Eat My Front Yard

As requested, here is a post on front and centre edible gardening.

My old front yard had a large spiral garden planted with herbs, perennial edibles, ornamentals and fruiting trees and shrubs. If you followed the spiral to its centre, a small stone bench awaited beneath a grape vine (not pictured here - instead peas climb up the trellis).

Tired of the growing green cement in your front yard? Or perhaps you have thriving perennial beds but have run out of space to plant veggies? Maybe it's just that the only tomato growing sun is in the front?

Ever watch a kid interact with a lawn? If they are not spinning in circles or kicking a ball, they gravitate to the bushes and flowers at the edges or search out the weeds. The 'yawn' becomes a blank palette on which the eye searches for interest. Why not paint boldly.

Well then what's stopping you from growing your food for all to see?

Here is a formal decorative vegetable garden before planting at the Museum of Agriculture. It's not messy but it is terribly boring early in the season and requires some pretty diligent weeding to keep up those bare spots. Orderly shapes compliment the sometimes rangy growth habits of vegetables but without anything at all growing they are merely geometrical.

The biggest issue is that people worry that veggies are messy. Because we view food as coming from utility plants, we have a hard time imagining them replacing the frilly fancies that normally dot the front. Not to fear. In this case, you can have your blooms and eat them too. There is more than one strategy to add edibles to your front yard.

Some purists only plant what enhances the garden's ability to make food either because it's a cover crop, a trap crop, habitat for friendly bugs or because it's food. Others add the odd veggie here and there among their flowers and still others prefer more prescriptive approaches such as forest gardens¹ or decorative potager. There's no right way but here are some design tips to help with curb appeal.

Bones

The visible skeleton of my old spiral garden that faced south though was variably shaded by a beautiful old Linden and a red oak in its prime. The main paths were stone inlaid with old pavers, secondary paths were lined with blasting stone and wood/leaf mulch that was also applied around the perennials. Compost and manure completed the top dressed amendments.

Just like designing a purely decorative garden, structure will keep the garden looking organized even in the early spring before perennials have popped up their heads or bedding plants have been tucked in. There are two main types of bones: hard structures like paths and arbours and woodies like bushes and trees.

In the beginning... Some softer bones in the form of fruit trees. I got these in the ground before I built the rest of the garden around them. The bush in the middle was removed and replaced by the stone bench and a grape vine but the three trees remained: two apples and a self fertile plum. This picture gives a sense of the large swath of south(ish) facing lawn that once graced the front yard. By the end of our stay, it had shrunk to a bit less than a third of its original dimensions.

Especially if you are planning on growing a lot of typical annual vegetables in your front yard, you'll want to have an attractive, strongly structured shape to your garden to give eye-appeal even if the beds are empty and to offset the often rangy growth habit of veggies. Start by looking at the shapes and structures already present: dimensions of your house, the shape of your yard, any standout features like rocks, trees etc... Even less noticeable features like a slight dip can be taken advantage of and enhanced.

Next ask, how do you use your yard? Do you like to sit out front and watch the world go by or would like to make it a bit more private (without blocking lines of sight for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists of course). What is the most common route that you take across it? This will help define the main path and any additional features you'd like to add such as a bench.

I love how little care I seem to take in staging pictures (she says sarcastically). The knee pad is a nice touch in this client's garden where a stone and mulch path leads from the front door to the back. Along its edge is a healthy row of kale. This client requested an entirely raw, edible garden. Kale chips were a favourite.

Note the shape of your yard and start breaking it apart in the mind's eye. Inside a square, a circle can be drawn and then a garden placed either within or at the edges. Structure can also be provided by more naturalistic shapes such as curves. Trace them out with a line of flour, a hose or by doing the dotted line - my usual technique. I turn over clods of sod along the line and then examine it at all angles to decide if it has the right affect. Be bold. Just remember you will need access paths approximately ever four feet both for maintenance and so you can wander around your paradise admiring the small details.² If dealing with the whole yard seems daunting at first, focus on a feature such as a bird bath or existing garden and build outward from it.

I am a big believer in four seasons of fun gardening. Though during the white one, it's mostly playing in a polytunnel. Therefore, I plant lots of spring flowers and early risers along with edible perennials that give tender shoots shortly after the weather warms like Hablitzia or asparagus. If you prefer, you can go native. The same holds for fall when I love late flowers like asters combined with the glorious seed heads of amaranth and the violet blues of cabbage.

Also giving year round structure are the woody plants such as fruiting trees but don't discount evergreens. Though not as edible as apples or currants, their branches can be clipped to shelter other plants and they provide long season interest.

