Of Roots

It's Blog Action Day once again.  Some of you may remember I participated last year talking about water.  This year's theme is food.  Now I racked my brain long and hard what to write about, because essentially this is what this blog is all about, food.  I write about it all the time, about growing it, foraging for it, preparing it, sometimes even eating it.  So how do I get a new angle on it.

Well two current news got me on roots, both literally and figuratively.  Unfortunately I appear to have mislaid my camera, so the images today have been nicked, apologies to anyone claiming copyright to these pics...

As one of the new things I have experimented with this year in the garden is a root vegetable known by it's Italian name of scorzanera.  I don't normally do well with root crops so I set aside a deep pot filled with quite a rich turf in it and sowed a few plants.  I didn't know what the end result would look or taste like.  Well as for looks (I did have a photo on my disappeared camera...):

 

This is it.  They are very slow growing.  I sowed them back in April I think and only just now harvested them.  

Once peeled I seemed to remember my Mum trying to feed me these things unsuccesfully.  However that doesn't mean much, because I was the world's fussiest eater as a kid.  (Incidentally this just shows you it's all in the mind, because as I grew up I became the world's unfussiest eater.)  Anyway, I seemed to remember my Mum cooking them in a creamy sauce, so that's what I  did, and I as I didn't have a huge amount I threw a handful of chicory leaves in with it and served the lot over some cooked potatoes.  Very nice and I shall try growing some more next year.

The other root story is quite an embarrassing one, I know you will laugh out loud about this Mr. H

My blogger friend Mr. H in Idaho has often mentioned growing Jerusalem artichokes on his land, or as he prefers to call them, sun roots.  He's asked me if I had ever tried growing them, as they are a very easy to grow root crop.  I told him, that I had never seen the tubers to start the plants of with for sale in Italy and didn't think they were known to Italians.

Now currently we have a helpXer staying with us, who incidentally is not exactly from Jerusalem, but from Israel.  As we went on a walk with the dog the day before yesterday, showing her some of the wild foods growing around here, she pointed at these tall yellow flowers asking me whether they were sunflowers or Jerusalem artichokes:

I said I was sure they weren't sunflowers, and I didn't think they were Jerusalem artichokes as they grew wild everywhere including on a wilder corner of our land.  She said it did look like the latter though, and if we did have some on our land, we should dig for the roots and have a look.  And lo and behold... this is what we dug up:

I peeled a bit there and then and tasted it... Hmmm!  Really juicy and tasty even raw.  So here we go, Mr.H, no need to send me any tubers I just cultivate some of the wild stuff that grows abundantly all over the place!  I now understand too why you call them sunroots.  I don't think you have ever shown us a picture of the pretty flowers.

A quick word about food in general and roots in the figurative sense.  We should all go back to our cultural roots eating in season and re-learning to find and use the wild foods that nature gives us so abundantly for free both for the good of our planet and for our own health.  Now wasn't that all beautifully summed up and brought to a conclusion, (if I say so myself... ;)).

PS: I now found my camera and replaced the above images with my own,,,

The Solution

I better tell you about the solution of last weeks 'wild food quizzzzzzzzz'
Greater plaintain.  Edible, but not very tasty.  Mostly used as a medicinal herb for a variety of maladies including liver cleansing.

 Colts Foot: Leaves can be cooked and eaten, but contain a liver damaging alkaloid and should therefore only be consumed in moderation.  The yellow flowers appear before the leaves and disappear again before the leaves come out.  A tea made from the flowers and leaves relieves coughs

Ribwort plantain, or as I call it, pointy-leafed plantain.  Used the same way as greater plantain.

Golden Rod.  An aromatic herb, a tea made from the flowers and leaves helps with various maladies of the water system, i.e. cistytis, kidney trouble etc.

Oak.  Acorns themselves are edible, but need repeated boiling to reduce the bitterness so are not really an option.  Young leaves are edible though and a palatable wine can be made from them

Comfrey.  Again not recommended for those with liver trouble and should be consumed in moderation.  My favourite way of eating comfrey leaves is covered in a tempura batter dipped in soya sauce.  The health benefits of this plant probably outweigh potential harm caused by alkaloids.

Wild strawberry.  Also the leaves are edible and go into my spring tart alongside primroses and sweet violets.

Some kind of mint.  Could be catnip.

Stingy nettles.  They don't need much an introduction

Walnuts.

