One of the easiest seed to save is cress /karse (Lepidium sativum). You can grow a lot of seed in a small space, it dries well on the plants and is easy to process, rubbing the seed pods between your fingers in a bowl and then blowing the chaff away outside. I sprout the seed inside during winter and also sow it outside in spring to harvest the young plants for salads and lunch. leaving a few to grow big for seed.
Category Archives: Seed sprouts
Perennial Myrrhis Sprouts
Sweet cicely (spansk kjørvel) is considered to be one of the worst invasive plants here and is now banned for sale and we don’t offer it through the Norwegian Seed Savers catalogue / yearbook. However, it’s one of the best edible perennials. It’s never spread in my garden as I’ve always eaten it, the best way to stop it spreading. In particular, eating the delicious flowers (in salads) and immature seeds (the best candy for kids) and collecting the mature seeds for winter sprouting, the best sprouts for winter stir-fries (sweet anise taste and a good size).
This year, I sowed the large seeds in a large pot and stratified outside for a couple of months before moving into the cellar where the temperature is warmer than usual this winter and there was mass germination a couple of weeks ago. A few will be used in a chinese style stir-fry tonight!
Eat your invasives!
Cut and come again peas
Save your own pea seed and sprout your own in winter indoors, some of these used for a stir-fry dish last night! If sown in soil, they can be cut to come again once or sometimes twice!
Extreme winter record salad
Proof one more time that north is best for growing a diversity of tasty salad greens ;) Presenting (and claiming) my new world winter salad diversity record, a salad with over 140 ingredients all harvested locally without using any additional energy than is available in my house and cellar (no greenhouse; no freezer; no fermenting involved and only dried fruit and seed used apart from fresh vegetables!). Despite the snow cover I was able to harvest some 20-30 edibles outside. More on how this can be done will be the subject of a separate post!
The salad was presented and eagerly devoured by those who had bought tickets for the Gourmet Cinema event on 9th March 2017 as part of the Trondheim Kosmorama Film Festival! It went so quickly, I didn’t even get a taste myself!
The film was followed by a Food talk with a panel including the film’s director Michael Schwarz, the head chef at Credo Heidi Bjerkan, myself and Carl Erik Nielsen Østlund, the owner of the biodynamic organic farm that supplies much of the food to Credo, moderated by Yoshi!
http://kosmorama.no/en/2016/12/gourmet-cinema-in-defense-of-food
As Michael Pollan concludes in the film:
Eat Food, Not too much and (as many as possible) mostly vegetables!
The day before, I had prepared a 105 ingredient salad for the festival dinner at Credo restaurant (http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=10184). While preparing that salad, I made a second salad with the same 105 ingredients…and then added almost 40 additional ingredients that I hadn’t had time to harvest the day before!
Kosmorama/ Credo diversity dinner #1
Last night (8th March 2017) was the first of two events I had been asked to take part in celebrating the diversity of vegetables that our area has on offer (or could have on offer) even in winter! The Trondheim Kosmorama international film festival are showing two films related to food. Last night, the film “NOMA: My perfect storm” was shown and around 40 people also bought tickets to a fantastic 10-15 course, 4 hour meal (I lost count) at Trondheim’s NOMA: Credo!
I supplied a number of vegetables for the dinner and these are shown here, several being served for the first time in Norway :)
