Crimson Flowered Broad Beans

I wrote a post on Broad Beans (Vicia faba) last year.  This year I grew a different variety of broad bean which I have wanted to grow for some time.  At first things seemed promising, they grew well, produced heaps of flowers and started to form many pods.

Then the ducks flew over the fence and ate most of the pods, broke most of the plants, ate most of the leaves, trampled everything that their little ducky feet could trample and generally destroyed things.  I was not overly impressed but some of the damaged plants went on to produce a small number of pods and seeds.  I still ended up with a lot more seeds than I planted so I count that as a win.

Crimson flowered broadbean starting to flower

I grew this particular type because someone sent me some seeds of a broad bean called 'crimson flowered' broadbean.  I had wanted to grow this type of broadbean for a while and was trying to decide between growing it and another one so it worked out well.  They did not send many seeds and I was not sure if we would move before the seeds were ripe so I only planted three.  These three seeds germinated and the plants grew strong.


History of Crimson Flowered Broadbeans

Crimson flowered broad beans are a very old variety of broadbean.  They were widely grown in the 1700s (it is mentioned in books from 1778 but probably grown prior that that) then almost went extinct as some of the newer varieties with longer pods became available.  Apparently they were thought to be extinct until 1978 when a lady called Rhoda Cutbush donated three or four of her precious seeds to the Heritage Seed Library.

Apparently Rhoda's father had received the original heirloom seeds from a cottage garden in 1912.  Rhoda grew up growing and eating these broadbeans, probably not realising that she was one of the last people to grow them.  Then in 1978 a crop failure wiped out all of Rhoda's plants.  She could not find anywhere to get new seeds from so she searched through her shed until she found an old tin which contained 3 or 4 seeds (there are discrepancies over the number).  Instead of planting the seeds Rhoda realised how important they were and decided to donate them.

What an amazing story of survival!  From there this crimson flowered broad bean has been saved from extinction and has been sent to seed savers and breeders across the world.

Crimson Flowered Broad Beans

What are crimson flowered broad beans like

They are a short and compact plant which rarely reaches over a meter tall, as they age they send up multiple stalks all with many flowers.  They grow and look much like any other broad bead plant, until the flowers begin to open.  The flowers are what sets this variety apart from many others.  They range from deep red to red/purple and look great, but it is their scent that is amazing.  I don't know if their flowers have a stronger scent than regular broad beans or if it is because they grow so many flowers, but I could smell them from outside the vegetable garden.  Considering that I only had three plants that is pretty impressive.

The pods, of which I did not get many as the ducks sabotaged them, were slightly smaller than the Aquadulce ones we grow.  I assume had the plants been allowed to produce a crop unharmed would have produced many small pods.  The pods have less seeds in them than the Aquadulce variety, only about 3 seeds per pod.  The seeds are slightly smaller and more green than Aquadulce.

I am told that they taste better than regular broad beans but certainly didn't get a chance to try these, as I don't really eat broadbeans this is purely academic and I have to use other people's advice.  People who grow them as a food crop tell me that their taste and productivity more than makes up for the smaller size of the pods.

As a green manure all broad beans are great, these are no exception.  Even though they do not grow too large they do sequester nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it available in the soil.  As they get older they grow more stems and become bushier, this ads to their use as green manure, compost activator or mulch.

Due to the flowers on this plant they can fit into an ornamental garden rather well.  The flowers not only look great and smell amazing but they are flowering intensely at a time when little else is colourful in the garden.  The flowers attract bees and feed them when little else is flowering.  I consider broad beans to be a great all round permaculture crop because they have so many uses.  Even though we don't eat them I grow them for their other uses.

Young Broad Bean starting to flower

Saving Seeds

If you plan to grow this type of broadbean please keep in mind that broad beans readily cross pollinate with other varieties of broad bean.  Clearly they will not cross pollinate with any other variety of bean, pea or anything else.  If you plan to grow and preserve this variety care must be taken to prevent crossing as they can and will cross at a large distance.  If your neighbour or even someone in the next block grows broad beans then it may well cross pollinate your plants so bagging or caging plants is the only real way to keep seed pure.  You must save a few more more pods from this plant as they produce so few seeds, this is simple enough to do.  I plan to do a larger growout next year and only save seeds from the largest pods to try and select for more seeds per pod.

If you plan to create your own new variety of broadbean this plant carries a few genes which no other varieties carry.  If I liked broad beans more and had time/space I would cross them with a long pod broad bean  and/or a purple seeded type and create a longer podded red flowered purple seeded broadbean.

A few places in Australia sell crimson flowered broad bean seed.  When I have enough seeds they are offered on my for sale page with a few other heirloom vegetable seeds or perennial vegetables.

True potato onion seeds and other perennial onions in Australia

True Potato Onion Seed

In 2013 some of my potato onions flowered.  It is the first time I have ever seen a potato onion flower so I was very excited, I wrote a little about it on a blog post called Potato onion seeds.  I planted about half of those seeds in Autumn and nothing germinated, I was more than a little disappointed but there was nothing I could do.

