Growing leafless peas

Growing naturally leafless peas - Lacy Lady peas

I grow a few types of pea for a few different reasons.  I am having more and more difficulty seeing peas and beans so am having to think hard to find ways to help make harvesting easier.  One of my favorite types of pea is the Lacy Lady pea, they are a dwarf, green podded, shelling pea that is either considered semi leafless or leafless.  They are NOT genetically modified and due to their leafless growth habit they lend themselves well to organic or permaculture gardening.

My first Lacy Lady pea seeds were given to me by someone who had grown them for a number of years and was concerned that she had not seen them for sale anywhere for quite some time.  She was worried that if something happened to her stock that they were irreplaceable and she did not want to think about growing any other variety.  With a story like this I was interested in growing them to see what the fuss was about.  It is not often that someone is so taken with a single variety of something that they give seeds to a stranger in the hope of preserving and distributing it.  After growing Lacy Lady peas I can see why she was so taken by them, these are superior to many other types of pea.  Unlike many of my other vegetables I did not search for these, I was unaware that anything like this even existed until I was given them, but I am glad that I now have them.  Had I known how great they were I would have been searching for them, in fact if I ever lose this variety I will be doing my best to track them down again.

From what I can tell this is a reasonably recently bred cultivar, perhaps only dating as far back as the 1970's, perhaps a little older, but not what you would consider to be an 'heirloom' yet.  It is one of either the leafless varieties of pea or the semi-leafless varieties of pea.  Before growing these I had very little knowledge of semi-leafless peas, since growing them I can see a lot of advantages for home gardeners.  I assume that many home gardeners have little knowledge of leafless peas and their benefits and disadvantages, so I thought I would write a blog post of them.

The leaf on the left is from a Lacy Lady pea, the leaf on the right is a typical pea leaf (from a yellow snow pea)

Semi-leafless peas in general are fantastic, yet at present there do not seem to be many (if any) varieties available to the home gardener.  Semi-leafless peas still have some leaves, but many of the leaves only grow as tendrils.  Older pea varieties all have compound leaves, each with many, small leaflets, and the terminal leaflet modified to form a single tendril.  The semi-leafless peas have more tendrils than leaflets.  The only flat recognisable leaf you will see on them is on the pea stalk itself.  These Lacy Lady peas have a recessive gene which produces a modification of the leaf morphology, this has not come about in a laboratory, or through any form of genetic manipulation, but simply through a random mutation that occurred in a field somewhere and has then been bred conventionally into this variety.  It is the same process that people used to create the first orange carrots, or the first red tomatoes, or many of the common fruit and vegetables that we enjoy today.

At first I was worried that by having less leaflets they would be less productive as they would have a lowered level of photosynthesis.  After growing them for a few seasons and researching them a bit I have found that this is not the case.  The tendrils contribute to photosynthesis in a similar way to normal flat leaves so the plants are just as vigorous as leafy types.  Having less flat leaves they are less likely to be damaged by severe weather.  They are also far less inviting to ducks who happen to fly into your vegetable patch, so far the ducks seem to be more content eating the grass and weeds and leaving the lacy looking pea plants alone.  Regular peas, however, tend to be one of the first things the ducks eat if they happen to get in.

One leaf from a regular pea - note the 6 flat leaflets and the tendril on the end

As large flat leaflets are replaced by wiry tendrils, the foliage surface area is reduced significantly.  One of the benefits is that the plant is far more water efficient and can withstand hotter, dryer conditions than leaf type peas.  As I currently live in an incredibly hot and dry climate this is very useful for me.  For those who live in cooler and wetter climates this trait is still useful as it means less time is spent watering, some people claim that they never water these peas and they perform wonderfully for them.  If I were not to water them I would be left with a barren vegetable garden with no weeds and only hard baked clay.

Another benefit is that with a lowered amount of foliage there comes a significant increase in ventilation, which means that less problems from things such as powdery mildew will be seen.  Where I live the ambient temperature is generally high and the humidity is low so we tend not to see many mildew issues, but for those in cooler damper climates this increased ventilation would be very beneficial.  I wish that I grew these when we lived in a cooler damper climate so that I could compare this from my own experiences.

Leafless peas produce a tangled mass of tendrils, that combined with the fact that they are very short plants means that most plants can support themselves without trellising.  As they are much shorter than most pea varieties, I generally grow these sorts of peas without much in the way of stakes or support, aside from a single post-and-string setup around the outside of the bed.  I don't even know if this is necessary, I mostly do it as a force of habit.

One leaf from a Lacy Lady pea plant - less water loss, better ventilation

I seem to have increasing difficulty in seeing green peas and beans in amongst green foliage.  For that reason I grow yellow snow peas and purple podded dry peas (which can also be used as regular peas, but in my opinion are better as a dry pea).  I have found that the lack of regular leaflets in the Lacy Lady peas has made it a lot easier to see the pea pods even though they are green.  The pods are fat while everything else is thin and wiry which makes the pods pretty easy for me to see.  Since the pods are easier to see due to the lack of leaves they are faster and easier for me to pick.  With more of the plants energy going into pod formation rather than growing large leaflets, they tend to have higher yields than many other varieties of pea.  This variety also tends to produce multiple flowers at each node, which again means a high yield.  Even though this is a short strain of pea the yield seems to compare or surpass the larger varieties that I have grown.

