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Post by richardw on Jan 1, 2016 12:55:44 GMT -5
As mentioned by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) in another thread lathyrus tuberosus sweet pea grows edible roots. There are at least three different colours growing wild on the sides of the road not far from here, given they are an extremely drought hardy plant which seems to be about the only non-irrigated plant growing around here at the moment that i would imagine if grown in a well watered garden situation they would respond well. Anyone have experience growing lathyrus tuberosus - taste - growing tips - suitable varieties - etc - etc..... |
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Post by billw on Jan 1, 2016 15:47:28 GMT -5
Yeah, it tastes really good, raw or cooked. Tubers are very small and yields are poor, so if you can put together enough to bother cooking it, you're doing very well. Apparently some of them, in some conditions, will produce tubers up to 4cm. Mine produce more like 1cm at best with the very rare 2cm giant.
There are a couple of informative posts on Radix, as I recall.
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Post by richardw on Jan 1, 2016 16:31:54 GMT -5
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Post by orflo on Jan 2, 2016 14:40:57 GMT -5
I can have quite 'big' tubers, up to 8 cms long, and very tasty...but I have to dig them before the mice find them, they also know what's tasty...Shall I send you some seeds Richard? They're easy to grow , return every year, and have nice edible flowers as well
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Post by richardw on Jan 2, 2016 18:22:54 GMT -5
Thanks Frank, ive gone looking for seed here in NZ but i cant seem to find any.
8cm long is a good size, so how per plant would you get.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 2, 2016 22:54:45 GMT -5
I think that the ornamental sweet pea is quite toxic. Too bad, it is very pretty, and impossible to kill.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 3, 2016 1:50:36 GMT -5
It's sort of a relative scale thing. At the extreme end of the spectrum, you have things like L. sativus(grasspea, chickling vetch, chicheuna) which are safe enough to be usable as a pulse crop (though not a day to day one, at least not for extended periods)
There are one or two other species, like alphaca have seeds you can get away with eating (though in even smaller quantities, since they have not been bred and selected as much for low toxin varieties)
But yes, by and large, the seeds of plants in the Lathyrus genus are not things you would want to put in your mouth
By that same token I'm a little dubious about the claim in one of the above articles that the flowers of one of the species mentioned are good to eat. I'm confident that one or two probably wouldn't do one much harm (though by and large flowers are not all that nutritionally dense as compared to leaves or roots) but I'm not sure that an unqualified eat all you want" stance is all that smart.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 3, 2016 12:47:38 GMT -5
I wonder if some Lathyrus species could be made into good crops with some breeding work. There is definitely a lot of vigor and yield potential in some of them. Legumes that are "sort of" toxic always scare me off. It is funny that so many of our crop plants have close relatives that are deadly. Carrots and poison hemlock, tomatoes and nightshade, etc. I don't think the aster family has any really toxic things, but maybe I have just not heard of them!
I was told not to plant sweet peas and garden peas in the same garden if there are children involved, because they might not realize the difference.
On a related note, Sweet Peas need to have the pods picked off so they keep blooming. One of my landscape customers has a fence lined with them, and the pod picking is a huge job. And in a few days they have grown a whole new batch.
An edible sweet pea; that would be a really great thing. They come back every year and out compete weeds.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 3, 2016 14:21:27 GMT -5
Well, with L. sativus, there already pretty close. There are bred varieties out there whose ODAP and BAPN levels are so low that the body can flush them out completely, making the risk of lathriysm (the problem with grasspeas, let them make up 60%+ of your diet for a few months (which is often what happens, as grasspea's extreme drought tolerance makes it a pretty common famine/poverty food in the third world) and you can wind up with a twisted back and permanent lower paralysis.) more or less zero.
The problem is that, quite often the chemicals that make a plant hardy and the chemicals that make it poisonous are the same ones so the less of the latter you get, the less of the former you have.
They're also often the same compounds that give the plants their colors, so if your goal is to have an edible sweet pea that was as colorful and ornamental as the conventional one, you'd probably be SOL. A few years ago I got my hands on a quantity of bags of Chicheuna (large seeded eating grasspeas commonly grown in places like Italy and Spain.) that were a tad less heavily bred than is the industry norm so that, while the majority of seeds WERE the normal white to pale tan that the eating kind usually is, there were still a fair number of ones that had heavy mottling or were darker, including a few all the way down at the brick red/dark grey end of the spectrum. The seeds were in really bad shape (the machine that had poured them into the bags for sale as food had badly damaged a LOT of them) so germination was not great. Most of those that did grow made no flowers. But of the few that got that far, I could not help but notice that, the darker (and therefore more likely to be high in bad stuff) the seed, the more color the flowers had (white's made dead white flowers, medium tans mostly white with a touch of pink and purple.) This spring I will probably be planting a handful of tiny grasspea seed I combed out of some bags of lentils (which pleased me, the little one grows a lot faster so unlike the big one I should get seed back.) But by definition they'll be treated as ornamental (not the least reason being that the pods will be too small to be worth picking either.)
You'll find a similar situation in things like the Lablab bean, or as it is commonly known in this country, the Hyacinth bean (that vine with the purple flowers and big purple pods some people like to put in their gardens.) Those purple ones are very pretty and you can eat the pods immature, but by and large if you are after a type where you can eat the dry mature seed as a pulse (the way a lot of African and Asian cultures do, you'll probably wind up with a type with white seeds (and consequently white flowers and green pods) (and if you live somewhere where you need the colored seeded version for the anti pest properties, you need to learn to leach the seeds before eating them.)
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Mar 10, 2017 23:26:38 GMT -5
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lu
gopher
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Post by lu on Jul 23, 2023 6:17:06 GMT -5
Yeah, it tastes really good, raw or cooked. Tubers are very small and yields are poor, so if you can put together enough to bother cooking it, you're doing very well. Apparently some of them, in some conditions, will produce tubers up to 4cm. Mine produce more like 1cm at best with the very rare 2cm giant. There are a couple of informative posts on Radix, as I recall. |
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lu
gopher
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Post by lu on Jul 23, 2023 6:23:25 GMT -5
About eadable flowers of this plant.
Is it really eadable and smb use in his kitchen often( every day in season kookin 10 pic in salad ,ax examle )?
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