I planted the rest of the seeds in Spring and some of them have just begun to germinate.  I don't know how many will grow but at this stage it looks like only a small number.  I could not be more excited about this.  To make things even better, some of my original potato onions have begun to flower again this year!  This should hopefully give me some more seed to try and grow next year.  Hopefully they will flower more often so I can have seed grown potato onions to begin selecting for traits I want to see in them.

Tiny Potato Onion seedlings germinating

Once these seedlings grow a bit I will separate them and see what they turn into.  Apparently potato onions that are grown from seed exhibit a lot of variation.  I had many types of onion flower at the same time as these potato onions (potato onions, spring onions, everlasting onion, tree onions, several types of bulb onions) so whatever these seeds grow into each of them should be different from each other.  Fingers crossed something truly remarkable comes out of this lot.

Potato onion seedlings growing larger

Potato Onions flowering again

Potato onion seedlings - only the strong survived

Everlasting Onion Seed and Bulbils

Another perennial onion I grow are the amazing Everlasting onions.  They flower each year but never produce seeds.  They have been grown by many different people in many different climates for well over 30 years and have not set seed and do not produce top sets.  They rapidly split in half many times throughout the year so are simple to multiply without the need for seeds.

Everlasting onions flowering happily as usual

Last year one everlasting flower produced a bulbil, I planted this in a small 10cm pot and kind of forgot about it.  That one bulbil has split into 7 small plants over the year and they are now flowering.  That is pretty remarkable considering how little space is in that small pot.  Time will tell if this will be more inclined to produce topsets or if it was just a once off.  Topsets are fun so I would like this to happen more often.  If not the tree onions are flowering at the moment and they produce a lot of topsets.

Everlasting onions grown from one bulbil - starting to flower

Last year from several hundred flower heads my everlasting onions actually produced some viable seeds.  I planted most of the seeds and ended up with 7 seedlings.  So far I can not see a lot of variation between the seedlings which I find rather odd.  Some are slightly larger than others, some are slightly brown whereas others are slightly red, but this happens throughout the year with regular everlasting onions so is nothing different.  They are still very small so perhaps I will notice differences as they grow, or perhaps they will be very similar to the parent, only time will tell.  As mentioned above a lot of alliums were flowering at the same time so I would have expected them to cross a little and result in some unique perennial onions.

Everlasting onion seedlings, I have since planted them into separate pots

Babington's Leek (Allium ampeloprasum var. babingtonii)

One of the perennial leeks I grow is Babington's leek, I should write a blog post about them but probably wont for a while.  I am not aware of anyhere in Australia that currently sells Babington's leek so if I ever have enough I plan to sell them so that more people can grow and experience these amazing plants.  They are a kind of wild leek that has been semi-domesticated, when it flowers it grows tiny bulbils on the flower head instead of flowers, kind of like the leek version of tree onions.

I heard of Babington's leek years ago and tried to track down some to grow.  One place had them for sale for more than I was willing to pay, but I contacted them anyway and they had sold out.  That place stopped selling plants altogether shortly after.  I emailed them and asked if I could get in touch with their supplier and was told no.  They believed that this variety of leek had died out in Australia completely and they wished me luck in finding any.

Babington's leek

As luck would have it some kind person traded some of my things for a few tiny Babington's leek plants.  I planted them in 3 different places to help protect against disaster.  They grew slowly for me, then died down over the heat of summer.  I hoped they had died down to bulbs but was not overly confident that they were coming back as they were posted at an inconvenient time for them.

When the weather cooled and the plants began to grow I had increased my stock from 5 tiny plants to 6 plants which ranged in size from tiny to reasonably large.  I had hoped that more would have grown from the roots, but that was not to be this year.  I am told that they will divide a bit each time they die down and many people increase their numbers in this way.  I am assuming that mine did not increase in number much as they were posted late in their season so they put their energy into establishing rather than dividing.

This year one of the plants is beginning to send up a flower stalk.  I have told the kids not to go near this plant and am concerned that they may remove it or damage it and I will have to wait another year to see what happens next.  Regardless, I have at least one plant of flowering size and it should flower each year from here on.  I am guessing that if all goes well the other plants will be flowering size next year as each of them is now larger than the ones I started with.

Not a great picture of Babington's leek starting to flower

I do not know how many bulbils to expect from one flower stalk.  I know of no one here who has grown these and have to rely on the internet for information.  Some internet sites say three of four large bulbils will be produced, others say a few dozen, while others say several hundred tiny bulbils.  I have no option but to wait and see.  I find all of this to be very exciting.  Judging by the size of the flower I am guessing not many bulbils will be produced this year, next year the plant may be larger and produce more.


Onion Chives (Allium schoenoprasum)

I don't have a lot to say about these little guys.  They are nothing special, they are not even a special type of onion chives, but I like them.  They die down to tiny bulbs each winter and grow again when the weather warms up a little.  Apparently they are the smallest species of edible onions.  I would like more of them so am letting some of them flower in the hope of either collecting the seeds or just letting the seeds fall and grow by themselves.