Oregano

Clover

Fennel.  Easily confused with dill if you only see the picture.

...and....(drum roll...), well done Tanya, butcher's broom.  The berries aren't poisonous as such, but will give you the runs.  Young shoots are edible like asparagus.  The seeds can be made into a coffee substitute.  But the main function is medicinal.  The roots used internally and externally are a cure for varicose veins and hemorhoids.

 Nobody got the bonus plant, but hey, maybe it's just a useless weed, although there aren't many of them...  Well done to those who had a go.  Tanya, Mr.H and Ruth all managed 11 right!

Wild food season

We went on a photo safari the other day for the book I'm writing, the guide to edible and medicinal wild plants for pilgrims.  Within a relatively short walk we found all these:

Who can tell me what these all are?  Go on have a go.  You can click on the photos to enlarge them.

For a bonus point, what is this one?

I haven't identified it myself yet.  The flowers are actually yellow.  Looks like it should be medicinal.

Finally on a separate excursion we visited some friends in the mountains and came away with tons of chestnuts (the woods around us have been badly affected by the chestnut gall wasp), crab apples and one lovely porcini mushroom:

I'm back...

This is not so much a gardening post, but an update on what's been happening to us.  Good god, has it really been over a month since my last post?  Thank you for all your enquiries about our well-being, we're still here, although our lives certainly haven't been boring.

The reason for my silence?  Well it was a tale of broken friendships, betrayal and sex and you really don't want to know about it...  Well I'm not going to tell you about it anyway, even if you do.  The consequences: Conspiracy Cousin is back in the Netherlands for the time being, but has threatened to return soon, we went on a holiday to clear our heads and another lesson learned about humanity.

Well this holiday turned out to be particularly eventful.  we went to see our very good pilgrim friends (you may remember them from the visit they paid us with their horse and dog last year) in Arles in the Provence.  Just 5 km into the journey we smashed the car against the wall.

It was very spectacular, with airbags inflating and all.  Luckily non of us was hurt and the car only had some minor damage.  So on we went to France to relax a few days with friends.  Eddie re-aquainted himself with his old friend from last year and the 2 dogs got on like a house on fire.  So when one day we went to see some vineyards in the region we felt it was safe to leave the 2 dogs in the house.  Unfortunately Eddie felt he had to live up to his name of Eddie, the B(eagle), named after the famous yet inept Britsh ski jumping legend, and jumped out of this fist floor window:

and got himself lost amongst the many lanes and alleyways of the city.  It took a few hours of wandering around and quizzing the neighbours until we finally located him, as he had been taken in (kidnapped) by a family and held for ransom.

At the end of the week we finally limped home on a flat tyre.  We had two very nice Norwegian helpXers house sitting in the meantime and looking after Mickey the cat and watering our land.

What else have been up to?  We went grape picking for some friends:

...and I'm finally seriously working on a book: edible and medicinal herbs along the pilgrim routes of Europe.  That'll keep me busy over the long winter evenings.

and in the garden?  Although the temperatures are still pleasant, autumn is definitely in the air.  We've had the first bits of rain after months of drought conditions and evenings are getting cooler.  Generally yields this year were lower than usual as expected due to the loss of topsoil during last winter's landlsides.  Weather conditions were almost perfect this year though, hadn't it been for that hailstorm, which destroyed much of our fruit crop.

Amongst the successes were litchi tomatoes, or rather as I prefer to call them by their less confusing scientific name (as they don't have much to do with tomatoes and nothing with litchies), vicious bastards.

It was Mr. H.'s sick sense of humour to send me some seeds of these.  Yes, they do grow really easily, are drought and disease resistant and very decorative.  But man! those things have some mean spikes on them!  And now that I have a whole lot of these fruits, what do I do with them, having got bleeding fingers from picking them?  They taste ok, a bit cherriesh, a bit tomatoish..., but I miss a bit of acidity in those things.  They are fine as an addition to a salad that involves real tomatoes.  So what else can you do with them?

Anyway, enough of this.  A second crop of green beans is coming along very nicely.  The first crop succumbed to disease and were finished off by the hail, but this lot's long healthy and is delicious.

Watering is no longer needed as seem to have enough dew at night to keep the soil sufficiently moist.  I'll try not to make the next gap between posts so long.