Aphids are more easily controlled by ladybird beetles and other predators on leafless pea plants.  Pea leaves are slippery whereas stems and tendrils provide a more secure footing.  Apparently ladybird beetles fall off normal varieties with flat leaves nearly twice as often as the leafless plants.  This makes them good for organic gardeners, permaculturalists, and for gardeners who control pests and diseases using Integrated Pest Management (IPM).  We tend not to use any poisons here, organic or synthetic, so I often try to find plants such as this with a natural defense against pests or diseases.

The only disadvantage that I have noticed is that being a dwarf pea at the end of the season when the plants are dead you are not left with much pea straw to use on the garden.  This is not a terribly bad thing when you consider how many benefits they have and that I can easily remedy this by also growing another variety of pea.  I grow a few types of pea, one shelling pea, one snow pea, and one dry pea, as well as a few crosses which I am making to try and improve upon other varieties.  Both the snow pea and the dry pea are not dwarf varieties, nor are most of the crosses, so I usually end up with plenty of pea straw from them.

Glass Bead Corn uses

I have had a few emails with questions about the glass bead corn that I am growing and selling.  People often ask what it is and how it can be can be used. I figured I should write another post and answer some of the questions as well as explain my hopes for this strain of glass bead corn.

The lady who sold me the initial seeds said that she had been saving a multi-coloured "Aztec" corn and each year was keeping some of the more beautiful seeds and growing them separately to eventually make the glass bead corn variety.  As glass bead corn is a morph of the Aztec corn it is theoretically possible that it may morph back if no selective pressure is maintained for enough generations, but for now the two varieties are very distinct from each other.  I believe that one or more types of popcorn have added their pollen to the mix at some point in time.  I have grown the multi coloured Aztec corn in the past (I was trying to track it down when I found the glass bead corn) and it is easy to see that it and Glass Gem corn are now different varieties.

Glass bead corn seeds

What can Glass bead corn be used for?

Sweet corn: I mentioned in my previous post that glass bead corn can be eaten as a sweet corn - but only if you get the timing right.  Both the Aztec and glass bead corn are a chewier version of sweet corn.  They are apparently sweet but firmer and with a deeper, fuller, more corny taste.  Sweet corn stays tender for about 3 weeks but is far sweeter when cooked within minutes of being picked as the sugars convert to starch reasonably fast.  You probably only get 5 days of tenderness with the glass bead corn before they start toughening up, again they would be sweeter if cooked immediately.  I am yet to eat it as a sweet corn as I am still trying to maintain as much genetic diversity as I can at the moment and selecting cobs after they have dried to hopefully breed it into something more amazing, I discuss that later in this post. 

Corn flour: Glass bead corn is excellent for cornmeal/flour as that is what its main ancestor, the Aztec corn, was bred for.  Yellow corn is relatively low in nutrients, white corn is lower than yellow in a few nutrients, but multi coloured corn is far higher in a host of different nutrients.  Corn flour made from yellow corn is yellow, when made from white corn it is white, when made from multi coloured corn it varies a lot.  While I am told that glass bead corn tastes nicer, I believe that this is due to freshness and the taste is much the same no matter what colour the corn is that made the flour.

Baby corn: Glass bead corn, just like any other variety of corn, can be used as baby corn.  While it will produce a crop of baby corn to use in stir fry or whatever, I think that there are better varieties to use for this purpose.  Varieties that have a shorter growing season, produce more cobs per plant, and grow shorter stalks are probably better suited to this task.

Decorations/teaching: Some people grow glass bead corn as decorations, I love the look of it but some people dislike the look of dry corn hanging on the wall.  As well as decorations some people try to teach genetics with it, personally I think that corn genetics are rather difficult and in depth (especially considering you are working with so many genes from parents of unknown lineage with a mix of alleles that may be dominant, co-dominant, recessive, transposons or retrotransposons etc I think that peas are far simpler for teaching genetics) so would not do this unless you are very confident with what you are doing or do not want to go too deep into the topic.

Popcorn: Glass bead corn can be used as popcorn, but it really isn't a great popcorn yet.  Some cobs clearly have popcorn as one or more of their ancestors as well as the Aztec corn.  I have grown mini blue popcorn in the past and can see several of its traits so figure that it is another of the ancestors of glass bead corn.  Sure a few kernels pop on every cob of glass bead corn, and on some cobs every seed will pop, but the strain that I grow has not been maintained or previously selected for popping ability.  There is wide genetic variation in the population in terms of seed colour, size of cobs, leaf/stalk/sheath/silk/tassel colour, and some cobs pop much better than others.

Glass bead corn - lots of genetic variation

How well does glass bead corn actually pop?

I think that a great popping corn could be selected from the existing gene pool and I am considering selecting and growing only the most colourful and best popping seeds.  But first I wanted to know how well glass bead corn popped in general.

If I chose the best cobs, pretty much all of the seeds will pop just like a variety that has been bred for popping, but that would not yield any useful data.  I wanted to see what percentage of a few random batches of all the seeds would pop.  This would most likely include seeds from the best cobs, seeds from the worst cobs, and seeds from average cobs.  I needed to do a few batches to give me a decent idea of how it pops. 

From randomly selected seeds (poured out of a large jar full of seeds mixed from all the cobs, and then counted) we found that an average of 24 out of 65 seeds did not pop well.  This is not a bad number already, certainly some packets of popcorn from the supermarket pop poorly like this, but it must be better if this is to be considered a good popcorn.

This means that currently only about 37% of seeds do not pop properly, which makes me believe that I can turn this into a beautiful and colourful popping corn in a few generations if I select for the popping trait as clearly the required genes are present. 

