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Post by billw on Feb 24, 2018 20:39:19 GMT -5
I just harvested my first crop of Chinese bugleweed and was fairly impressed by it. Trixtrax sent me a couple of rhizomes last year and they did really well. It is most commonly used in Chinese medicine, but also at least occasionally as an edible in China and Japan. I found it very productive and easy to grow. The tubers are much like the other tuberous mints, but a little more bitter, similar in flavor to rough bugleweed (L. asper). Not too bitter though - just at first chew. After that, it is pleasantly sweet. The tubers are a good size and the plants yielded about four pounds each. I probably should have harvested them in the fall, as they are already sprouting. It looks like they aren't super cold hardy, probably zone 7 or so. We had temps down into the low 20s last week and the sprouts on many of the rhizomes died back. Lycopus species use stachyose as their primary sugar, so I expect this will be a gassy vegetable if eaten in quantity.   |
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 25, 2018 14:31:02 GMT -5
Is it used fresh or dried in TCM, do you know?
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Post by billw on Feb 25, 2018 16:14:10 GMT -5
I know next to nothing about TCM. It appears that they use both the stems and leaves and dried rhizome for different things. The conditions that they are used for just read like nonsense to me. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycopus_lucidus |
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Post by khoomeizhi on Feb 25, 2018 18:10:14 GMT -5
Sign me up. Low attention, decent yield, probably repeat business from tcm people? I'll ask some doc friends how much they use it/what other names it might go by...
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Post by oxbowfarm on Feb 25, 2018 23:23:26 GMT -5
khoomeizhi the only problem is that TCM practitioners are kind of hard to access as a market. We recently joined a cooperative to try and grow and market certain TCM medicinal species, and it gets really complicated really fast. Its not like you can dry something and take it to the farmers market or whatever, or even put in on ebay or something. Most TCM medicinals are used with other species that are compiled by the practitioner into the specific formula. The problem is they are used to being able to buy the most of the stuff from the same source, even though the pharmacopeia of TCM runs the gamut of species from all kinds of different faraway places. So there is a tradition of the herbs being sold and then repurchased to and from a collating middleman who ends up having everything they need. So traditionally, the grower or gatherer sold the herb to the processor, who sold it to the middleman, who collected the massive variety of the pharmacopeia and then sold it to the practitioners. Thats a hard chain to break into and make money at it. I'm not advocating for or against TCM, and I've really loved the TCM medicinal species that we've tried. Putting small strips of my fields into heavy blooming perennials seems like a great thing for my farm ecologically, both for the insect ecology and for soil improvement and rotation purposes.
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Post by khoomeizhi on Feb 26, 2018 5:09:09 GMT -5
I hear that, oxbowfarm. In my area there is a fairly active community growing between practitioners and farmers, trying to get as much as possible from local sources. The herbalist community in general is very local-centric here, and while the tcm folks are (for the reason you mention) a bit farther behind the rest of the pack, they're being pretty intentional about arranging more local sourcing too.
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Post by rangardener on Feb 26, 2018 10:17:46 GMT -5
My favorite TCM plant info in English is the Medicinal Plant Images Database of Hong Kong Baptist University’s College of Chinese Medicine. To me, anything about TCM beyond plant info requires not only a different language, but probably a totally different system of everything. :-) libproject.hkbu.edu.hk/was40/detail?lang=en&channelid=1288&searchword=herb_id=D00275When I read online I saw mentioning of using young leaves and fresh rhizomes for pickling and making soup, but I have not seen good examples with detailed descriptions or illustrations. Sure hope to find out more. billw , is L. lucidus so much more productive than L. asper in your experience? Do you have experience regarding other Lycopus species of N. America or Pacific NW? I suspect that our native species can be used similarly for food. (As I saw Barstow’s examples of using Aralia californica used like Aralia cordata, udo, in Norway.) |
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Post by billw on Feb 26, 2018 15:03:05 GMT -5
L.lucidus has significantly larger tubers than the other Lycopus species that I grow, which are L. uniflorus and L. asper. It may not be a fair comparison because I started the other two plants from seed, while I started L. lucidus from rhizome. It may already have been selected for improved tuber size while the others are wild.
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