Oh and we had a little concert in our house as part of the annual poetry competition:

What's wrong with this world

No I won't be attempting you give you a comprehensive answer to that.  This is just to hook up with the recent post appealing for help for our helpXer who had all her kit stolen out of our caravan.  First of all thank you everybody for your offers of help and support.  Unfortunately, for reasons I don't really want to speculate about on a public blog, our helper has left in rather acrimonious circumstances, not really cooperating with any efforts to help her.  I have therefore had to refuse any of your kind and generous offers.  But thank you again, I was touched to hear from total strangers, who don't even normally comment on my blog.

In the meantime it has come to my attention that there has been quite a spate of small crimes committed in the area.  A number of our immediate friends and aquaintances have had their houses and/or cars broken into.  At the same time in England kids have taken to the streets for several days in a free for all rioting and looting extravaganza.  What's going on?  Have you noticed or heard of an increase of crime where you are?

Here is my take on the story.  What those looters stole or even the damaged they caused, without of course wanting to condone any of it, is peanuts compared to what speculators and stock brokers have looted from the markets!  Our whole system is based on greed and greed only.  These bankers are no more than large scale thiefs and robbers, helping deplete natural resources.My fellow blogger Jeremy puts it much better than I could.

I also loved the quote of my money-less friend Mark Boyle, who said:

I love the way that we call people who break into chainstores 'looters', yet the rest of us law abiding citizens get to loot the entire planet and are deemed peaceful. Instead of H&M, read rainforests. Instead of JD Sports, read oceans. Instead of Tesco, read soil. If you want to see a looter, look within, we're all looters. Just some are culturally normalised.

 We live in a consumerist society where what you have defines who you are and if you have nothing you are nobody.  We are bombarded with adveritising telling us what we must have.  The politicians keep telling us the economy must grow so we must spend, spend, spend.  According to this ethos we only contribute to society by spending and buying consumer goods, thus at the same time depleting the world's resources.  

But as the gap between haves and have-nots is ever widening, those who don't have the means to buy all those glitzy new gadgets, the latest car, the newest fashion accessory will inevitably find other ways of obtaining them.  And as they see those criminals at Wall Street and in the City, the big company bosses and corrupt politicians get away with murder, they feel they haven't got much to loose.

They won't fix the system by locking up 12 year olds for stealing a bottle of wine, but by radically changing to a fairer more just, not to mention DEMOCRATIC system.  All those guys giving their lives in Lybia and Syria aledgedly fighting for democracy.  What a rude awakening they'll have when they find out there's no such thing...

But enough of the ranting.  It's been boiling hot our way, so physical labour has been off the schedule for a while.  Thus I've had some time to rant a bit.  But now the sweat is starting to drip on my keyboard so I better stop.  

 

Oh but one more thing:  I'm now the proud foster parent of Foster, the Ducklet all the way over in Ohio.  Check out my "sister's" blog here.

 

Farmer Heiko's latest adventure with Mr. Monsanto

Bad Luck Strikes Again

After the landslides in winter and the hailstorm last week we again face ourselves with another disaster.  This time caused by humans though.

Until today I have always felt we were living in a relatively low crime area.  In our village we routinely leave the key in the front door, even when taking the dog out for a walk.  I have repeatedly forgotten to lock the car, even leaving the windows open for a few days on the village car park.  But today we found that you shouldn't let your guard down, because there's always some opportunist out there.  We were on this occasion not the victims ourselves though, but one of our helpXers, which makes us feel particularly bad.

We are currently having two young girls staying in our caravan on our land helping us with some work in exchange for some free lodging.  While we were all working a few terraces lower, not having locked the caravan, one of the girls, Diane from France, had all her belongings stolen in broad daylight yesterday morning.  Her rucksack with everything.  The Carabinieri aren't interested.  They're just saying come back Monday morning!  

This is Diane a few days ago lifting some potatoes:

Diane was at the beginning of a trip of a lifetime.  She had planned to stay 2 weeks with us followed by another 2 weeks in Italy and a few months in India.  She luckily had her passport and cards on her, but lost a considerable amount of cash as well as all her clothing and various other personal things.

Those of you who know us and/or have been following this blog for a while, know we don't have any money.  Neither are we or Diane insured.  However we feel responsible for this, as she was staying as our guest.  I'm asking any of you please (!!!), to give this young woman back her confidence in humanity.  If it is at all within your means donate something for her, so she can continue her travels.  Every little would help.  Please be in touch, send us an e-mail (heikover@libero.it) if you can help in any way.