Spring is here, which means it's time to plant a garden. In the same spirit in which I recommended planting hardy bananas, I'd like to suggest a few unusual plants for your garden this year. There is still time to order and start everything listed here, and I’ve included links to buy them. Let's jump right in.
Ruby Takane Buckwheat
Buckwheat is a wildly useful plant, often used as both a cover crop and a food source. It has a special—although often misunderstood—talent: it excretes an enzyme from its roots that converts non-bioavailable phosphorus into a bioavailable form, which it then takes up in "luxurious" quantities (meaning it consumes more than it needs.) This process does not add phosphorous to the soil, but if buckwheat is cut down and decomposed, either in place or in a compost pile, the newly bioavailable phosphorus is released, making it available to other plants. A lack of phosphorus may well contribute to the end of our civilization, so get crackin' on the buckwheat planting. Another compelling reason to grow buckwheat is that its flowers are a favored food source for parasitic wasps, which kill soft-bodied pests in a gratuitously disgusting manner: they lay eggs inside of them, after which their offspring eat their way out. Super gross, but also very useful. Given that it blooms in just 6-8 weeks, buckwheat offers a quick way to add some beautiful biological pest control to your garden, along with yielding the primary ingredient in soba noodles, if you're feeling industrious. I strongly favor the Ruby Takane cultivar because it is a zillion times prettier than the standard white type.
Winged Beans
A tropical vine that is edible from top to bottom: leaves, flowers, roots, and bean pods. The bean pods are the star of the show, however, offering a visually fascinating, tasty, and prolific alternative to green beans. They are wonderful stir-fried or pickled, becoming increasingly crunchy the larger they get. Winged beans will happily takeover a fence if given enough heat, sun, and moisture, blooming gorgeously before forming its signature pods. Remember, this is a tropical plant, so it's not going to do well in cool nor extremely hot temps, and it prefers humidity and heavy, regular watering. If you can offer it those conditions, you'll have yourself a super productive edible vine. I recommend this short-season, non-day length sensitive variety.
Fixation Balansa Clover & Miniclover
Clover is a superior cover crop: it fixes nitrogen and feeds pollinators, while being very easy to sow and grow. I am personally inclined towards two opposite ends of the clover spectrum: 1) A tiny perennial ground cover that forms a dense, weed-excluding mat, and 2) A mammoth annual clover that can grow 8 ft stems that stand up to 3 ft high. The first is called Miniclover, and it is the default ground cover in my food forest. My goal with it is to fix nitrogen and prevent weeds in all the various nooks and crannies between plants, areas that are often unproductive and easily colonized by wind-born seeds. It is estimated that for a food forest to be completely self-sustaining in nitrogen, 25-40% of the plants need to be nitrogen fixers (which is not to say they can't perform other functions, too, like being edible), and filling in all the awkward little spaces with Miniclover should help me get there. I'm also using it to establish a lawn alternative over my septic leech field, which is a more traditional use: a sea of green with occasional bee-friendly flowers. Fixation Balansa, on the other hand, is an unruly beast intended to fix the maximum amount of nitrogen while producing as much biomass as possible. It is perhaps the best in-place soil factory around, choking out competition while leaving behind 2-3 tons of dry weight per acre and nodule-cover root systems running 2-3 ft deep.
Guatemalan Green Ayote
I'm a big fan of winter squash, and one of the most unusual I've ever grown is the Guatemalan Green Ayote. A green-fleshed pumpkin, it is so strikingly unusual in appearance that one might understandably assume it's just a novelty. But it is not. It is an alarmingly delicious squash, and an impressive plant of the moschata-type, meaning that it has hard, thick vines resistant to squash vine borers and other pests. Being a tropical type, it has a long growing season, so for cold climates, I recommend starting it indoors, perhaps in a CowPot, so as not to disturb the roots during transplanting. Guatemalan Green Ayote is also a great candidate for crossbreeding—a simple task with squash—offering the tantalizing potential of transferring its unique green color to other varieties.
Mongolian Giant Sunflower
One of my pet projects is to grow 100% of the feed for my little chicken flock, and a component of that feed is sunflower seeds. Sunflowers are easy to grow, lovely to look at, beloved by pollinators, and a good treat for humans, too. So in the interest of maximizing my sunflower seed output, I'll be growing Mongolian Giant Sunflowers this year, an enormous variety capable of reaching 14 ft tall with 18 inch flower heads. The seeds themselves are massive, easily the largest sunflower seeds I've ever seen. Granted, the plants do not always reach their genetic potential for a variety of reasons, so I may not succeed at getting sunflowers the size of hors d'oeuvre trays. But even if they don't reach full size, they should make impressive specimens. Sunflowers also have another benefit I'm planning to experiment with, which is that the seeds are allelopathic, meaning they inhibit the growth of other plants. If I end up with extra flower heads, I'm going to toss them down in weedy areas and see if I can replace weeds with sunflowers without doing much work.
Amaranthus Tricolor
One of the most striking edible plants out there, Amaranthus Tricolor is a type of Amaranth that almost looks fake it's so showy. The psychedelic colors are the result of a slew of antioxidants packed into its leaves, which the plant uses to protect itself from the sun, but which your body uses for a host of beneficial things. It's essentially a warm weather spinach substitute that looks like a black light poster, and—on top of all that—it's relatively easy to grow. The leaves can be eaten raw or cooked.
Saffron
You—yes, you—can grow and harvest your own saffron. Saffron is delicious and expensive, but it'll just pop right out of the ground if you grow it. You do this by purchasing saffron crocus bulbs, sticking them in the ground, and waiting a few weeks. Little grass-like leaves come up, and then very beautiful purple flowers, the pistils of which are saffron threads. You pluck them, dry them, then use them however you would normally use saffron. Mine took about 6 weeks from planting to first harvest. Saffron is a fall planted species of crocus, so no rush to order the bulbs now. But you will want to set aside some space and prepare a bed. Why does saffron mostly come from Iran and India? Because it is laborious to harvest, and labor is cheap in those places. That's it. So long as you're willing to do a little light work, you can easily grow enough saffron to cover your personal use.
River Locust
A North American native shrub in the legume family, River Locust is a nitrogen fixer that sports beautiful flowers offering a heavy nectar flow to pollinators. Adapted to a wide range of growing conditions, it's classified as a "medium" nitrogen fixer by the USDA, which is as good as it gets for North American native shrubs. A great use for River Locust is in chop-and-drop systems: research has shown that once established in the right conditions, it can be cut back up to 4 times per year, which is A LOT. And unlike many other plants with similar qualities, it doesn't have thorns, which can be a serious problem. So if you're looking to add a perpetual source of mulch, soil nitrogen, and/or pollinator food, River Locust is worth checking out.
Alright, that’s it for now. Good luck with your gardens this summer, friends!
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