As the season wears on, the spiral is less obvious for those not walking it and the textures of plants emerges. This garden is as bursting with things to eat as to look at and smell. See list below.

Mature fruit trees often have beautiful natural shapes and liven up spring with their short lived flurry of blooms but various pruning techniques can limit shading such as splaying the branches against the wall or making stopover trees so that more plants can be grown around them.

Canadian Organic Gardeners maintains a little herb and veggie patch at the Museum of Agriculture. Here they have rhubarb and currant underplanting apples if I remember correctly.

Another alternative is the hedgerow. Generally a wild, mixed, woody boundary or living fence. Hedgerows are not just attractive but provide food and shelter to wildlife and yourself.

Not Just Herbs: Edible Perennials

Here are 'just' some herbs: sage and oregano planted in the dryer, sunnier part of the garden.

Not that I want to discount the beautiful flowering herbs like catmint, lavender, sage, oregano, and thyme but I'd like to include less well known edible herbs like lovage, sweet cicely, garlic chives, mondarda, and sorrel. For those who have not yet investigated, the list of perennial edibles is surprisingly long including well known favourites such as daylily and hosta (yes, the early spring shoots that Stephen - edible plant collector extraordinaire - calls hostons), natives like prickly pear and strawberries and other favourites such as asparagus and perennial onions. Many of these are very attractive plants that are not out of place in a decorative garden.

Needing careful placement, this towering giant among useful perennial edibles - Jeruselum Artichoke - was put at the side and back of the garden in its own bed as it is seasonally dug out. By being kept to the back, its absence in spring and fall are not so noticeable nor is its presence too foreboding at the height of its growth. Instead it is a lovely backdrop. P.S. If you tend your garden, rumours of its invasive nature are at least slightly exaggerated in my opinion in our climate. If you do not spend your days lovingly coddling your plants then you might forget a patch long enough to require few years of diligent removal. Radix Rhizowen recently made a discovery when trying to eradicate a patch with landscaping fabric. The forced shoots are quite tasty.

The list of edible perennial plants is surprisingly long and they are often beautiful. In fact many plants started their history as useful only to be converted to decorative along the way such as balloon flower and bloody dock.

One of my favourites: Sweet cicely - all parts edible tasting like sweet anise - lines the partly shaded path toward the back, grown with clematis and alpine strawberry, mallow and iris.

Ringing your annual beds with compact, short statured herbs is not only useful but also acts as another reliable feature around the rangy pumpkins or potatoes. Having lots of diverse flowering plants will also feed beneficial insects and confuse the signals pests use to find their host plants. Breaking up plantings slows the spread of disease too.

Sperling toga onion underplanting Nanking Cherry.

To explore the world of possibilities when it comes to edible perennials, check out the sites Plants for a Future³ and Richters. Also look up books such as Perennial Vegetables, various titles called Edible Landscaping, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden, Food not Lawns and Uses for Wild Plants and The New Food Garden by Tozer. Search terms like wild edible foods, foraging, permaculture and hardy culinary herbs can inspire you too.

Perennial/walking kale currently is continuing its winter hardiness trial in my garden, backed by the flowers of the spready Dame's Rocket (edible and not bad).

Decorative with Edible?

There is no law that states that you cannot grow peppers near Dahlia or Coreopsis.

In early summer, this garden is alive with iris along with orach, lemon balm (ack - that's one that you shouldn't let seed), malva, salad burnet, strawberries, elderberry, lovage, young currants, Bellis perennis and more.

Turn the rules of design on your edibles to make something pretty and functional, ex. compare and contrast, don't put your sweet potatoes near something that doesn't like root disturbance. A well mulched perennial bed with plants carefully chosen to thrive in that garden's conditions can be pretty low care.⁴

Cabbage in the background facing the street and lavender in the foreground playing off cabbage's bluish leaves.

That's not to discount annuals. Many people add bedding annuals such as marigolds to look at and to ward off pests. When incorporating temporary plantings, make sure that everyone has enough space to do their thing though as sometimes annuals can suffer next to well established thugs.

Salsify was grown here as a self seeding root crop. Here their early morning glory is echoed in the giant purple alliums.

Classic annuals

Dark leafed elderberry (not convinced by this cultivar as a fruit crop by the way), is threaded by bicolour runner bean.

Mixing it up with annuals and biennials will mean that you disturb the beds more either by exposing ground for seed or transplants and to harvest or remove debris. Some good places for annuals are the border edge especially for greens and root crops before they go to seed, spaces between young perennials and dedicated annual pockets.