Glass bead popcorn - every seed on this small cob should pop

How to select for the popping trait

People ask me how I will turn this strain of glass bead corn into a better popping corn.  I normally tell them it is just by adding some selective pressure and growing the best seeds, many people comment that it sounds difficult.   If you have no interest in saving seeds or selecting corn to pop better the rest of this post is probably not for you and will be boring.

Adding selective pressure is actually a lot simpler than you may think.  Lets face it, whenever you save seeds from anything you are adding selective pressure whether you like it or not, I may as well add selective pressure for excellence in something rather than selecting for mediocrity in everything.  As there are currently no multi coloured popcorn varieties in Australia I may as well select for the popping trait and end up with a beautiful and useful variety of corn.

Firstly grow the seeds and let the cobs dry on the plant as best you can, then remove them and hang them somewhere to complete drying.  Discard any sweet corn seeds, glass bead corn has no sweet corn genes so this step has been done for you many generations ago.  These sweet corn seeds are easy to identify as they are wrinked and shrunken when dry, not firm and round and full like the glass bead corn.  The only way that Glass Bead corn will have any of this is if you or a neighbour are growing sweet corn and the pollen blows over the fence and pollinates your corn.  For anyone who is into genetics you are essentially removing the genes for sugary (SU), sugar enhanced (SE) and supersweet (SH2), once these genes are gone they will not pop up again by themselves.

3 of the darker cobs will pop well, the 2 with more yellow seeds will not

Selection Rules for popping corn

Once you have done that it is important to make some selection rules, mine are like this:

If many seeds on a cob are cracked I don't want to save the cob for seed (unless it has a colour or some other trait I desperately want to keep) and will discard it.  Cracked seeds will not pop as the pressure vessel is weakened or corrupted.  This seed is fine to grind into flour or feed to stock and are not noticeable if eaten at the milk stage (as a sweet corn).

I don't save the cob for seed if many of the kernels have popped on the cob.  This sometimes happens due to rain or irrigation, it is ok for sweet corn, it is fine if you are to grind it into flour, it is not great for animal feed due to lowering the storage time, but it is not a good sign for pop corn.  I normally get rid of the entire cob if any of the seeds have already popped as it appears to be strongly heritable.

Look at how the kernels are arranged on each cob, they need to be as round as possible.  They will not pop if they are flat or squished together.  They will also not pop well if the seed has an indentation on the top or if the kernel is angular instead of round.  Ideally the kernel would be spherical, as this is not possible in corn seeds you aim for the closest possible thing.

Look at each of the remaining kernels closely, if they look glassy and translucent then they probably will pop well, if they are not they tend to be poor at popping and should be removed.  As glass bead corn was created by selecting the prettiest glassy looking seeds of Aztec corn, the genes for glassy looking or translucent kernels are already present in glass bead corn.  The job now is to ensure that each seed is homozygous for glassy alleles and that each generation has a higher percentage of glassy alleles.

Each kernel must not have a deep indentation around the germ.  The germ needs to be small and reasonably indistinguishable if the seed is to pop well.  This trait is highly heritable so should be reasonably simple to select for.  The only down side is that if the germ becomes too small then survivability can be lowered.

If the individual kernels are overly large they will pop ok but will be tough, so I am selecting for regular sized kernels.  Small kernels seem to pop well, but do not give a lot of volume, people tend to want large fluffy popcorn in their bowl.  For this reason I will eventually aim more at growing medium sized kernels, but for now many of the small seeded corn cobs have all of the other traits so I am leaving a lot of them in.

I need to select seeds form a large number of cobs/plants as corn is highly susceptible to inbreeding depression.  Sometimes this will mean that I do not get the best popping corn traits as fast as I want to, but these set backs should only add an extra year or so to the project and ensure that this strain should be easy to continue indefinitely.

After all of this I then try to select for the best colours as well as a wide range of colours.  I have no intention of doing all this work to simply reinvent the wheel and ending up with a new type of yellow pop corn!  I was disappointed over how many yellow seeds are currently in the cobs, for the next few years I will not plant many yellow seeds so that the presence of the yellow allele is lower in the strain.   I also do not want to completely remove the yellow genes, I just want a smaller percentage of plants to carry yellow.

Larger cobs produce more seeds (which means more popcorn per plant), and plants that grow several cobs per plant are better use of space in the vegetable garden, and a shorter growing season means there is less chance for crop failure and more efficient use of vegetable garden space, but these are all secondary traits that are less important than the other traits mentioned above.  These traits can be selected for after the glass bead corn is a good popcorn, if you select for too many things you tend not to make any progress and the choice between what to keep and what to exclude becomes unclear.

After I have applied the selection rules I end up with a bunch of seed that is colourful, glassy looking, and reasonably round.  I then separate this into three batches (one to plant, two to store) to help make certain that I will not lose them if I have a bad year that results in crop failure.  Every seed that is culled or does not make it into storage/planting batches can then be eaten.  Each year I should move the glass gem corn towards being a better popping and more colourful corn.

In a few years we will see how I went, fingers crossed I end up with a refined strain of glass bead corn being an amazing multi-coloured popping corn reasonably quickly.  If that does not work I guess I could cross it with red pop corn and blue pop corn (to incorporate popcorn genes as well as adding some colour) and keep trying, but I have a good feeling that all the genes needed to make this into an amazing popcorn are already present. 