Chives starting to flower

Spring onions (Allium fistulosum)

Spring onions are, in my opinion, the poor cousin of the everlasting onion.  They are edible, useful, hardy and perennial so are not without their charm.  I had some plants at our previous house that were 3 or so years old.  Prior to moving here I saved their seed to bring with us.  I planted them during the first few weeks after we moved in and they have been growing ever since.  I do not have the heart to kill them as they are perennial and require very little looking after, so they have stayed where they are not doing too much.  They produce viable seed each year, I used to collect the seed but recently have not bothered as everlasting onions are far superior.

Spring onions are perennial onions, we used to eat their leaves and white shanks.  The problem is that their leaves get too thick and coarse after their first year and I do not know how to fix that other than planting new seed each year and killing the parent stock.  I have cut some to the ground, when they sprout they are think again.

Everlasting onions have far thinner foliage and it is never course.  Spring onions do not have the ability to produce bulbs whereas everlasting onions die to bulbs each year if I want them to and will keep growing if I water them a lot over summer.

Tree onions are an interspecific hybrid between spring onions and bulb onions that was made accidentally hundreds of years ago.  I have often thought of trying to recreate tree onions with better parents but I doubt I will ever try to do that as I have a lot of other, more deserving things going on in the vegetable garden.

Spring Onions flowering - were almost 4 years old

Giant Russian Garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum)

This is great stuff.  Botanically it is a type of perennial leek, but they grow a massive garlic that is mild in taste.  Apparently this can grow in more tropical places where regular garlic can not.

Many people say that they can not produce seed but this is not true, each year mine produce a tiny amount of seed which grows into new plants.  The seed seems to grow true to type even when there are other types of leek flowering at the same time.

Russian Garlic almost ready to flower and die down

At the moment my plants are looking shabby as they are almost ready to flower, after they have done so they will die down to bulbs.  This normally happens around Christmas/New Year.  I will dig them up after this and have them for sale again, digging them up now does not go so well for them.

Some people complain that Giant Russian garlic is too mild.  I have found that if I plant them early and they grow through some frost the taste is a lot more intense.  Apparently putting them in the fridge a few weeks prior to planting can have the same result if they are grown in frost free areas.

I have successfully (and accidentally) stored the bulbs for over 18 months before we moved here.  I stored the cloves somewhere and forgot about them, by the time I noticed them it was too late to plant and I had no more garden space so I waited for the following year.  From those, 100% grew and the plants were indistinguishable from the fresh ones.  While this is far from ideal, it shows how easy these things are to grow.

One single giant Russian garlic clove, they do get a lot larger than this in good years

Perennial onions for sale in Australia

If you are interested in growing some of these I do sell everlasting onions, tree onions, perennial leeks, giant Russian garlic, garlic chives, two types of potato onions and a bunch of other perennial vegetables (and some heirloom vegetable seed and some herb plants) on my for sale page.  When I have enough I plan to also offer Babington's leeks but that will have to wait for at least a few months to see what happens with this flower.  If the potato onion seedlings or the everlasting onion seedlings end up as anything remarkable I will sell them too, but I dare say that is a while off as I would like to grow them out for a few seasons to see how they perform and evaluate if they are worth keeping.

Yacon Water Kefir

I have had milk kefir grains for some time now, the kids love it, I like it but find it a bit too sour to drink by itself, and Tracey dislikes the taste of it.  Kefir is good for you so I wanted to try water kefir.  Perhaps that would be a way for the kids to get more of the kefir goodness into their diet.

Recently we obtained some water kefir grains.  Water kefir is different from milk kefir, it is still very good for you though.  The younger kids do not like water kefir all that much (mostly because it is a bit bubbly), Igloo loves it, I love it and Tracey thinks it is ok. 

Kefir
Both types of kefir contain live and beneficial probiotics.  Basically they consist of "good" bacteria, yeasts and other microbes. These good microbes are eaten by you and some will colonise in your digestive tract and continue to provide you with benefits long after you have finished consuming the kefir.  There are many recipes for water kefir on the internet but we have been mostly following the one that came with the grains.

Yacon
Yacon contains inulin and other sugars which are not digestible by humans.  Yacon is considered a prebiotic, this means that it contains things that feed the good bacteria etc in your digestive system which help to keep you healthy.  Yacon tubers also taste great, it is a vegetable that is eaten like a fruit and is loved by kids.  Yacon is my favourite vegetable.

Kefir & Yacon?
If water kefir contains probiotics, and yacon contains prebiotics which feed the probiotics, then it made me wonder if I could culture water kefir on yacon and leave out all of the other things.  After internet searching I found many people who claimed water kefir flourished when using yacon syrup instead of sugar.  Some people culture water kefir only on water and sugar, many of these people were the ones saying that the yacon syrup was great.

The only problem is that I do not have access to yacon syrup, I grow yacon plants and have access to the delicious yacon roots.  I do not know how to make the syrup and I do not intend to find out, I certainly have no intention of ever buying yacon syrup!  Nowhere on the internet seems to mention anything about yacon root (which I grow) being used in water kefir.  There is no one saying that they have tried this and failed or succeeded, someone needs to try this and let people know if it works or not.  That is why I am writing this post.

