My zoom talk “A Virtual Edimentals Walk Around Burnley Gardens” in Melbourne, Australia was recorded and is now available https://youtu.be/rHX3q3Dng4k I based the talk on Edimentals that can be grown in Melbourne, based on plant lists for Burnley Gardens and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne! After the talk, Sam Taylor and his team made a salad from plants growing in the garden! See pictures below. Thanks for inviting me, it was fun to put this together, and thanks for allowing me to put the recording of this unique talk up on my youtube channel!
Kurrajong is an Australian tree, Brachychiton populneus, which along with other species of the genus make interesting house plants due to their interesting leaves. Kurrajong leaves resemble poplar leaves as the epithet populneus suggests. It’s a common tree of sandy plains in Eastern Australia. The seeds are remarkably nutritious and were popular Aborigine tucker (wild gathered food). It is unlikely I will ever be able to harvest seed of this tree in the Malvaceae (mallow family), but Rowan White on the Radix Root Crops FB group reminded me that the swollen roots of young trees could also be eaten. My tree wasn’t exactly young at 9 years (seed propagated along with Brachychiton acerifolius), when I first decided to have a go in 2012, at the same time as I moved it to a bigger pot…
Brachychiton acerifolius (Illawarra flame tree) is another beautiful tree growing in my living room forest garden….making an attempt to escape…it’s been suggested I make a hole in the ceiling so that it can grow on up into my bedroom where it could flower and produce nuts that I could harvest from bed ;) (this tree is often planted as an ornamental street tree in the tropics, see https://tinyurl.com/yaqnnm65)
Brachychiton acerifolius leaves
There were 3 young roots worth trying so I harvested them and baked them in their skins together with potatoes. They seem to need a bit longer than potatoes. The skins peeled easily off after baking and they were crispy with a good mild taste. If you have a ready supply of seed, they can be grown and harvested a bit like carrots when quite young!
Kurrajong doesn’t often if ever experience snow, here’s my plant with earth removed (December 2012)
The small young roots were harvested
Roots removed, hope it doesn’t kill my tree (it didn’t!)
Ready for baking
After 45 minutes in the oven
They peeled easily
Crispy non-fibrous roots
Kurrajong leaf
Kurrajong leaf
This spring the tree died (at 15 years old) with no sign of life in the above ground parts, but when disposing of the plant I noticed that the young roots looked healthy, so I harvested them and repotted the remainder of the root to see if it might resprout and after several weeks in the window sill it now has fresh leaves, so not dead after all!
I didn’t get round to eat the young roots…they were left inside for a month and looked withered and inedible, but cutting in to one it looked good inside and indeed it was tasty and almost free from fibre….so we ate it in a stir-fry dish last night!
Yam daisy or murnong (Microseris lanceolata) from Australia, harvest outside in Malvik on 12th November 2011. I’ve had lower yields of other crops! Needs a bit of selection, but not an impossible project I think!
This post is inspired by this video about aboriginal Yam daisy agriculture, introduction of livestock by the Europeans largely destroyed this sustainable agriculture… https://www.farmingsecrets.com/growing-yam-daisies-australias-earliest-agriculture
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
