the stalwart 
rows of edamame and the abandoned pea vine trellises, one corner of my garden 
is an unholy mess. I haven’t pulled any of the weeds there, because they are 
indistinguishable from the cultivated plants. Wild Apios americana has crept 
in and overrun or intermingled with Bill’s apios. The wooden stakes I labeled 
are buried in pyramids of dark-green foliage so thick that not only the 
distinctions between plants but also their names are obscured. This mess is 
surely a kind of permaculture crop, one ideally suited to its locale, 
persistent, vigorous, and indifferent to human designs. Domesticated apios 
vines sprawl yards north through the fence and into the meadow, where wild 
groundnuts sprout and climb southward. In and out of the garden food grows, 
abundant and available. It’s our choice whether to notice, and dig in. 
   
   

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