Yacon kefir - all the bubbles are gone because I carried the jar outside to take a picture

This is almost certainly not the best way to do this, but it is my first attempt so I will write what I did, and what I think should be done differently to make it better.  At some point in the future I may write another post and say what I changed and how it worked (or did not work).


Yacon Water Kefir

Ingredients:
1 small peeled yacon root (about the size of my thumb, perhaps a bit larger)
1 small peeled and grated yacon root (similar size to above)
1/2 cup water kefir grains
4 cups water

Method
1) add water kefir grains and water to a jar
2) squeeze the liquid out of the grated yacon root.  I put a strainer above the jar and squeezed above this so that the liquid would go in but not the solids.  Discard the squeezed and grated yacon
3) add the peeled yacon to the jar of liquid
4) wait 2 days for the kefir to do its thing.  I do not put a lid on the jar but you need some way to prevent insects and dust from entering
5) remove the yacon root, remove the kefir grains, drink the liquid.  Pretty simple


Even before the 2 days were up I noticed a few things.  Firstly, grated yacon is delicious!  I think it would go well in a salad being grated like this.  Secondly the kefir was bubbling a bit, this tends to indicate that the grains are working well.  If the jar had a lid we may have had issues with the pressure.


What does it taste like, Would I do this again

It tastes alright, but nothing to write home about.  It is similar to how water kefir tastes when it is made on sugar rather than adding any kind of fruit.  The water tastes like it is bubbling, even when it is not, other than that it does not have a strong taste.  I could barely taste the yacon, if I did not know that yacon was in there I would not have guessed it.  Kind of like soda water.

I don't think I will do this again, or if I do I will change things around and perhaps add some limes.  I love how water kefir normally turns out and found this yacon kefir to be less than exciting.  I also prefer to eat yacon normally rather than to eat it after it has been kefired.  The water kefir grains did not multiply as much as I had hoped.  They did multiply a bit, and the grains had been in the refrigerator for a week which generally means that they wont multiply a lot, but I had high hopes.  The water kefir grains have been multiplying slowly lately and I had hoped that the natural sugars in yacon would fix this, apparently we just have to wait for the weather to change.

Interestingly enough, the peeled yacon root also tasted like it was bubbling after it is removed from the completed kefir.  The kids thought that eating the yacon was fun as it did not taste much like yacon, it tasted like it was bubbling.

I also found it interesting that yacon normally discolours reasonably quickly after it has been peeled, but even after two days in the kefir the peeled yacon root looked much the same as when I put it in the jar.


What I would do differently

Yacon kefir tastes ok, but not great.  Adding some kind of fruit or berries or something may have made it much nicer.  Adding some sort of juice or something to the finished yacon kefir certainly makes it taste great.  I don't know, I may try a few different things and then write a post about them.


Where to get yacon and kefir grains

I sell yacon crowns on my for sale page over winter.  I may offer water kefir grains and milk kefir grains for sale, if I do they will be listed on the for sale page too.  Kefir grains sometimes reproduce slowly, other times quite fast, so you may need to contact me to see if they are available.  I also sell a few other organic perennial vegetables and some organic heirloom vegetable seeds.

Reisetomate tomatoes in Australia

A while ago I heard of an ancient Peruvian heirloom tomato that did not grow round or oblong like most tomatoes, but grew segments that one could separate like a mandarin or an orange.  This tomato could be eaten one segment at a time without the use for a knife.  This sounded intriguing, I wanted to see a tomato like this.

After some research I found that it was called "Reisetomate".  I saw some pictures of it and it did indeed have segments like an orange.  The fruit looked amazing but I was concerned it may be just a novelty tomato.  I have no time for novelty vegetables so I wanted to know more.

Reisetomate tomato with some segments removed

Apparently it is an incredibly rare and ancient heirloom variety.  This variety may actually predate the Spanish conquistadors going to South America.  There are unsubstantiated stories of this variety being used by the Incas when they were traveling and tearing off a segment at a time to eat.  The name Reisetomate is apparently German and means "traveler tomato" eluding to the fact that this variety is carried on trips to be eaten without the use of a knife.  I also hear that this is one of the varieties of tomato that the Amish grow, if this is true then this variety is a no-nonsense productive variety.  I became more curious and wanted to grow one.

I wanted to try this variety, but they are so rare that it is difficult to find anyone who has seeds.  Tomato seeds can not be imported into Australia without huge trouble and expense so I had to find somewhere local to purchase seed.  After searching I found only one place which had Reisetomate seeds for sale in Australia.  There were not even any dodgy ebay sellers which I had hoped to see as they can drive the price down a little.  The one company that sold them was demanding an outrageous price for a small number of seeds and was a company which I have had a lot of trouble with in the past.  I rarely buy seeds anymore so there is a chance that company has lifted its game.  I did not know if the risk was worth it and was about to give up on trying to grow Reisetomate tomatoes.  

Luckily a friend of mine kindly bought me the seeds as he knew how excited I was about this variety.  I waited for weeks and the seeds never arrived.  Several weeks later my friend contacted the company and they then sent out the seeds.  I planted some seeds and kept some in case things went wrong.  Tomatoes are simple to grow from cuttings so I figured planting a small number of seeds would be ok as I could still get a large number of plants by taking cuttings.