Comparing Perennial Leeks with Regular Leeks

Perennial Leeks

Perennial leeks are rare and difficult to find in Australia for some reason, yet they are simple to grow and one of the best and most productive vegetables to grow for home gardeners.  I would hate to be without them again, if we ever lost them in a bushfire or something I would be devastated.  I have had a lot of questions about the perennial leeks from different people, so thought it best that I write another post and answer some of them.

Perennial leeks - note the baby leeks growing from their bases

 What are they, how to grow perennial leeks?

I have some growing notes here.  I will tell you a few things now that were not covered in my growing notes page.

Perennial leeks are an amazing plant, they are hardy, productive and delicious.  People often ask when to plant perennial leeks, we plant and divide perennial leeks all year.  When we harvest a leek for dinner I then plant the small baby leeks that are growing from the large one's base.  It is only over the hotter summers when the plants are dormant that we do not harvest leeks, even then I occasionally dig up the bulbs and plant them out in other places.  Even when we lived near Canberra we could divide and plant them all year, the frost and the heat does not seem to be too much of an issue with them.

Summers here are extremely hot and dry and the leeks tend to die down to bulbs, in cooler climates or even cooler years they grow all year.  They flower here but generally nothing comes of it.  One year after floods we had them set viable seed which I think was a cross between the leeks and elephant garlic, that year the flower heads also grew small leek bulbs in the same way that tree onions grow small onions on the flower stalk.  These things have only happened that once and I have not been able to convince them to flower since.

Some people ask me how they compare with other types of leek.  When I wrote my first perennial leek post I had never grown or eaten any other varieties of leek to be able to compare, since then I have grown and eaten some regular leeks so can compare them.  I considered buying some leek seeds to grow, but I have grown onion seed and find them fiddly so did not want to do that if I did not have to.  The leeks in the supermarket were so much larger, both longer and fatter than the perennial leeks, so we bought some for dinner a few times just to see if they were any better.  After cutting off the roots with a few mm of shank I put them in a jar with a little water and they sprouted.  We used to do that with the perennial leeks to build up numbers the first year that we had them so figured it should work with any leek.  It worked fine and the regular leeks grew well.  I then grew the two types of leek, perennial and store bought, in adjacent beds to see how they compared. 

Perennial leeks - I need to take a few more pictures for this post

Comparing Perennial Leeks with Regular Leeks

Below is roughly how they fared compared with each other.  Please try to keep in mind I only grew them over one year, I had an unknown commercial supermarket strain (or several unknown strains), and had small numbers of store bought leeks so this comparison is far from scientific:

The store bought leeks taste pretty much the same as the perennial leeks, no noticeable difference there.  Some people who I have sold perennial leeks to have claimed that the perennial leeks are sweeter or tastier, but I am not convinced that I could tell any difference.  Both types of leek cooked the same, neither one was tough or bitter or anything like that.

While the store bought leeks were larger, the perennial leeks grew faster and sent up a lot of babies and we ended up with a greater harvest of perennial leeks compared to store bought leeks on the same area of land.  So from a yield per area of garden the perennial leeks came out on top by a long way.  When harvesting perennial leeks there are always baby leeks that you can use as replacements, which maximises the use of space.

The perennial leeks reproduce slowly throughout the year, then around November they explode in numbers.  From one well grown plant I ended up with 128 leeks in 12 months.  During this time I would have been able to eat leeks as well as increase their number had I wished.  The store bought leeks did not flower in the 12 months, but I assume had I left them in for another 6 months or so they would have flowered and produced hundreds if not thousands of seeds.  I guess there is a trade off here, the store bought leeks would have reproduced more than the perennial leeks if they had more time, but we would not have eaten leek during that long time.  The time it would take to go from a seed to an edible leek is also a lot longer than to go from a baby perennial leek to an edible sized leek.

When saving leek seed it is advisable to grow out at a minimum of 80 plants to prevent problems with inbreeding depression, you would then rouge out any plants with undesirable characteristics (minimum numbers based on info from http://www.seedalliance.org/uploads/publications/Seed_Saving_Guide.pdf).  That is a lot of space to tie up each year just to produce leek seed for the following season.  Leek seed is only viable for a year or two, so you would end up having to tie up that much space all the time just to produce leek seed, you would then have to allocate another bed to produce leeks to eat.  Of course you could just buy leek seed each year, but then you may as well just buy leek from the supermarket to eat and use your vegetable plot for growing something else.  When growing perennial leeks you can grow a single plant if you wanted to and build up numbers from that, there will be no inbreeding, and rouging out is not needed as every baby it produces will be genetically identical to the parent (this is not exactly true as sometimes mutations pop up, but that is an in-depth topic that is best not covered here).  There is also no problem with perennial leek about having to isolate plants to prevent them crossing with the neighbour's leeks which can be an issue if you live in town.  So from a sustainability point of view the perennial leeks end up as the better option.

Regular leeks can be grown as perennials, harvested close to the ground and allowed to regrow.  Perennial leeks are superior here as they can be grown and harvested the same way but continually reproduce and allow you to build up numbers if you wish.

Regular leeks are a bit larger, but the ones I grew were nowhere near as large as they originally were in the store, perennial leeks are a bit smaller.  I assume that if I grew the perennial leeks better they would be a bit larger, but I also think that regular leeks will always be a bit larger than perennial leeks.  If you do not divide them, the perennial leeks end up as a clump of hundreds of plants that are as thin as chives.  This can be a down side of perennial leeks, it can also be easily avoided by dividing some of them occasionally.