A dedicated annual planting pocket that was soon overgrown with tomatoes. These spaces can be rotated. If rotation and perennial planting sounds confounding, here's my exploration of the subject.

Don't forget that you can embed pots around the garden too. Having the pot in contact with the soil and surrounded by greenery may keep them moist longer.

These two habanero peppers were placed on the ground and abandoned while I traipsed off to visit relatives for a month. I was happy to see them alive when I returned. The rain must have cooperated.

There are plenty of colourful edibles such as rainbow swiss chard, purple leafed beet, golden anise hyssop, amaranth and eggplants, and others that are texturally compelling such as feathery leafed carrots and parsley, glaucous cabbage and kale or strap like chufa and salsify.

Some texturally interesting plants seen head on including soft leafed orach, the whirl of salad burnet, and the increasingly fine dissection of the malva leaves. I love, love Rhubarb as leaf plant. It is particularly nice paired with rainbow swiss chard and nasturtiums.

In keeping with decorative, veggies should be neat and by that I don't necessarily mean in orderly rows or blocks though that's an option. Make sure their best features show by removing diseased leaves and growing sprawlers up. I can see how peas intertwining through a shrub can be beautiful but otherwise, you'll want to trellis vines with something that doesn't say utility.

The Museum of Agriculture's potager (shown above) late in the season with some type of dwarf, upright pepper and the edible designer's darling: rainbow swiss chard. Note how the tomatoes on the trellis are looking very scruffy.

Just like in regular garden design, keep large plants to the middle or back of a bed. Some vegetables will look sickly before harvest is finished such as tomatoes and squash that tend toward foliar disease. I wouldn't put these front and centre if you are going for maximum eye appeal. Others that will be harvested early can be replaced with a second crop or bedding plants.

Self seeding annuals

Yes, it's a fav: orach. That's the bright red one, along with osaka mustard and red ursa kale. Perennial onions spiking up in the background. These were all self sown.

Lots of edibles such as chicory, oyster root, magenta spreen, amaranth, and kale will give you a second, third or more harvest from an initial planting if only they are left to go to seed (which may not be until the second year). There are two problems. One is that a tidy, ruby head of radicchio placed at the front of the border can become a four foot spindly giant the following year. If you are planning on letting them go to seed, keep their final height in mind. You may want to plant diagonal swathes, removing those in the front and letting those at the back do their wild reproductive thing. The flowers will add to the diversity of your garden.

Yes, this is my old backyard and I actually think these bowing heads of parsley preparing to invade my yawn are cute but you can see the problem. P.S. They are leaning on what used to be my veggie patch. It was reconverted to lawn for sale. Apparently people like lawns?

You may want to bend seed heads toward where you'd like them to travel or cut and lay them down in a new spot. The other issue is that if you heavily mulch then you may get few reseeders. For this reason, I used to do my main mulching before reseeding (depends on the plant and the mulch, how well they'll do seeding into mulch) or after the volunteers are up and thinned in the spring. One easy way to rejuvenate an area is to stir the top few inches soil in spots near where plants have gone to seed.⁵ When I replaced my vegetable garden with lawn before selling, I just spread out the dirt and sprinkled some grass seed. What emerged was a swatch of salad greens germinating alongside the grass and clover.

And with that we come full circle.

What grew in the front?

Below is just what I remember growing in my old front yard that was edible. It doesn't include all the great stuff in the backyard or all the possibilities. At my new place, I'm going totally wild (in a so much space, so much choice kind a way!)

Currants

Gooseberries

Jostaberry

Hostas

Chives

Garlic Chives (eat the flowers or you'll have lots)

Daylilies

Strawberries - pink, white flowered and alpine

Apples

Pears

Cherries

Blueberries

Horseradish (near the back)

Jeruselum Arichoke (near the back)

Yarrow (marginal!)

Oregano

Sage

Thyme

Lavender

Mint (yikes!)

Mitsuba - purple leafed

Salsify

Scrozonera

Red Valerian - not bad in the spring

Violets

Violas

Rhubarb

Borage

Spiderwort

Rugosa

Crosnes

Hosta (spring shoots)

Solomon Seal (spring shoots)

Grapes

Seakale

Prickly Pear

Strawberry Spinach

Bloody Dock

Calendula

Trilliums (shoots) - no I couldn't eat them, too pretty

Bellis Perennis

Bellflower(s)

Balloon Flower

Sedum (check varieties)

Cinammon Yam (didn't like me)

Perennial Leek

Ox-eye daisy (marginal according to me)

Raspberry - not for front yards me thinks - moved.

