Have you used Good King Henry?

Good King Henry is often featured in lists of edible perennial plants, but I have found very few people saying they actually grow it and like it.

Here are some of the various things I've found written about it:

- Many people suggest it as a perennial edible, or say they plan to plant it, but I just haven't found much by people who eat it and like it.

- It is described as being harvested like asparagus (but my second year shoots were a leaf rosette, not a tight shoot)

- The book Bioshelter Market Garden mentions it as a salad ingredient in their spring mix (which would imply raw leaves, I think?) ... but:

- Stephen Barstow, as a featured author on Permies, said:

for me the taste of raw Good King Henry has earned it the name Bad King Henry in my book

- The most detailed info I've found is in the book Perennial Vegetables:

Good King Henry is a reliable, low-maintenance spinach relative adapted to most of the United States and Canada. It has been cultivated in Europe in the past as a cooking green and for its shoots, known as Lincolnshire asparagus, as well as for its edible seeds as a grain crop. The shoots were once a very popular vegetable in England. If given a rich soil with plenty of compost or rotted manure, it can produce shoots 20 days before asparagus and continue to do so until several weeks after the asparagus harvest is over. That’s a season of over three months! The leaves are eaten as a fine cooking green, although their flavor is a bit bitter and they are best mixed with other greens.

- And oddly enough, in an old Time-Life Herbs book:

Good King Henry can be grown Zones 5-8; and prefers partial shade to full sun. Seedlings are slow to appear, plant them 9 - 12 inches apart; but it is easier to divide root clumps of mature plants. They taste best in the spring; should grow 3 years before harvesting; if shoots are to be harvested like asparagus, mulch in fall with 4 or 5 inches of leaf mold or compost, shielding them from light.

A permies member did post this, which was encouraging, but he was 2-post wonder:

I love Good King Henry, a lovely perennial spinach. It reliably has produced for me 6 years running and is an early spring green. Nothing like spring omelettes with garlic mustard, chives and Good King Henry and some of last year's tomato sauce!

Other bits I've found:

- Some people have had difficulty germinating it. (But I had reasonable success with naturalistic stratification, planting it in a container outside in April during light snow. And now in my cold greenhouse, it is reseeding itself.)

- Some people have difficulty finding seeds. (I got seed from Fedco in the US.)

- Some people confuse it with Fat Hen (Chenopodium album, which is called lambsquarters in the US), or conjecture that it is just a bred up version of C. album, but to me it looks like quite a different species. It is perennial, the leaves are different, the overall plant shape is different, and the seeds are much bigger.

- I have always seen it identified as Chenopodium bonus-henricus but Wikipedia says that genetic research has revealed it is not in that genus, and since 2012 it is called Blitum bonus-henricus.

So if you've grown it or eaten it, please share your experience! I'm eager to hear.

I grow it. But I haven't found a recipe I like for it yet.

I struggle with this with many perennials that are supposed to take the place of some annual.  I love the idea of perennial food crops. I plant tree crops of course,  and fruits, nuts, and berries taste great and make sense to me.  Edible weeds and perennial plants that are rarely grown taste so inferior to me that I've largely given up on them except as novelties.  I'm going to keep trying,  but annuals are in no danger of being replaced by perennial substitutes anytime soon at my place.  Other than berries or tree crops,  asparagus is the only real perennial I grow to eat.

One Yard Revolution
This great youtrube channel discusses growing and using Good King Henry


I managed to grab the ad at the beginning of the video I wanted to share.
Fortunately our community caught this and Dave has inserted the correct material.
Thank you Dave!

Just finished reading Perennial Vegetables today and was considering Good King Henry as a possible addition.  Glad to see this thread! I think its more likely that I will just keep using lambsquarter.  It's close enough to perennial and I know I like it.

Growing & Using Good King Henry was published in 2015.  The 2021 update includes unique recipes.

https://g.co/kgs/1TmoJa

I'm thinking about pulling up my good king henery.  The chickens don't even eat it.  I haven't found a way to eat it I like.  I'm thinking of giving the space to some other plants.  

Taste wise Fat hen is so much better, and it's less hassle I think, as it is very happy to seed itself everywhere and all you have to do is keep the ones you want and let a couple go to seed.

+1 for Fat Hen as a tastier, nuttier spinach and much more palatable than GKH.  It grows quite often here, particularly on disturbed ground (be it alongside an allotment/bed or where construction work has happened). I nibble it raw, add it sparingly to salads or, probably wiser, cook it as a spinach. I say wiser because I think it is quite high in oxalates.

Maybe the problem with GKH and other old perennial crops in there modern world is that those of us in the "first world" chatting on the internet are not literally so starved for vegetables in early spring that we're happy to eat anything non-poisonous that grows out of the ground.  Ancestors weren't comparing it to their favorite greens, but just to whatever else was growing at the same time, as their winter food stores were running out.