The plants were growing well and were about to flower, then the heat of summer hit.  The flowers are not like an ordinary tomato flower, they an odd and multiply fasciated flower, some with exposed stamens and pistils.  Like many heirloom tomatoes this variety will cross pollinate with other tomatoes.  Apparently this variety is notorious for cross pollinating with other tomatoes so I was careful to plant it in a separate vegetable garden to my yellow pear tomatoes.  This is one of the positives to having two vegetable gardens spaced so far apart.

Reisetomate flowers

The plants all flowered and grew well, but the temperature was too high and the flowers withered and died.  Apparently temperatures in the mid 40's denatures tomato pollen and prevents fruit set.  Cooler nights may have helped overcome this, but the nights don't always cool down out here over summer.

The plants grew about 5 or 6 feet tall and probably would have grown a lot taller if they had more water, protection from the heat, and better soil.  Many of the stems are covered in small roots searching for soil and anywhere the stems touched the ground they firmly rooted.  After a little over 9 weeks of daytime temps in the 40's the weather cooled down (to the high 30's) and the plants started setting a lot of fruit.  The tiny green fruits looked very odd, kind of like weird little green brains, and gave me a good idea of what the fruit would look like when it ripened.

Unripe Reisetomate tomatoes - very productive plants

More unripe Reisetomate tomatoes

When the first fruits began to ripen I was perplexed.  Each fruit is like a cluster of small tomatoes fused together with many odd lobes.  The first set had one or two lobes on each fruit that looked like it was rotten so I did not know what to do.  After picking them I found out that the rotten looking lobes had been infected by fruit fly.  It was simple to remove and discard the infected lobes, then the rest of the fruit was unharmed and fine to eat.  After the first few I got on top of the fruit fly and all of the tomatoes were fine after that.

Ripe Reisetomate tomatoes

These tomatoes have provided large yields, far larger than any other variety I have grown.  I can not imagine how productive they would be in a more mild climate.  I have read some seed sellers claim they produce 1.1kg per plant and others claim over 25kg per plant, mine produced somewhere in the middle.  They are the highest yielding variety of tomato I have ever grown.  Perhaps next year I will weigh all the fruit from one plant to find out for sure.  They seem to survive through some light frosts with no issues but I am guessing the heavy frosts will kill them.  I am told in climates without frost they can be a short lived perennial which survive and produce for half a dozen years.  I am also told that without frost the stems can get as thick as your wrist after a few years and can only be cut down with a chainsaw.  After growing these under difficult circumstances and seeing how strong and determined they are I believe this is entirely possible. 

Reisetomate tomato, simple to pull apart segments

After tasting these tomatoes I want to grow them each year from here on.  The taste is amazing, they are by far the best tasting tomato I have ever eaten.  They have a deep and strong taste, they are not sweet or insipid like some cherry tomatoes. Sometimes they can be a bit too sour, a little salt reduces that and brings out their full flavour.  I love their intensity, just thinking about it makes my mouth water... 

We use these tomatoes fresh pulled apart in segments.  I love them like this and it is my favourite way to eat them.  We also use them cooked in any dish that requires tomato, they seem well suited to this and bring a depth of flavour and complexity to a dish that many tomatoes lack.  We slice them for sandwiches and the like, they taste amazing but their odd shape makes them less than ideal for this purpose.  They can be pulled apart and put into salads like a cherry tomato.  Being so intense and full of flavour I assume that they would make a decent sauce or paste but I have not tried this myself so can't be certain.

The question I keep asking myself is why these are so rare.  Many things are rare because they are not worth having or are too new.  Reisetomate tomatoes are older than any other variety of domesticated tomato that I know of, they taste amazing, yield tremendously high, apparently have disease resistance (I do not have tomato diseases so can only go off what I have read), and look great.  I can only assume their rarity is due to being unfit for mechanical harvest.

These plants show a lot of diversity of their fruit.  On one branch of a plant you will have some fruit that split into perfect segments as well as some fruit which does not split as perfectly.  Apparently this is mostly due to growing conditions rather than genetics.  I only save seed from the plants which have most of its fruit which splits cleanly and evenly into segments, I only save seed from the best fruits from those plants, I figure this is worth doing even though I don't know how heritable this trait is.

I do sell Reisetomate tomato seeds, I have them listed on my for sale page.

Chinese water chestnut yield

It is about time to harvest the water chestnuts.  This year I grew them in small 10 litre buckets, it was very cheap, simple and took up very little space.  This method could even be used on a balcony as it is not only productive but if you used nice looking buckets it looks good too.  I have put details of how I grew them here.

The buckets were cheap and easy to find, I filled them with clay and manure from the property, so it was also very cost effective.  They required no weeding, no pruning, no maintenance at all other than the initial planting and then filling up the buckets with water when I was out watering the rest of the vegetables.

Water Chestnuts growing in a bucket

Water Chestnut yield

One bucket was ready so I pulled the plant out and broke open the root ball in search of water chestnut corms.  There were a lot of corms in that bucket ranging from tiny to medium in size, unfortunately none of them were very large.  Most were too small to bother peeling and eating but about a dozen were edible size.  A dozen edible corms return per corm planted is not too bad considering how simple this was.