Rugosa rose

Various edible flowers and tea plants: catmint, monarda, hibiscus, dianthus and so forth

Mustard

Celeriac

Peas

Peppers

Eggplants

Sunberry

Kale

Nasturtiums

Cabbage

Lettuce

Garlic

Landcress

Sunflower

Corn

Cucumbers

1. Seen as belonging to a much wider gardening (and increasingly lifestyle) practice called permaculture, this link takes you to a man who popularized the term forest garden.

2. My spiral garden was planted in part to obscure the path in order to invite people to walk its distance. It was challenging planting for height in the middle of each bed but also graduations as you moved toward the centre, from front to back AND from the house to the far side. Also, I wanted lots of little features that could only be seen up close. I enjoyed making it!

3. Double-check their info for your own peace of mind and remember whenever you try something new, go slow! I find that their hardiness ratings are sometimes off. They are located in the UK so growing info is skewed to that climate.

4. I would feel remiss if I didn't mention that certain plants can affect each others' growth negatively or positively. These interactions aren't always so visible especially if the plants are in a rich garden environment where they can compensate for slight insults. However, the classic example would be the strongly allopathic affect of black walnut that inhibits the growth of certain plant families such as tomatoes and their kin.

5. Seeds have different longevities of course and weeds also inhabit your seed bank which is why some people are hesitant about recommending self seeding annuals in perennial planting schemes as to allow them to self seed, you often need to let down your mulch guard a little. That and some self seeders do so at nuisance numbers. I'm an equal opportunity edible gardener though as you can see so I included many.

Harvest for Stock Monday

Having just moved means I don't yet have lots of succulent mature perennial shoots but there are a few divisions that I planted last year who are giving up the goods as well as various wild plants. Also, lots of the seeds I scattered last fall have sprouted.


Lovage makes for a great stock plant. I find it a bit strong to use as a vegetable. Also harvesting dandelions, wild leeks, and parsley for a soup base.

Seeing Results: Fall Sowing

Fall Sowing is a natural way to start germinate seeds that require stratification, such as those that originate from temperate zones, are wild flowers or that self sow. After your garden cleanup, just prepare a seed bed, mark it (this is where I fail, though it does strengthen my identification skills) and sow. If you have mature plants already, cut the ripe seeds heads and either toss them where you want the seedlings to come up or crush and sprinkle them on the ground before composting the rest. It's a fast and easy way to get a headstart on the planting season.


Why do I always overseed? This is called hedging your bets and will require thinning. Turnip Rooted Chevril seedlings. Must be fall sown.

Edible Self Sowers:

The following (not an exhaustive list) have worked for me:

Kale
Lettuce
Corn Salad / Mache
Chicory
Orach
Magenta Spreen (aka - giant lamb's quarters)
Dame's Rocket (spring greens are edible)
Salsify
Chard - Bietina/perpetual spinach is the variety I've let self seed
Dill
Bulbing Fennel (regular fennel too I'm sure though I don't grow it)
Parsley
Coriander
Sunflowers - especially perennial kinds
Malvas
Calendula
Borage
Sweet Cicely
Amaranth
Lemon Balm (I like to prevent this as I don't use THAT much)
Chickweed
Violas including sweet violet - a very nice edible this time of year, and Johnny Jump Ups
Garlic and regular chives
Docks and Sorrels
Rocket/Arugula
Purslane - including selected varieties like Golden
Turnip rooted chevril
Mustards


Sweet violets are a great groundcover and have edible leaves in the spring followed by edible flowers. They've grown happily for me in near full shade to near full sun, in various soil conditions.

There are lots more that others have had luck with such as New Zealand Spinach, Celery varieties, more brassicas so have an internet-look at the possibilities for your garden and lots self sow what you like to grow. You'll see that members of the carrot, cabbage, and goosefoot family are very well represented.

I also have various herbs and other vegetables that come back like most of the tomato family relataives - sunberry, tomato, potato, ground cherry - but some people may wish to remove these volunateers if they have disease issues. Vining crops will also often volunteer but as many people grow more than one of the same Species genus (Cucuribit maxima for example), they will result in crosses. Could be fun, and compost squash often grow great.

