Skirret in Australia

Skirret (Sium Sisarum) is the ultimate perennial vegetable.  As far as I am concerned skirret is the perfect vegetable for organic gardeners, permaculture gardeners, people who are into increasing self-sufficiency, people who are increasing their food security, and people with fussy children.   That’s right, even fussy kids will eat skirret.

Skirret has a long history as a vegetable, it has been blessed with the highest recommendation and cursed with the lowest popularity of any of the root crops.  It grows wild across Asia, and has been well established across Europe.  Skirret may have made its first documented appearance in a 1322 list of seeds maintained by the gardener for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Palace, which included a penny's worth of skirret in a 1321 to 1322 inventory.  We don't know how long it was used as a vegetable prior to this, it is believed that skirret grew along damp riversides and ditches and was easily harvested for free, so didn't need to be bought and sold.  It is likely that skirret was grown and eaten long before this but simply not recorded.

People keep telling me that there is no skirret in Australia, but I grow skirret, I sell skirret, and eat skirret.  I have given skirret to some people who now also sell it.  So skirret is slowly becoming less rare in Australia.  Hopefully one day I will see skirret for sale at a farmer's market.

I adore skirret, I have grown it for a number of years now, have written a few posts on it to try and show other people how to grow it.  Skirret is the most delicious roast vegetable ever.  I have never eaten anything that even comes close to how great skirret tastes.  I like the taste normally, but frosts make it far sweeter.  I want to encourage more people to grow this remarkable vegetable.

Skirret next to 30 cm ruler for scale

Skirret next to 30 cm ruler for scale

Over the years I have given skirret to many people to try and am yet to meet someone who does not instantly love it.  Skirret is not an acquired taste, it is not something that people either love or hate, I have only seen unanimous agreement that people love to eat skirret.  People love skirret the first time they taste it.

Skirret has a long history as a vegetable, yet for some reason no serious breeding effort was ever put into it to make fatter roots.  This means that skirret is probably best described as semi-domesticated.  While this lack of breeding is a bad thing because it means that if I want to eat it I have to grow it myself, it is also good a good thing.  It means that the traits that make skirret perfect for home growers have not been bred out in favour of traits that are suitable to mechanical harvest, long distance transport, and months of cold storage.  As skirret is perfect for home gardeners, and it is so easy to grow, it is difficult to buy anywhere as the larger companies have little to gain by offering it or marketing it.

Skirret grows best in cool climates with plenty of water, lots of sun light and soil fertility.   While these are skirret’s preferred conditions it will grow and produce a crop under less than ideal conditions. 

I have grown skirret in incredibly hot climates, I have grown it overcrowded in a small pot, I have grown it shaded by taller things, I have grown it in infertile dry soils, and it always produces a crop.  The yield was significantly smaller, but it still produces when not grown under ideal situations.  Skirret survives hard frosts with no issues and crops well even under sort seasons.  I am told that removing skirret flowers will increase the yield but haven’t really noticed much difference.

Skirret produces many offsets once established

What is so great about skirret other than the taste?  Once it has grown past the tiny seedling stage where slugs and snails relish it, skirret has no real issues with pests or diseases.  While it survives in poor soil it prefers soils rich in organic matter.  Unlike many root vegetables that do poorly on highly fertile soil, skirret does not appear to produce leaves at the expense of roots.  This makes skirret perfect for organic gardeners as there are no pests to try to control and it is simple to fertilise with compost or aged manures and not worry if the nitrogen level is too high.

All parts of skirret are edible, the leaves are nutritious and can taste a bit like celery (but this varies from plant to plant), the seeds are meant to be edible but I haven’t bothered trying them and don't know how to eat them, and the roots are highly nutritious and utterly delicious.

All forms of livestock, poultry, alpacas, sheep, guinea pigs, etc seem to love to eat the leaves of skirret.  At this stage I have no intention of giving skirret roots to livestock but I assume they would eat them as they are high is sugars.  Once winter hits and the tops die off the dead stalks and leaves are useful as compost activators or can be left to quickly breakdown where they stand.

Skirret on left is a year old, on the right is grown from tiny offsets

When grown from seed skirret can germinate, produce a small crop, flower and set seed, and produce several offsets all in one year.  For a perennial vegetable this is pretty remarkable.

When grown from an offset skirret will produce a larger crop than seed grown, produce more flowers and produce a larger amount of seed, and produce more offsets in a year. 

If you do not harvest skirret and just leave the plant where it is, the following year the roots will be longer and fatter, it still has offsets that can be planted out, it also flowers and produces a lot of seed.   This means that if you don’t get around to harvesting skirret for some reason, or if you only harvest half of the roots, there is never any waste.   It also means that if you have space you can leave some skirret unharvested each year and get fatter roots the following winter.

The flowers of skirret are like any apiaceae flower in that they attract numerous types of pollinators and other beneficial insects such as parasitoid wasps.  Flowers are usually produces in such profusion for such a long amount of time that the benefits are long lived.   I find that leeks and other vegetables grown near skirret appear to grow larger and faster.  This may be due to skirret root exudates, or this may only be coincidence, I am not entirely certain.

Skirret plants produce rather dense clumps which shade and protect the soil, but they don’t seem to out compete anything that is tall, so they could be used as a living mulch when stacking with taller vegetables or climbers.   Skirret roots, like many plant roots, actively exude sugars, amino acids, and other compounds into the soil.  This combined with the number of roots they grow complements soil ecology and provides habitat for earth worms etc.

Being perennial, growing offsets, and self-seeding readily makes it simple to have enough skirret plants to share in a short amount of time.

All of this makes skirret perfect for permaculture gardeners.

Even this tiny skirret produced several offsets

Skirret is perfect for home gardeners, but not for large scale industrial farming, which is why skirret will never be tremendously popular.   Unlike carrots which only produce one large root, skirret produces many roots, some are reasonably thick while others are thin and not worth harvesting.  Any thin roots will fatten the following year so this is a trait that is well suited to home gardeners.  As skirret produce so many roots, only some are fat enough to be worth harvesting and the others are best for replanting, skirret is not suited to mechanical harvest.

Skirret roots do not store overly well once dug, this makes skirret useless for large scale industrial cropping as sending the roots thousands of miles across the country to landless consumers just doesn’t work.  For home gardeners this is of no consequence as we simply dig the roots as needed. Over winter the plants are dormant, I often dig and replant the same plant many times until I have harvested all of the suitable sized roots.

As skirret roots do not store very well they are best as a seasonable crop, you could probably harvest all year if you wanted but they are so much sweeter once some hard frosts have hit so I haven’t tried this.  I also don't know how they would taste in areas without a real winter. 

In Australia it is difficult to find skirret seeds or plants for sale.  I sell both skirret seed and I sell skirret offsets from improved plants through my for sale page.  If you have never eaten skirret you really don't know what you are missing.