Identify five different root vegetables that can grow in your area.
In the produce section of your grocery store, find out how many different root vegetables are available. Are any of the vegetables in the store on your list? Where were they grown?
Tracking the food miles of produce from the grocery store was tricky. The minimally packaged produce would have less of an impact on the landfill but also came with few specifics about where it was grown. The USDA requires a COOL (country of origin label) but that could mean 0 miles or 2,600 miles away if it was grown in Hawaii. Produce grown close to the Mexican border might be fewer food miles than something grown on the northern boundary of my own state.
I am hopeful that initiatives like The Produce Traceability Initiative will provide more detail. It looks like a few local grocers are participating. I sent a note to my own favored grocer to consider greater source transparency.
[Intermediate] Grow two different root vegetables in your garden or in planters. Cook a meal for your family with each. • Research if there are any native root vegetables that grow in your area. If there are, where would you find them growing?
Sweet potato/yam- we have battling with invasive morning glory on this property for 15 years. We visited Ron Finley's "gangsta" garden and he pulled a sweet potato the size of my head out of the sidewalk median which he claimed he was only watering using olla pots. Incredible. Inspired by that memory, and subsequently learning sweet potato is in the same family as our invasive glory, I started tucking a few forgotten grocery store tubers into the orchard as I went about my business. They really took hold this year. We have been frying them for sweet potato fries for our young cultivator.
Radishes- I like to interplant the little red ones with seeds that take a long time to sprout because they remind me to keep watering and monitoring the area hopefully. We've scattered daikon seeds, hoping to get a more substantial yield as our tastes have strafed toward Asian dishes, and it seems like the new mulched potato-bean rows in the front yard were the spot, judging by this huge one that popped up. The other two grew in and around a wine barrel planter in the veggie area that the orchard is slowly reclaiming.
Foraging- root veggies aren't particularly common forage compared to greens, fruits, and seeds, but our friend, Professor Kent lists a few in his book (Foraging Southern California)
Chicory - July-Nov is when the roots are most energy-packed. It grows in disturbed areas (like its relative the dandelion). Focusing on the young leaves seems easier and more appetizing to me, but if I were cutting back on caffeine, I could be persuaded to quaff the roasted roots as a coffee alternative.
Nut Grass (Yellow & Purple) - sweetest in late spring but harvested year round. Found in urban moist, shady landscapes. Best roasted but can be eaten raw. Can be ground into flour. Seeds are also edible.
Shepherd's Purse - late spring is best for starchy roots. Leaves, seeds and flowers are also edible. It grows close to people in moderately deep, slightly acidic, disturbed soils.
Sourgrass - Follows people and is available year-round. Roots can be eaten raw but taste better boiled or cooked. From my experience, there is usually an abundance of more easy to harvest greens that I would work with before falling back to the tubers.
Sword fern- shady moist canyons and crevices in the foothills, or as house plants. These were eaten as a famine food by indigenous peoples. You can eat them raw or treat them like watery potatoes.
Bull thistle- can tolerate salty soils and high elevations. Look for it in areas by agricultural waterways. The roots may require a lot of digging as they grow up to a foot under the soil and grow straight down. Boil for 20 minutes and then sautee with butter and spices. Pioneers considered this a famine food.
Cattail- frequently cited as an edible root vegetable available year-round. It grows in slow-moving fresh water and it can tolerate some salt, so I would look for it along the water ways that flow out to the ocean.
[Advanced] Grow three more root vegetables in your garden or in planters. Research the best way to store some of them (methods may be different, depending on the veggie) and store as much of your bounty as you can for later use. Now we know why our ancestors had root cellars! [Advanced]
We were studying the Irish Famine and working on the potato head badge, so I dropped a couple pounds of organic bagged grocery potatoes (goldens/reds/purples) in the perimeter of mulch I've been wheelbarrowing out to the front yard. I believed these varieties to be the faster surface-level sprawlers rather than the russets that I could drop in a shallow grave in a deep bucket and continue to bury their leaves with fill as they grow for extra yield. Incidentally, my russet deep patch got completely decimated by roly polies, so we'll chalk that one up as a fail. "You're not going to use my drill auger to bury them deeper?" Hubby queried on the smooth skinned fun sized nuggets bound for the mulch perimeter. "Nope, Ruth Stout and Kevin from the Epic Gardening channel say they just drop them in the ground and cover them with mulch. Same yield less effort." A few days later, my confidence wavered, there were lots of divots in the mulch rows. ChatGPT suspected possums, raccoons, or skunks since the cat colony should have spooked rats. But miraculously, many have sprouted to the point of having a low-slung hedge around the front yard which I had to warn the landscape service not to weed whack.
