GranolaBox

Food recognition 101: The Backyard

Earlier this week before my surgery one of my last two-handed tasks was to make a very crude map of our small plot of land. This is the time of year when we need to order food bearing trees to plant throughout the yard. But before we ordered trees, we had to have a good idea of what kind of space we have to work with.

So one of the first things we did was to look at our land very carefully from front to back assessing all the different plant forms we have throughout the yard. As it turns out there were only four plants in our yard that are actually edible.

First there’s a small clump of raspberries the back yard that I was very close to digging out last year. I thought they were ugly. That’s one big change in my gardening thinking. It’s not about pretty or ugly anymore… it’s all about edible.

There’s also a couple of Barberry bushes in front, but I have no idea what Barberries taste like.

The first thing I noticed that was edible was a clump of Japanese knotweed along the creek that I tried in vain to rip up last year but failed when it quickly got ahead of me. I was all excited to have the Japanese knotweed in our front yard and he thought it would be exciting news for the queen of my universe. But as it turns out we don’t want the knotweed. It spreads like wildfire on to all the surrounding vegetation. Our village just put in a nature trail connecting two different parks and within a couple months and was almost completely grown over with knotweed.

Japanese knotweed has about a three-week window of tastiness, during which time it’s supposed to taste like rhubarb into supposed to be phenomenal in pies. After that it just spreads like the plague through everything. There’s so much of it around in it so easily harvested that there’s no need to infest our yard with it.

Another thing that there’s plenty of around that grows even in winter and the shady part of our yard is chives. As a matter of fact as we were doing our lawn assessment our cat Chaplin was munching happily on some wild chives, almost daring us to pull them out.