Many flowers like alyssum and coreopsis also self seed and might be a lovely addition to your sea of self seeded greens as long as you can tell the leaves apart! When managing your self sown border, you can let it have the wild look or selectively thin so that you have patches of the same plant or a few complementary plants. Stripes are nice too. Let the ones at the back develop their seedheads which are often shockingly tall compared to the juvenile leafy rosette. If you include a few taller flowering perennials like echinacea, they'll hide the sometimes unruly looking seed heads of chard and lettuce and prop up the gangly but attractive seedheads of plants like chicory and kale. Some plants, such as mint, you might want to cut back after the bees have their fun but before they set seed. Not only is mint invasive enough as it is but the seedlings are often inferior in taste.

If you have allowed your self sowers to add to the soil seed bank year after year but mulch consistently so that you might see less self sowers, stir up the soil in a patch and see what emerges. Last year, when I removed my vegetable garden and put in a yawn lawn to sell our property, among the grass and clover sprung up a salad bowl of goodness.

***

Wild Garden Seeds (recently Frank Morton was profiled in Mother Earth Magazine) sells a mix of feral edibles called an insectary mix which would be a great semi-wild border that would produce a nice bounty to boot!

Fall Revival 09 - long live the greens!

The greens that gave you succulent salads in spring and early summer may have faded into toughness in the summer but don't give up on them yet. Instead of yanking them out, see if they will undergo the fall revival! Many of my biennial and perennial, even some annual greens will sprout new leaves after going to seed:

Gone to seed but not gone. After cutting back some spent seed stems, I find green at the base of the Bietina (type of Swiss chard)!



Don't count this 'Red Ursa' Kale out yet, after providing delicious and nutritious leaves last summer and fall, waking up bright and early from the receding snow pack this spring, the plant went to flower, reseeded these babies on the left of the pictures and put out a new flush of tasty leaves, on the right.



Even this annual mustard keeps going after its seed stock has dried up and fall down with this decorative wine coloured display.



Here are some freshly germinated mustard babies not far off.



Mache's mom and dad may be gone, but its ultra hardy, mild tasting seedlings live on to lushly carpet the ground, with a self sown chicory in the middle.



Not to leave the alliums out, bunching onions that were munched on by leek moth spring back,



and topsetting egyptian onion plant themselves to produce a widening patch of these rich tasting hollow spears.


The bulblits are in the midst of the violet leaves, with small green spears emerging.

Viva the self starting fall garden!

Phenomenal Fall

The big three (aster, mum, anemone) fall ornmental perennials are beautifully blooming. Unfortunately, two out of three are rule breakers. What are the rules? Well, I am trying to use my precious urban plot to grow more worthy plants. To qualify as worthy, they could be:

1) Native
2) Beneficial to beneficials, or
3) Edible or otherwise useful

I'm afraid that the following plants only qualify for the fourth rule-breaker rule:

4) Too pretty to take a shovel too.


Japanese Anemome


Here featured with a common coleus. The coleus is not winter hardy but roots easily from cuttings.

I cannot get rid of this gorgeous flower even though it did originate in... well a nurseryman's test plot - these are people-made. It is a member of the buttercup family and therefore not even edible!


Chrysanthemums


The background to Scottish curley kale and 'blue false indigo' which has yet to flower for me. Next year?

Nothing adds colour late in the season like this plant. It's brilliant reds, yellows, pinks and purples, complement the fall leaves. "Hello sugar maple, you look magnificant in that colour of red." "And why you Mum look fabulous. What is that burnt orange?" They are edible - specifically the variety Chrysanthemum coronarium - and are probably a late season nectar source so they squeak by in acceptability. Phew.


Aster


Wild aster.

Finally, a virtuous plant that is both a number 1 and 2! It's quite pretty to boot and there are lots of showy cultivars out there. I have regular field aster which grows to over 5 feet in garden conditions. There are also lots of native asters.


Black Eyed Susan


A crazy messy garden with self seeded sugarloaf chicory. You can see it popping out of the grass, lemon balm, and so on.

Another pat on the back for this self-seeding perennial. You could easily have yourself a field of aster and BES as I refer to it in my gardening notes. The wild type is a tall flower with a mass of charming, petite blossoms.


Obediant Flower

Still flowering, though nearing its end, this native also provides late season colour in the shade of pastel pink. This has one of those spreading rhizomes. You've been warned. Bees love it!


The leaves


Blueberry bush with a pink chrysanthemum just unfurling its pink blooms.

In my garden, the most striking leaves so far are on the blueberry bushes, evening primrose, chokecherry, and the hibiscus. I mention the latter because it is an exotic ornemental so I was planning on getting rid of it until it did this:

Hibiscus showing off.