Ginger comes from so far away! I stuck what the recipe didn't call for in a cast iron pot with failing enamel that it would be prohibitive to repair. Balanced on the dryer with a very sunny aspect, it is growing great. I haven't worked up the courage to try to harvest any yet though.
Why do kid gardens always suggest carrots? Sure, most kids will eat them, but carrots take FOREVER to germinate. We are trying these container-friendly ones in a new vertical planter system (green stalk). This is the biggest we've been able to get them, largely because they can't be trampled here and the easy hand watering with salad material in other growing pockets of this high-traffic "zone 0" area means they don't dry out. To be continued!
Every year we grow onion sets from Dixondale. I so badly want to grow a few lunkers like a Maui or Alisa Craig varieties I see at our farmer's market but I think our latitude is a few clicks too far south to be able to grow long day onions. The fact that these are sold in the farmer's market just drives home how many extra food miles and microclimates even "local" produce travels through to get to us.
Storage:
This feels like a trick question since our neck of the desert doesn't have a frost date. The best way to "store" many of these is to succession plant them and store them in the ground for a growing season that ends only when we are ready to use them. We do have a rare house with a root cellar though. Ours is running about 5 degrees F cooler than our kitchen, so yeah, things would theoretically keep down there for longer, but there is no way it is consistently in a "good temp" range for storing veg of 32-60 degrees F. Also on the cons side, it is harder to remember and continuously visually inspect them when they're out of the way down there for signs that their shelf life is numbered.
It seems like the general guidance is that (1) if there are greens attached, detach them so that keeping them alive doesn't sap your root (2) avoid washing the veg until you are ready to cook it (3) store it in a cool place. Some things you can float in water in the fridge to extend shelf life (carrots, radishes).
Onions- We still supplementally buy these in the store so I wouldn't say we have this figured out. Dixondale planting charts say the varieties that will grow in our area are extra sweet and thus have shorter shelf lives. We follow all the guidance about letting them cure in open air for a couple days before bringing them in for storage. I try to braid them because this makes it easier to visually inspect them and rogue out any that are going soft. It also allows us to store them attractively in higher-traffic places and farther away from potatoes which may shorten their storage life. But they are kind of messy to store this way, so be ready with the broom. If more than I can use start going soft, there are plenty of great InstantPot camelized onion recipes that shrink down their storage footprint. I haven't sorted out how to shelf-stable can the recipe as it seems to fly out the refrigerator for pizza sauce, French onion soup and whatnot faster than I can whip up another batch.
Garlic- We have had success braiding these. We've also had success roasting whole heads in olive oil and storing in the freezer in olive oil since many dishes that call for one call for the other. You might need a dedicated ice cube tray if you experiment in that direction though. (see onions)
Potatoes- The plan for when this batch is ready is to store the bulk of them in the basement (to reduce light and onion exposure). We'll need to experiment more with whether open racks in the dark basement make it easier to visually inspect or if paper bags win out for keeping things dark enough to deter sprouting prematurely. The family favors these as french fries and mashed potatoes, so it might make sense to prep these in quantity for those dishes and stash them in the freezer. If we run out of freezer space, MJF has several potato-forward backpacker meals I might taste test and experiment with copycatting.
Radishes- We don't grow or eat these in quantity to justify storing. If we did, these seem like a good candidate for pickling experiments.
Beets- See radishes. I have found canned beets are more convenient and cheaper to work with than fresh, so if I land on an addictive diy beet chip recipe, I would probably look into batch freezing or canning these.
Carrots- We don't need to store carrots, we need to grow them faster and in quantity. I have read that similar to beets, you can layer them in a bucket with sand in the interstices.