I ended up with around 127 corms from that first bucket (plus a heap that were too small to bother counting but are probably just as viable), all together they weighed around 365 grams.  That bucket also produced a decent amount of straw which I can use as mulch somewhere in the vegetable garden.

The bucket had a lot of corms squashed against the side as the plant tried to reach new ground, these corms will all grow and are genetically identical to the rest of the corms in the bucket so they can be used to grow next season's crop.  They are not easy to peel as larger and rounder corms so will not be eaten by us.

I am guessing that the other buckets will yield roughly the same in terms of weight.  I have high hopes that one bucket in particular will have less corms, but they will mostly be larger corms.  That bucket was not started off with planting a corm like the others, instead I had a spare bucket of soil so I broke off a runner from one of the other plants and put it in there.  I think that it will have produced less corms and they will all be a bit larger.  When I harvest that bucket if it is any different and I remember I will try to write a comment or another post.

All of those small corms are great as it means I have plenty of stock to plant next year and to feed to animals, but I would prefer to have a lot less corms all of which are much larger. 

Water Chestnut corm

How much did it cost me

Normally I don't do this but I thought I would write the cost of this little water chestnut growing experiment.  One water chestnut corm $2, one bucket $0.85, soil & fertiliser etc $0, water $probably a few cents.  

For a total expenditure of less than $3 I got about a dozen edible sized water chestnuts.  That means each of the larger edible sized water chestnut effectively cost me about $0.24 plus produced some straw and whatever added benefit of having insects and wrens hanging around due to the water.  

Next year I already have corms to plant and the buckets so each water chestnut will essentially cost a fraction of a cent.  I doubt the buckets will last more than a few years due to the sun, but we will see what happens.

Things I plan to do differently

One factor which may have made the corms so small is that we went away towards the end of the growing season and some of the buckets dried out which meant the plants died down early.  Some buckets are still actively growing as they did not dry out as much, so time will tell on this theory.  Perhaps if they had constant water in the late season, like they did throughout the rest of the season, they would have kept growing and the corms would have increased in size.

I think that I can make the plants produce larger corms in a few ways.  Firstly I think adding more manure and having less soil will help.  More manure will mean more fertility, hopefully this fertility will help the plants to produce larger corms. 

I will probably have the soil level slightly lower and the water level slightly higher, this will help prevent drying out on hot days as happened a few times here over summer.  During summer where the daytime temperatures were in the mid 40s for weeks on end meant I would fill the water container in the morning and by the afternoon they had dried out, having lower level of soil will mean that I can have slightly more water in the bucket.  Having a deeper and wider container would help, but that is not really an option right now so I am sticking to growing in buckets.  

Growing by splitting off shoots and planting them part way through the growing season should help to reduce the number of corms in each bucket and hopefully ensure that these corms are larger.  If this does not work I know that there are some improved varieties out there which grow larger corms, but getting my hands on them seems almost impossible.

I plan to grow them again

Overall I am happy with how this turned out, I got a good yield of edible corms from a tiny space with next to no work from me, a massive yield of propagation material (and/or animal feed), and a good amount of straw.  Considering that all this resulted from planting a single corm that was only the size of my thumb nail I count it as a win.  I have a few things to change for next year to hopefully ensure some larger corms.  

They taste nothing like the water chestnuts from a can, they taste a lot nicer.  They kind of taste like something familiar that I can not quite put my finger on, perhaps coconut.  I wish they tasted more like yacon or jicama as some people have suggested that they might, but they don't.

Being a perennial vegetable it means that if I decide that I want to I can continue to grow these for ever.  Considering that the largest cost in growing these is purchasing the corms, and given how simple they were to grow, having my own supply kicking over each year seems to be a sensible option.

Where to buy water chestnut corms in Australia

Like many of the other perennial vegetables I grow I do sell water chestnuts.  The corms that I sell are larger than the ones I initially bought, but they are not as large as they will get if you give them room.  If you are interested the details can be found on my for sale page.

Small scale home aquaponics

My fish tank started to get a bit stinky and I don't have a lot of water here so am hesitant to do a water change.  Being outside it gets a few hours sun in the early morning so the sides get covered in algae.  I used to scrape it off on the viewing side from time to time.  I used to leave it on the other three sides so that it helped suck some of the nutrients out of the tank.  I also always try to have duckweed growing on top to help improve water quality.  This works fine as long as some of the water is changed very now and again.

Then I considered turning my fish tank into a mini aquaponics type tank.  I have been interested in aquaponics for some time now.  After a lot of tyre kicking I am ready to give it a go, but we are planning on moving soon so I do not want to start anything too big so this works out well and helped me to learn how to do it properly on a larger scale.

I had a little bit of styrofoam in the yard.  That got me thinking.  I wanted to set up something that would work with my fish tank, something that was simple, something cheap, and hopefully something productive.  The more simple the better.

I bought two tiny bristlenose fish (Ancistrus sp, or as my kids call them "nibble fish") to eat some of the algae, but then I still had a lot of ammonia, nitrites and nitrates to deal with.  Adding extra fish only makes this problem worse.  Duckweed helps, but there are a lot of fish in my tank producing a lot of waste.