One of the store bought leeks grew with a red stem and looked nice, the perennial leeks were just green.  Occasionally a variegated perennial leek turns up, but other than that they are just green.  I like the look of the variegated perennial leeks myself but they only seem to turn up occasionally.  At the end of the day these are a food plant, looks are secondary.

To the best of my knowledge there is only one or two varieties of perennial leek in Australia whereas there are a whole lot more varieties of seed grown leek.  Some types of seed grown leeks are suited to warm climates and others are suited to cool climates.  Some grow long and thin whereas others grow short and fat, apparently each of these types is better suited to different climates.  I have sent perennial leeks to a few parts of the country and so far am yet to find a climate in which they are not productive.  This lack of choice with varieties is not an issue as I am happy with these perennial leeks, if they were not fantastic then this lack of choice would matter a whole lot more.

From what I have been told perennial leek will cross pollinate with any variety of regular leek and they say that the offspring are less desirable than either parent, so if you grow both it is best to remove the flower stalk from the perennial leek to prevent problems.  I have never let regular leeks flower so can not say too much about the subject.  Perhaps if you were to let a regular leek flower next to a flowering perennial leek you could grow the resultant seed and perhaps get a new type of perennial leek!

Perennial leek bulbs - they only die down to bulbs some years if it is too hot or dry

My conclusion

Over all the perennial leeks were a lot easier to grow, they were producers of food throughout the year, they were producers of huge amounts of food for a small area, and I know that if I forget about them for a year (or ten) that they will still be there waiting for me.

After growing the two types of leeks and comparing them I don't think I can be bothered growing regular leeks again and will stick with the perennial leeks.  I understand that there are many varieties of regular leeks and someone should preserve them and prevent them from going extinct, but that someone should not be me at this point in time.  I am happy with perennial leeks and at this stage want to spend my energy saving seed of other things.

I do have perennial leeks for sale as well as some seeds, herbs and other perennial vegetables on my For Sale page.  I am not keen on posting outside of Australia unless you have already contacted your country's quarantine and are confident that they will be allowed through.  That being said I am happy to try my best to answer any questions about perennial leeks from people even if they are overseas.

I have since written a better comparison with pictures I did of growing seven regular leeks and seven perennial leeks for 12 months side by side.  If you are interested it can be found here.

Pineapple Sage - one of the most delicious and useful herbs

I first heard about Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) on the internet somewhere and I was both intrigued and skeptical.  Everyone who wrote about growing or eating this plant raved about how great it is.  I wanted to try some but did not want to pay a fortune for one through some mail order and then find it did not smell like pineapple, or that it smelled of pineapple but the pineapple smell was overpowered by the smell of sage.  I was lucky enough to find a small plant for sale in a shop somewhere and was able to smell it before buying it.  It smelled delicious, just like sweet pineapple.  After smelling it I had to buy one and try and grow it.  I am happy to say that it was simple to grow and performed rather well even in my harsh climate.

Pineapple sage flowers are sweet and delicious, just like the leaves

Pineapple Sage is quite possibly my favourite herb.  Many herbs are meant to smell like something, and they do if you use your imagination and wish really hard, but pineapple sage is different.  Other things smell different depending on where or how they are grown, how much water they are given or even the time of day that you smell them, chocolate mint is a prime example of this.  Other herbs have faint scents, or they have the scent of its name sake but it has another smell that overpowers it.  Pineapple sage actually smells like pineapple.  It really does.  It is not a faint pineapple smell that also has a sage smell overpowering it, it smells strongly of pineapple and nothing else.

Pineapple sage, like many of the vegetables that are eaten in Australia, is native to Central and South America.  It is less hardy than regular sage, frost knocks it around a bit if not protected, and it needs a little more water than regular sage, but it is still worth growing.  I grow some in the garden, mulch it well and hope that when the tops get burned off by frost that the roots will survive and re-sprout in Spring.  As well as growing it in the garden I always have one or two in pots, that way if we do happen to get an especially hard frost that kills off the garden grown plants I still have one in a pot to start over with when the weather warms up again.  It is simple to propagate via cuttings, but they only seem to take for me during the cooler weather.

I love pineapple sage, after reading about it on the internet it seems that I am not alone in my love for this plant.  I would grow it simply to smell as I walk and brush past it.  Water is scarce out here so I would struggle trying to justify growing a plant that simply smells nice.  Luckily it is not just a nice smelling ornamental, the whole plant is edible and useful in a number of ways.

Both the leaves and flowers of this versatile plant are edible, the leaves are used to flavour meat, poultry and other main meals, it is used in 'herbal tea', used for sorbets as well as a large range of desserts.  The flowers can be added to drinks, jellies, jams, desserts and fruit salad.  My kids and I like to make 'tea' by steeping the leaves in hot water and adding some honey or sugar.  Even my eldest son Igloo, who is rather picky about drinking such things loves the smell and the taste of pineapple sage tea.  Igloo is trying to convince me to let him grow 100 pineapple sage plants in his little vegetable garden, perhaps we will start with one and see how he goes.

Pineapple sage is meant to deter some pest insects, so I grow a few in amongst the vegetables in the garden.  To be honest I do not know if it makes any real difference, but nothing seems to grow any worse by having pineapple sage next to it and it is good to have a few extra plants.  By hiding it in amongst the vegetables they seem to be slightly safer from children who love to steal the leaves to eat them or do whatever it is that kids do with nice smelling leaves.