How can I get rid of the fire plant?

I then read that the leaves are 'technically' edible. This is also true of Rose of Sharon leaves, and I am guessing Okra. I should really look into this more closely. Hmmm, probably a number 4 plant?

***

Links:

Pickled mum flowers - I have 'no' idea what these would taste like.

Not just any solanum - sunberry, wonderberry, litchi tomato and more

Seeds of Diversity and Feast of Fields...

I volunteered to represent Seeds of Diversity at the Feast of Fields last weekend and had a great time. It is an event that pairs a local, organic grower with a team of chefs to create fabulous dishes. As a volunteer, I was spared what I consider the heavy entrance fee, and was able to sample the vittles.

Sunberry / Wonderberry?..

As well as thoroughly enjoying talking to people about seed saving, I got to sample two interesting tomato relatives from Greta's Organic Gardens. The first was the 'wonderberry,' also known as sunberry (Solanum burbankii). What intrigued me about this little black berry was that it was very different from my 'sunberry' that I had purchased from Mapple Farms a couple years back. The berries (couldn't find the seed listing this year) of Greta's variety were larger, but the taste was more bland and skin was thicker. They are similar but much better tasting than Garden Huckleberry (Solanum melanocerasum).

It could be that the growing conditions on my plot were different but the morphology was too distinct from mine leading me to beleive that these really were different, though very similar plants. Interestingly, Baker's Seeds described Chichiquelite Huckleberry (Solanum nigrum) as slighlty larger than the sunberry, and it is part of the cross so I wonder if there are just different phenotypes out there?

I love my Sunberries even if their small size makes them tendious to pick. They are no more of a chore than picking blueberries. They are also tasty raw. Not just edible, but flavourable with a unique smoky 'blue' taste. They also self seeded in my garden. I transplated one into a semi shade area at the back of the yard which has been heavily ammended with organic matter over the years, and it has done quite well. This year we had less sunlight than usual with tomato growers complaining of slow ripening times so it is quite possible that the crop of self sown Sunberries would be respectable next year. We'll see.

Self seeded sunberry plant growing in my raspberry bed

The Lovely Litchi Tomato...

Greta also allowed me to try litchi tomatoes (Solanum sysimbrifolium) which are apparently related to eggplants. The plant itself looks like a thorny tomato but the fruit has a small husk like the physalias. In fact, I would say that the seed reminds me of a tomatillo or something just as much as an eggplant.

It was delicious.

I immediately asked her if she would have some for sale next year because I will buy them. They were crisp, juicy, and fruity.

Ground Cherries...

It reminded me that I am going to try to get some ground cherries to self sow this year. I had one of Aunt Molly's ground cherries (Physalis pruinosa / prevuinia) pop up this year from last year's crop but it has not fruited and I do not think it will before next frost. Yuko, from Yuko's Open Pollinated Seeds, on the other hand often talks about where her ground cherries have migrated next. Many complain that ground cherries are a pain to pick as you have to wait until they are ripe and fall to the ground and you do not get a great deal of them but my kids love them and they do make a nice addition to desserts or salads even though I rarely get enough to bake a ground cherry pie. Last year, they also lasted in their husks until well into winter so they are worth growing again.

I would love to get my hands on the 'clammy ground cherry' (Physalis heterophylla Nees) which is a wild perennial around these parts though I have no idea how well it crops or how tasty it is but hey it would not hurt to try.

Don't eat a chinese lantern...

Because of my constant hunt for new vegetables, I decided to brave a chinese lantern (Physalis alkekengi). There are claims that it is edible though there are also counter claims that though it won't poison you, it tastes awful.


Chinese Lanterns in my garden littered with insect chew holes.

Yes, chinese lantern didn't kill me. Yes, it tasted AWFUL.

I suspect that indeed it had a high level of bitter alkaloids and the life preserving part of me said stop. So, I am happy to keep them in my yard as a trap crop for the colorado potato beetles, that love them above all other solanacea, but I will not be trying another.

And Tomatillos too...

What I would like to try to grow again are tomatillos (Physalis philadelphica) though I am undecided as to the variety. I secured some seeds from Chris who runs the CSA common ground for 'Yellow tomatillos', which are actually yellow/purple in colour when ripe, but I also have Mapple Farm's 'Indian tomatillo' variety. The problem is that 'Yellow tomatillo' seems to split its husk whereas 'Indian tomaillo' does not. I find that members of the physalia family keep much better in their husks even if I think I like 'yellow tomatillo's' taste better. Decisions, decisions.