I then got a piece of styrofoam, punched a few holes in it, and inserted some herb cuttings which had tiny roots.  Within two weeks the cuttings had long roots, the water no longer smelled bad, the sides had noticeably less algae on them, and the water was a lot clearer.  I had no idea that it was not all that clear before, but the difference is remarkable.  This was fantastic, but I am not sure if this is due to the plants or the new 'nibble fish' or a combination of both, chances are this will only work short term as the plants may rot with the roots being in water all the time and oxygen levels not being high enough.

I then set up a small fish tank at work with a pair of Endler's who began to breed.  I planned on using this to do small scale aquaponics and try to be as productive as possible.  After the fish had been in for a few weeks and increased in number somewhat I removed the filter and started the small scale aquaponics set up with an eye to work out potential problems and see how productive a tiny tank could be.  This tank is far smaller than my tank at home, but this tank has a light on it.

Many aquaponic gardeners start with deep water culture to keep things simple.  The Aztec floating rafts, or "chinampas" was a way to farm using deep water culture on a large scale.  Clearly this approach can and does work, but there are a few things that one has to do right to make it work well and I needed to teach myself what these things were.

The timeline for my tank at work is as follows:
25/03/2014 - the cuttings were set up
28/03/2014 - first set of photos
10/04/2014 - 2nd set of photos
29/04/2014 - 3rd set of photos
12/05/2014 - plants grew far too large and were harvested

First I got some styrofoam, punched a few holes in it and inserted some herb cuttings, just like the tank at home.  I increased the oxygen levels in the tank to help prevent them rotting.  As expected, these grew like crazy.  I then included a pot of gravel with another cutting.  I "seeded" this pot with beneficial bacteria to break down ammonia and nitrites faster.  The herb in this pot also grew like crazy so a few days later I included a second gravel filled pot with a different type of herb.

small scale aquaponics, the fish are in there somewhere too

aquaponics 3 days in

herb cuttings 3 days after planting - note the tiny roots

I had great plans of taking pictures each 2 weeks to show the growth and development of the plants.  I originally planted basil, mint and pineapple sage.

aquaponisc 2 weeks on

root and leaf growth after 2 weeks

plants larger after 2 weeks

2 weeks of growth, all looks good

Then I went on holiday for 2 weeks, upon my return the plants were huge and crowded under the light.  The roots are spread nicely throughout the water giving the fry a place to hide.  I held off doing anything for a while but the plants got too large, so I cut them back pretty hard.  We made mint and basil lemonade with the herbs.

5 weeks of growth, ready for harvest

The herbs were larger than they look

I have learned a lot from doing this, many things I thought would happen have happened.  It is reassuring to see things growing in ways that I thought they logically should.  It is also nice to be able to work out any problems on a small scale before doing this on a larger scale with edible fish.  Regardless, I now know how to make this work for me simply and cheaply.

I also have started to grow some watercress in one of the pots, hopefully it does well in a floating pot but it is too early to tell yet.  I also have some seeds of kang kong which have just started to germinate, but I think it is a bit cold for them at the moment.

Growing Water Chestnuts in Buckets

The water chestnut (Eleocharis dulcis) is a type of sedge that is found growing in tropical wetlands of the world.  They are simple to grow, highly productive, and nutritious.  As well as providing food for you, they yield a decent amount of straw as well as providing habitat for frogs and water insects, all in all they are an excellent permaculture vegetable.

I always wanted to grow water chestnuts, but was never able to find any to plant.  People often comment that they are cheap to buy from supermarkets so they are not worth growing, but I have never seen them for sale except in cans.  I have no idea what chemicals are used on the water chestnuts that I do buy in a can.  I do not know where they grow, how far they have traveled to reach me, how they are grown, or anything like that so growing my own water chestnuts organically seems like a sensible approach.

I have heard of a lot of different ways to grow water chestnuts, and I have heard a lot of people complain that they tried to grow them and failed miserably.  So I thought I would write a post about how I grow them, this is not necessarily the best way, but it works for me and requires very little time and effort.

Water chestnuts growing in buckets

How I grow water chestnuts

The first mistake people make is rotting the dormant water chestnut corms.  I plant the corms in a small pot or punnet and keep it reasonably damp until they sprout.  I used 10cm square pots that we had in the shed, I put the cheapest potting mix in and planted the corms so that they were not quite touching each other.  I do not make it any more damp than I would if I were germinating tomato seeds.  If you put the corms under water prior to them sprouting I believe that they will mostly rot and die.  I planted them in late winter/early spring and kept them away from frost.

I then watered like I would any seedling until they were about 5cm tall.  At this stage I put the pot in an ice cream container and filled water half way up the pot, a few days later I put water up to the top of the pot so that the soil level was at the water level.  I then left the water level there for a few weeks.  This gives the water chestnut a chance to grow roots and the leaves start to collect energy for the plant ready for the next step.