Pineapple sage grows well in a pot or in the ground

Pineapple sage leaves are a nice shade of green, in Autumn to Winter it will flower with beautiful red flowers.  These flowers smell as delicious as the leaves and are often visited by honey bees and several other pollinators.  We have seen honey bees as well as nine different species of native bees on the pineapple sage flowers, they simple adore it.  By flowering in Autumn and Winter they provide food for pollinators and beneficial insects in a time when traditionally they do not have a lot of food available in this area.  If you can grow it in a protected spot where the frosts will not burn it you will have it flowering most of the way through winter.  This means that come Spring you have a large number of pollinators and predatory insects already living in the garden ready to pollinate flowers and take care of any insect pests that may be around.

According to the internet pineapple sage is extensively used in Mexican traditional medicine, especially for the treatment of anxiety, depression, stomach aches, evening out blood sugar and for lowering of blood pressure.  I can't comment on how effective it is, but Igloo does seem a lot calmer and happier after he has drank some pineapple sage tea.

I have seen a golden leaf form of pineapple sage, apparently it is the same as regular pineapple sage but looks a bit prettier.  Some day I hope to track it down and try to grow it as well, but for now I am happy with the regular pineapple sage.

If you have never grown pineapple sage you should try it. Your kids will thank you for it.

Tree Onions

Tree Onions

Tree Onions are also known as Egyptian Walking Onions or Topset Onions.  They are an old heirloom vegetable dating from back to at least the 1850's but their exact history prior to that has apparently been lost.  Originally thought to be Allium cepa var proliferum but now we know that they are a interspecific hybrid between Allium cepa (the common onion) and Allium fistulosum (bunching onion).

Apparently tree onions used to grow in every backyard vegetable garden in the past, but recently they have fallen out of favor and have all but disappeared in Australia.  Not surprisingly they are not well suited to mass mechanical production, so it is unlikely that you will find them in the supermarket, but they are very well suited to the home grower.

Bulbils on a flower stalk which have sent up a stalk of their own

How to grow tree onions

 I have put some notes on how to grow them here.  Basically they grow the same as any other onion, but are a lot hardier and more forgiving if things do not go well.  They prefer a moist but well draining soil with plenty of nutrients and no competition from weeds, but will survive pretty much anywhere that is not too wet.  Raising the pH of the soil is helpful for any onion, this can be done by adding ash from the fireplace or buying some lime.  I have been told to harvest the bulbs when the stalks dry down, but this may or may not happen.  We harvest after flowering when the bulbs look larger, or whenever the bulb looks large enough to bother digging it up.  Sometimes in late summer I stop watering them so that they dry down for me, this seems to work.

Tree onions in less than ideal conditions

How to multiply tree onions

Tree onions reproduce vegetatively, do not  set viable seed and will not cross pollinate any other type of onion you may be growing.  As they reproduce vegetatively they are stable and will always grow true to type, as such they are one of the very few hybrids that I will bother growing.  Just like all the other perennial vegetables I grow, they just keep doing their thing year after year just as long as I do not eat all of them.

Tree onions are kind of like potato onions in that they are edible perennial onions that can divide underground.  The bulbs are a little larger than potato onions, and they do not divide as much underground, and the leaves are much larger than potato onions so they are easy to tell apart.  The underground bulbs of the tree onions normally grow to around the size of a ping pong ball.

They then grow small onion bulbs, called bulbils, on top of the flower stalk.  These small bulbils sometimes then send up a flower stalk of their own which grows more smaller bulbils.  This strain sometimes produces some real flowers as well, but they wither and drop quickly as all the energy is directed to the growing bulbils.

Unfortunately the flowers are only around briefly and only on a few flower stalks, I am always busy when they are around so I have not had a good look at them.  I would be curious to know if tree onions display cytoplasmic male sterility or if it would be possible to remove the bulbils and get the flowers to set viable seed.  If they could produce seed (even with a fair amount of intervention on my behalf) I would love to try and grow some out and see if I could produce some new varieties of tree onions.  But that is a project for Future Damo as I have a lot of other things going on that are more important at the moment.

The bulbils normally reach the size of a marble or a pea as the climate is so harsh here, I have seen them far larger when grown in more mild climates.  If the bulbils touch the soil they grow roots surprising fast.  When I have broken some of the bulbils off and planted them they always have roots by the following morning.  The roots of tree onions grow deep, far deeper than you would expect from such a small plant and certainly a lot deeper than any other onion I know of. 

Tree Onion bulbils just starting to grow

What Tree Onions are used for

The entire plant is edible, we use the bulbs in any recipe that calls for onion, if eaten straight away they can be a little insipid, if stored for a while they tend to taste a lot stronger.  The green parts can replace spring onions (we generally use the Everlasting onions for this though), and I am told that the bulbils are good pickled but am yet to try that myself.

The bulbils can be picked before they sprout and stored for many months, so far I don't bother doing this and just plant them when I find time, if I don't find time they plant themselves and I just transplant them when I get around to it.  The underground bulbs are meant to store for up to 18 months, I can't comment on this as I have not tried to store any because we just dig them up to eat as needed.  That is the beauty of perennial vegetables, many of them do not need to be stored and can simply be dug up, broken off, pulled out, or cut down and cooked when they are needed.

As well as being edible, tree onions are a garden curiosity that always attract comments from people who see them.  Children love to grow tree onions even if they have no desire to eat them.

Small tree onion bulbils, they grow far larger than this

Tree onions are very hardy!

