Big grove of Toona trees at Morris Arboretum today.
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Various Campanula species produce edible greens (mostly for cooking due to texture as many have some fuzz on the leaves).
I’ve been trying various selections. Some are too small. Others too invasive. Others just too short of a harvest season. I was pleasantly surprised last year by the ornamental selection called ‘Sarastro’. It’s a hybrid between an aggressive spreading type and a compact type with the resulting plant being vigorous enough to be worth growing as a vegetable without it being problematic running around the garden. Bonus is that it’s insanely beautiful when in bloom as well. I only got to sample the leaves to a small extent last year since my plant was still young, but I tried them dipped for a few seconds in boiling water to blanch them and the texture and flavor was excellent! I think the closest flavor comparison would be snow peas. I will definitely be scaling up production.
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I have a linden tree that I’ve identified as a hybrid between big leaf and little leaf linden. I find it as well as other lindens I’ve observed have a tendency to sucker so even if you didn’t coppice the tree you could still maintain a sort of bush of low branches around the base to harvest from while also having an attractive shade tree. I’ve got a bunch of pure big leaf linden seedlings I’m growing out now so hopefully soon I’ll have a chance to sample them to determine if I want to plant them as a veggie or not. Sometimes you just gotta try stuff to see if you like it cause individual tastes can vary so much.
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Did anybody here mention escarole and arugula, I’ve been eating them non stop since Nov to now. I still have a few bunch out there to cut. Super easy to grow in SoCal, no cooking required. Lots of vitamins too.
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Creasy greens, (winter cress?), easily established in the garden and pasture edges, and it’s almost time for branch lettuce (Micranthes micranthidifolia) and morels, just another month and a half in Appalachia. Our morel forage has been nil for the past 2 seasons. Branch lettuce has to be picked early on before a quick bolting seed head shoots up.
I would like to learn more about Linden tree leaves. Murky, this book lists early season multi-stem Linden tree as an edible green.
Just checked out a library book yesterday, Edible Wild Plants of the Carolinas. Could this site use a fruit recipe topic?
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I second miner’s lettuce. Very tasty, easy to cut multiple times, reseeds itself etc. I didn’t think it was very quick to bolt, doesn’t get too tall but definitely spreads out.
I also agree with Jeremiah that chickweed is tasty.
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I’ve tried perennial arugula, but the leaves are very fine and not much substance to them compared to regular arugula. My tree collards are a healthy, vigorous patch with a nice purplish color but they don’t do much for me in terms of flavor. I started some Dietrich’s broccoli raab last year that I really liked the flavor of raw, but the leaves are fairly rough. It reseeded and I see I have a small patch coming in where the chickens can’t get to and look forward to trying more of it.
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I guess it’s not exactly “alternative,” though it is an interesting “twofer” hybrid----but has anyone here tried “Purple Peacock” broccoli/kale? I thought it looked potentially useful so ordered some seed.
Edit: Inspired by this thread, I’ve also decided to start a patch of Good-King-Henry, and finally started my “Kaleidoscopic Perennial” kale grex seed; I got it last year, but sort of forgot about it in the freezer.
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Make sure you’ve got some confidence in what you’ve got. “Hosta” is a bit of a blanket term that includes a lot of things that may not be edible, at least in the same ways.
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@Mtncj I’ve read multiple times that all hostas are edible, although some may be more bitter or may contain higher concentrations of saponins. https://plantaddicts.com/are-hostas-edible/ If you are referring to other plants, not in the same genius, then I don’t know… It may be regional? In some regions, people may call a certain plant by another name…
Apparently, Japanese people call this vegetable YUKI URUI. I think people mostly eat them as long blanched shoots (protected from light).
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I’ve never encountered any plant being referred to as hosta other than those of the genus Hosta. Which plants outside the genus have you seen referred to as “hostas”?
I like Hosta as a cooked veggie cause it’s thick enough to maintain some notable texture when cooked.
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Why not real easy greens like lambs quarter?
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It may just be a labeling thing combined with expanded cultivars available, but multiple outlets in this region were labeling things I’ve called Hostas for years as something else (possibly just more specific varietals) and labeling plants I’d never seen before as Hostas. I know there are lots of different ones. If the label gives you the genus as Hosta, (or you know your plants well enough) you’re probably good.
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There is a lot of work being done to push morphological variations of Hosta cultivars to new extremes. Most notable are extremely narrow or wavy leaf forms as well as red leaf petioles with some newer releases showing red pigment beginning to bleed into the actual leaves. To my knowledge this is all being done by selecting and recombining traits and mutations naturally found in the Hosta gene pool.
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That tracks with a lot of what I saw shelved last year. Some of it looked rather foreign, though.
I do have a couple of red/white varietals I potted last year and will choose permanent spots for this year when they prove survival. I need to sample some of the ones that were already established.
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It takes forever and a day to pick enough leaves for a dish for 1 person. Otherwise it i s great tasting and easy to grow
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I agree with @poncirusguy. I have been letting lambsquarters grow in my garden for the past few years and they are indeed very time consuming to harvest since the leaves are rather small. Young stalks can be picked and eaten too, but they get too tough and fibrous fairly quickly. They are also difficult to get rid of if you let them go to seed since they produce a lot of seeds that will come up each year and make weeding them out a nuisance.
That said, they are a very nutritious and tasty green that is worth growing if you don’t mind the time and effort to harvest them and keep them under control. Taste is similar to spinach but more tender. They have a high mineral content (noticeable mineral salts cover the top leaves that give them a powdery white or purple color) and are heavy feeders that like nitrogen rich soil. Cooking them is very similar to spinach as well since they cook down quite a bit and have a similar look, taste, and texture (thought they sometimes have a bit of grittiness to them from the mineral salts that they accumulate).
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In fertile soil lambs quarters can be VERY productive to the point where harvesting a large quantity is easy. The only problem is that with that vigorous growth they end up becoming very attractive to aphids which negates the easy harvest by the added labor of washing all the aphids off. I really like lambs quarters as a cooked green though and it keeps a vibrant green color when cooked.
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