People make a few mistakes in the nest step, they make the water too deep and they do not use enough soil.  Water chestnuts grow in soil, that is where they produce their crop, so if there is not enough soil then they will produce a small crop or a crop of very small corms.  They are an emergent plant, which means that while the roots are below water, the top of the plant must be in the air otherwise they will die.  I then separate the corms and plant them in soil which had about 10cm of water on top of it.  In this way the little plants were just under the surface of the water and would grow out of the water in a few days.  You can make the water deeper, but not too deep, up to about 30cm should not harm the plants but any deeper than this and they may struggle.

In a perfect world they never experience any frost, unfortunately mine seem to see a few light frosts when they are young.  I try to make sure the frost they see is not too hard and they seem to do fine with it.  Interestingly they handled a light frost better than duck potatoes.  They even had some ice on top of the water a few times, while it is less than ideal they are hardy enough to cope with that.

The water chestnuts then grow during the warm weather and die down in autumn.  When they die down the water level is dropped and the corms are left to dry a bit in the soil.  When they have dried down a bit they are dug up and eaten or stored.  If they are ever completely dry they will die.

Water chestnuts growing in the shade of a plum tree

Where I grow water chestnuts

Ideally you would grow water chestnuts on the edge of a pond or slow flowing stream.  In a perfect world they would colonise this water edge and all you would do is go and collect them.  Many people, including myself, do not have access to a pond or stream so this method is unachievable.  

Many people who do not have access to a pond grow them in a bathtub, while this method sounds great it takes up space and you have to be able to find a free bathtub.  Finding free things where I live is almost impossible so I had to think of another way.  I have heard of people growing them in an icecream container filled with soil and submerged in a fish pond, they say they yield about 30 corms per container.  Again this sounds great but requires a fish pond which I do not have.

People often tell of growing them in styrofoam broccoli boxes that they get for free from the fruit and veg shop, out here we can not buy styrofoam boxes let alone convince a shop owner to give them away so I had to keep thinking.  

There are a lot of plastic tubs and boxes that I have seen used, but they all cost too much, I want to produce high quality food for cheap.

I found some cheap buckets for sale, buckets hold water, they look ok, they are easy to find in pretty much every town, they are large enough for one corm each, and they do not take up too much space.  If you only had a balcony this method would still work.  So I decided that buckets would be the containers I would use in which to grow water chestnuts.

I then dug up some subsoil clay, mixed it with animal manure, put it in the buckets to about 5cm from the top, and filled with water.  The soil settles a bit over the next little while so you end up with more water above the soil level.  

It is important to leave it for a few weeks because if you planted directly into this the water chestnuts would rot.  Any weed seeds germinate in the wet soil, the weeds can not survive being constantly under water so they die off reasonably quickly and pose no problems.  Over the next few weeks the water goes green, then crystal clear, then green a few times as algal blooms deal with excess nutrients.  This is good, do not worry when this happens as this is what you want.  The water seems to do this on and off throughout the entire growing season, again do not worry as this is normal.

People are often afraid of clay or subsoil, but they hold a lot of minerals.  Being underwater it makes the soil soft enough for plant roots to penetrate and renders these minerals available to the growing plants.  The only thing to watch for is that no rocks are in the mix.

Water chestnuts growing in a bucket with duckweed

Once the water has had a few weeks to work itself out I then plant the water chestnuts in the fertile mud.  They were not tall enough to reach the air yet, but that is ok.  By now they should be strong enough to grow a bit to reach out of the water.  I also put a bit of duckweed floating on the water surface.  The duckweed grows to cover the water surface and blocks light from the algae.  It also slows evaporation, cools the soil by providing shade and helps out in a bunch of other ways.  If you have access to azolla I would include that too as it fixes nitrogen from the soil and fertilises your water chestnuts.

As the water chestnuts grow to fill the bucket they send out rhizomes, I had a spare bucket of mud so broke off one of these rhizomes and planted it.  It did not take long before it grew so much that I could not tell which bucket had a corm planted and which one was from the rhizome.  From here I simply kept the water at the top of the bucket by filling it up each afternoon when watering other vegetables.

Everywhere you read and everyone you talk to will say that you must grow water chestnuts in direct sun and avoid shade at all costs.  At first this is what I did and it went well for me, but then summer came along and it got too hot.  Even though there was still water in the buckets the plants were suffering from the relentless heat.  Being in buckets made it simple to move the water chestnuts under the shade of a tree.  I moved 2 buckets at first to see if that helped, those plants started growing again while the ones in direct sun were still going poorly.  Now I grow all the water chestnuts under part shade, they seem to be growing fine there.


How I harvest water chestnuts

When the time is right the foliage of the water chestnuts starts to yellow off.  This is a signal to stop watering the buckets.  When they have dried off for a while you then dig through and collect the water chestnuts.  It is important not to let the corms freeze if you are planning on replanting them the next year as freezing will kill them.  If you plan on eating them freezing is fine.

I wrote another post here about the yield I got from a bucket of water chestnuts.


Where to find Water Chestnuts for sale in Australia

I sell water chestnuts for planting and growing on my For Sale page. As you can see above they are simple to grow and very productive.  Chinese water chestnuts are a great perennial vegetable and fit in well in a permaculture vegetable garden.