Tree onions are very hardy little plants, they have survived drought, flood, severe heat, and hard frosts here and still gone on to produce a decent crop. They are pretty much impossible to kill by mistake.  Last year I lost most of my regular onions (as well as potato onions and a bunch of other things) to the drought and crazy heat, but the tree onions were happy, I put that down to their deep roots.  They can also be grown in pots, the roots seem to either go through the drainage hole into soil below, or the roots stop growing if the pot is off the ground and they they hit air.  If the pot is too small they tend to get very root bound and survive, but they do not often end up giving a large crop.  Even though they are very productive and hardy I don't think they pose a weed threat at all.  If you do not want any more it is simple to remove flower stalks, if you miss some and they happen to touch the soil and grow they are simply to pull up.  If any parts are left in the soil they do not tend to grow unless they have part of the base plate attached to a piece of bulb.

It is too dry for grass and weeds to survive, but tree onions go on strong

They are the cold hardiest of the onions and will survive in frozen ground for quite a long time.  As well as being productive little survivors they are unusual enough to be grown in a children's garden.  I have taught children who do not like onions, or any vegetables, beg me to let them grow these purely as a fun oddity.  I see that as a great way to teach kids about growing food.  Tree onions are very forgiving and will survive and produce at least some food even in the most neglected children's vegetable garden.

I first started growing tree onions when I was barely a teenager, I was fascinated by them, the thought of eating the underground bulb and replanting a small aerial bulb appealed to me.  Unfortunately I lost them when I left home, it took me a few years but I am glad that I was eventually able to track them down again.

I do sell tree onions from time to time on my For Sale page.

Antechinus

When we first moved here there were a lot of antechinus in the area.  They are a small, native, carnivorous marsupial.  They look similar to a large mouse or a small rat, but they are ferocious and they eat meat!  I wanted to show the kids what they looked like up close so I caught this one and put in in a bug catcher.  The kids had a look and then I let it go, it climbed up a tree and disappeared into the roof.

my Antechinus friend

Then a mouse plague struck the area, the largest plague since the 1980's.  It probably took 3 or 4 weeks of everyone in the area complaining about mice before we even saw our first mouse.  I am pretty sure the local antechinus population was large enough that they were eating out all the mice before they could get to my house, which was great.  Then the mice numbers eventually got too large for too long that they were everywhere.  People were having mice eat the wiring in their cars.  It was disgusting.

Eventually the mice started to get in the house and chew through electrical wiring in the roof.  After we could not take it any longer I started to put out traps and eventually started to bait them.  I was killing heaps of mice each night.  Unfortunately I was also occasionally trapping antechinus, they are tougher than a mouse so I was able to set them free and hope that they were not too injured.  Judging by the way they ran off I am guess that they mostly were not too hurt by the experience.

When the mice eventually subsided there were no more antechinus.  Normally we would see them hopping around eating moths and beetles, but all was quiet.  I had a bad feeling that they had died from eating too many sick poisoned mice.  It is a horrible feeling to think that perhaps you have killed off all of them...

Then the other day Tracey came home and found a dying antechinus under the car port.  This is great news!  Male antechinus die after the breeding season around this time of year, so finding a dying male is a sign that they are still around.  Hopefully they can return to their previous numbers and get back to protecting the place from mice.

while the picture is far from convincing, this is a male antechinus

Yacon - the world's most civilised vegetable

Yacon (Smallanthus sonchifolius formerly known as Polymnia sonchifolia) is a perennial root vegetable from South America.  

If you have never eaten yacon then you are missing out on something truly special. 

When Tracey asked our five year old to describe yacon he said: "They taste like apple. They look like a tube and grow underground like a potato. The leaves feel like a soft blanket."  To be honest I think that is as good a description as any.

How I first grew yacon

I read about yacon years ago on the Lost crops site and eventually tracked down a small rhizome to buy over the internet.  I spent a bit of money to get yacon and had no idea if it would grow for me or even if I would like it.  You plant yacon in spring, then you wait as it grows happily, if you have frosts it is best to let it die down over winter before harvest.  After planting it I waited patiently as it grew, still never having tasted it, all the while tempted to dig up a small root to try but trying to be patient so the plant could do its thing properly.  The yacon grew about waist high and looked nice, towards the end of the growing season it dropped a few leaves and looked a bit shabby.  The yacon then grows a small yellow sunflower like flower some years, unfortunately they require more than one clone in order to set viable seed and as far as I am aware there is only one yacon clone in Australia.

Yacon flowers

Then winter came, I was very excited, but the frosts did not kill off the tops so I waited until we had a hard frost as frost apparently makes the roots sweeter.  We then had a hard frost, and the yacon looked a little burned but overall was not too bothered, even though it does not look like it yacon is a pretty hardy plant.  After a few hard frosts the tops eventually succumbed to the cold.  I carefully dug up the large and brittle tubers and tried one, I liked it but it was nothing special.  The yield was amazing, from the one tiny rhizome that I initially planted I ended up with a dozen much larger rhizomes and a bucket full of large tubers, but if the taste was not great I did not want to use the space on them regardless of the yield.  Everything I had read said that if you leave yacon for a few weeks after digging it up it gets sweeter, so I waited for a few weeks for the tubers to sweeten, I then tried another one, I loved it!  

I wish that yacon was more readily available in Australia, even if the plants were more available for people to grow at home it would be great, this is why I started to sell plants.  I am rather fond of perennial vegetables, once you plant them you pretty much will have them forever.

