Selfsufficientish.com

Hi!

I wanted to ask you all for ideas of reintroducing old crops and flowers that were traditionally cultivated here but are no longer around - I have a real interest in this area and want to reintroduce these native or traditional crops/flowers into our smallholding.

Thank you for your help in advance and happy weeding and harvesting!

Matthew

Um, you haven't put your location in your profile so nobody is going to know where 'here' is .

One of our favourites is carlins or maple peas. They used to be a populat food stuff in elizabethan times but fell out of favour and became cattle food. In this area they are eaten two Sundays before Easter Sunday . The story goes that there was a village on the coast who's crops had failed and the villagers were on the verge of starvation. A ship carrying a cargo of carlins crashed on the rocks and the villagers collected the peas, boiled them and served them with butter and rum sauce and were saved. As my granda used to say - Carlin Sunday Fartin' Monday! They are very easy to grow, grow to about 6ft tall and have very lovely purple flowers. From just a table spoon of the dried peas we've had a large crop, so they are quite profuse. You can either eat them as regualr garden peas or dry them and use them in soups etc. They are really nice in a pea and ham soup as they have a very "meaty" flavour

They sound much more prolific than 'normal' peas, interesting!

I only know Parsnips are about as native as you can get, and purple carrots are supposed to be but are really hard to get hold of and really hard to grow.

I want to try some really old varieties of potato next year.

You could try salsify (vegetable oyster) and scozonera. They are long roots, like thin carrots (they are white, scozonera has blackish skin), and were grown by the Victorians. They can be stored over winter like carrots or potatoes. I tried growing them years ago when we had an allotment, but the land was too dry for them to germinate. Another one to try would be cardoons, mainly because they reach 2 metres in height and look like a scary giant thistly globe artichoke (not surprising, cos that's what they are). The stems are chopped up for stews and soups, but I have no idea what they taste like - friends of ours have grown one on their vegetable patch for several years (they can be propagated from offshoots/suckers), and it is great as a centrepiece. There are other Victorian oddities you could try like the black radish, seakale (needs salt adding to the soil!), skirret (the sweetish roots are boiled), and Good King Henry or ('Lincolnshire Asparagus'), which was pretty well displaced by spinach. Some of these plants were no doubt discarded for a reason as you may find out! Jerusalem Artichoke is still cultivated, but not common, and worth a try - we had a permanent double row as a windbreak hedge on our allotment, they need no fertiliser or cultivation, you just dig a clump of tubers up as you need them (they can either be stored or left in the ground for ages), put one small piece back in the ground to grow a new plant, and the puree makes good soup (but gives you wind). Because they are helianthus (sunflowers), you also get good yellow flowerheads for the birds and insects.

I found salsify impossible to germinate having ahd 2 goes- shame I really want to grow them.

Cardoons my allotment neighbour grows, they are HUGE! He says they taste earthy.

J Arts I have grown but once they are they it's impossible to be rid of them and they are so very tall that they ahve overshadowed alot. I like the taste but the rate teh multiply at is beyond my capacity- s when someone tells you they don't spread - they do, and that they are only 4 ft- it's more like 7 ft! But very easy for sure.

Try looking at the Thomas Etty website, it has loads of heritage seeds and bulbs and has things I've never heard of - Tree Primrose and Meum?
They are also good for medicinal plants and plants for dyeing etc.

Interesting website- surprising how much stuff doesn't date back much further than 1850. Had no idea radish wer so ancient though!

Can't understand comments about the difficulty of getting salsify seeds to germinate. On my plot it self-seeds everywhere! Mind you getting parsnip seeds to come up is very hit and miss, but when I let one go to seed, they came up everywhere!

Self seeded stuff is always easier to germinate in my experience. Will try again this year with Salsify in hope

Radishes are indeed ancient. They were cultivated here by the Saxons, not just as food but for medicinal reasons: they were thought to ward off 'women's chatter' for one thing, and to cure depression!

trevorb wrote:Radishes are indeed ancient. They were cultivated here by the Saxons, not just as food but for medicinal reasons: they were thought to ward off 'women's chatter' for one thing, and to cure depression!

I can hear men saying now- one and the same thing....

grahamhobbs wrote:Can't understand comments about the difficulty of getting salsify seeds to germinate. On my plot it self-seeds everywhere! Mind you getting parsnip seeds to come up is very hit and miss, but when I let one go to seed, they came up everywhere!

Like you, I had no bother with the salsify I planted this year: every one came up. Mind you, I planted them in the greenhouse then transferred them (via the cold frame) when they were established a bit. A bit high maintenance to be sustainable, perhaps!

Well I've ordered my salsify from another supplier this year so hopefully I'll have more luck!