Yacon, note the light brown edible tuber and the purple propagative rhizome

How to grow yacon

I have included some growing notes here that describes things a bit more clearly.  Yacon are interesting plants to grow, they pretty much look after themselves, they are hugely productive, and they are perennial.  From what I have read it can grow and be harvested all year in frost free places, apparently without frost you just wait an extra couple of days after harvest to let it sweeten before eating it.

I have never heard of anyone who has grown yacon complain of any pest or disease that affects the plants.  Yacon seems not overly picky about soil conditions, planted in rich moist soil it gives the highest yields, but it still gives a decent yield on poor soil with minimal water.  Yacon prefers full sun but will also provide a decent yield in part shade, it is well suited to growing under trees to utilise an otherwise wasted space.  One thing that yacon does not like is rocks and stones in the soil, the tubers will still grow and give a large and delicious yield but they will be misshapen due the pressure exerted upon them from the stones etc in the soil.

Unlike jerusalem artichokes to which yacon is related, yacon poses no weed threat, it grows well yet it remains civilised by not taking over the vegetable garden, in fact other plants seem to grow better when yacon is grown near them.  Yacon exudes inulin and other sugars from its roots which attracts and feeds earth worms as well as a host of other beneficial soil life.  I am told that yacon is readily colonised by mycorrhizae which promote plant growth in a number of ways.

Purple Yacon rhizomes ready to be divided and planted

Yacon is edible, delicious and healthy
Another civilised thing about yacon is that every part is edible as well as being good for you.  Some other vegetables have some parts you can eat and others you can not, or some things which must be eaten cooked as they are toxic if raw, or irritating hairs or spines that must be dealt with, all parts of yacon can be eaten either raw or cooked.  The large sweet crunchy tubers are the part that we like the best, we do not tend to eat any other parts.  Mostly we eat the tubers raw, some people just dig them up and eat them as is but I peel them as the skin can taste a little like resin.  I find that if I slice them thin they taste the best.

Yacon is crunchy and sweet, after cooking it retains its crunch but tends to take on the flavour of whatever it is cooked with.  It can be used in the place of water chestnuts in recipes.  Even though yacon is very sweet the sugars are not digested by people which makes it fine to be eaten by diabetics.  Yacon is high in inulin (which is different to insulin), inulin is a natural prebiotic which feeds the good bacteria in your body and helps to exclude the bad bacteria.  This means that as well as tasting great yacon is good for you.

Once harvested yacon tubers seem to last anywhere from a few months to a year depending on climate in which they are stored.  One year we had far too many yacon tubers so decided to freeze some of them.  Once frozen they last seemingly forever.  To eat them it is important not to thaw them as they go black and slimy looking.  I remove the tubers from the freezer, peel them with a vegetable peeler, slice them and eat them.  When frozen yacon tubers are easy to peel and easy to slice.  When frozen yacon tastes different to when it is raw, it is difficult to describe but it kind of tastes like frozen banana custard.  My kids seem to like frozen yacon even more than they like raw yacon.

Another remarkably civilised thing about yacon is that the part that you eat is different to the part that you plant to grow a crop for next season.  Unlike other vegetable crops where you have to decide how much to eat and how much to save to replant or you have to decide how many plants to let go to seed, you eat all of the yacon tubers and plant all of the propagative rhizomes.  As yacon is propagated by division and does not produce seed you do not have to worry about caging or separating to keep seed pure or growing enough plants to avoid inbreeding depression.  Growing yacon by divisions means you never have to worry about the neighbours growing GM crops that will cross pollinate and ruin your plants, the yacon that we grow and eat today is genetically the same as the yacon plants that the Incas domesticated and grew.

Small yacon plant almost ready to be harvested after frost

Harvesting Yacon

The different parts of yacon are easy to tell apart as the tubers are large and brown and look like sweet potato, the propogative rhizome is purplish and small and has growing points, you will see these when you harvest yacon.

I look forward to yacon harvest each year, not only because it means that in a few weeks I will be eating sweet yacon, but also because of the unmistakable yacon smell.  It is a smell that can't be described, a smell that says that winter is here, a smell that helps keep me connected to the land and the seasons, a smell I miss over the rest of the year.  When we harvest yacon I carefully dig/pull up a plant and shake it gently.  The edible tubers fall off in a civilized pile and what is left in my hand is for dividing and replanting.

Yacon leaf,  it "feels like a soft blanket"

The leaves are large and fuzzy, as Igloo says they "feel like a soft blanket".  I have heard that in Peru the leaves are used to wrap food before it is cooked, kind of like a banana leaf or a grape leaf, but I am yet to try this myself.  A herbal 'tea' can be made from the leaves which helps to even out blood sugar.  The leaves can be picked and used straight away, or they can be left somewhere out of the sun to dry and then used to make the herbal tea later.  Unlike many herbal claims this claim that yacon leaves lower blood sugar levels seems to have been tested and proven to be true.  I have only made tea from the leaves once and found the taste to be a little odd, kind of like peppermint mixed with something.  I didn't really like it, but I didn't hate it, I am glad to say that the taste was not very strong.  It would probably taste nice if you mixed it with something that tastes better or something that has a strong taste that would overpower the yacon.


Where to buy yacon plants in Australia

As I already mentioned, if you have not eaten yacon you are missing out on something really special.  The chances are that you will never see yacon in the supermarket, so if you plan to try some or if you want your children to try some you must grow your own.  I do sell yacon rhizomes (a bit larger than the ones in the pictures above) here.


Ecclesiastes 3:1-2  There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens; a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,