So maybe it is not a vegetable for our times?

I’ll put a vote for GKH.
I quite like the immature flowering spikes, lightly steamed. I like the fact they’re perennial and grow really well for me. They seed  themselves a little bit, so make it easy to propagate into new areas, but only where there is a bit of bare soil. I’m also interested in trying the seeds. See this post from Backyard larder for some inspiration.

Mk Neal wrote:Maybe the problem with GKH and other old perennial crops in there modern world is that those of us in the "first world" chatting on the internet are not literally so starved for vegetables in early spring that we're happy to eat anything non-poisonous that grows out of the ground.  Ancestors weren't comparing it to their favorite greens, but just to whatever else was growing at the same time, as their winter food stores were running out.

I definitely agree with this. I also think that our tastes and instinct to the benefits or detriments of various foodstuffs have been heavily affected by our modern diet; we are so used to high-fat, sweet foods that anything bitter has become rather unpalatable. I'm sure that our ancestors, even 150 years ago, would have had a much more perceptive sense of taste.

It grows as a weed that I pull out in my polytunnel 😬. I have cooked and eaten the leafs which I much prefer to spinach. I get alot of fat hen too with I mix in with the leafs. I can't belive I'm weeding these things out to plant other greens 🤦

Just found out about this plant.  I'll grow it on the hugel-stump and see how it fares.  Edible and the deer don't like it

Hmmm so it's best to eat the early leaves in spring to get used to some of the unusual bitters. Maybe very shortly cook it with a bit of water. Aren't we supposed to eat something new 7 times to get to get used to  the quirkiness of new plants?
I'm going to give it my best shot this spring. Keep cutting it back until i found a way. It looks like a lump of comfrey strengthwise. It looks like something that will be very hard to kill if i don't uproot it. I've only discovered i have it growing last year, i mistook it for some weird mexican herb for 5 years that i had tasted and didn't like much, but was waiting for some use to miraculously appear. Glad i did, it's a monster now. Saddens me people don't like it.
I totally agree with somebody up here saying we're probably 'spoiled'. But that fact hasn't enticed me to try a lot of dandelion except for when it was bleached accidently with a bucket or plantpot laying about on top of it. I guess i'm spoiled rotten.

Maybe that's another idea we could try. Bury it and eat the white leaves that try to look for light or place a bucket on top or something. Make it less strong tasting that way.

Can someone who is growing and liking Good King Henry post a photo of the "shoots" that come up in the spring? When I grew it, there were no shoots but a rosette. I remain confused about the usefulness of this plant!

I've put a big black container over the sprouting good king Henri. It's foliage yellows out, but is crunchy and sweet, not bitter at all, and i asked a friend what he thought of it who really doesn't like bitter tastes. Not bitter.

Rebecca Norman wrote:Can someone who is growing and liking Good King Henry post a photo of the "shoots" that come up in the spring? When I grew it, there were no shoots but a rosette. I remain confused about the usefulness of this plant!

I think there's possibly some confusion over terminology here. The "shoots" probably refer to the immature flowering spikes, since as you mention, the plant doesn't make a shoot as such (no proper stem for a shoot to center around). The flowering spikes are very tasty stir-fried. Ate them at a friend's place a couple of years ago, our own plants haven't really started doing much yet. I think they need more seaweed...

Hugo Morvan wrote:I've put a big black container over the sprouting good king Henri. It's foliage yellows out, but is crunchy and sweet, not bitter at all, and i asked a friend what he thought of it who really doesn't like bitter tastes. Not bitter.  

Oh, that's interesting! I thought the bitterness was supposed to be saponins, right? Guess if they're there to deter herbivores, there's not much point for the plant in making them before getting into the sunlight...

Hugo Morvan wrote:I've put a big black container over the sprouting good king Henri.

Ooh - good experiment Hugo - thanks for sharing. I expect that the protection would also make the leaves come earlier in the spring too as they have a bit of protection from the cold.
Mine is just starting to sprout too (without protection)

early spring shoots

I think you make a good point Eino. The flowering shoot appears rather later than the first leaves (I think one of my plants has the first sign of a flower shoot). I'm not really sure where the 'like asparagus' comes from; maybe because you lightly cook them in similar ways? I suspect it's like the 'like spinach' analogy - random greens are 'like spinach' and random flower shoots 'like asparagus'.

I'll try and take another picture later on, when the structure of the plant is more clear. It's all a bit tiny at the moment.

@ eino keitta, don't know what group of chemicals make plants taste bitter, i don't know if herbivores care much if stuff is bitter. Bitter is a warning for humans in case something is poisonous, but many bitter foods are the most nutricious. And as we're addicted to sugars naturally as kids need them and as a society as a whole with an industry literally depleting veggie varieties of nutrients to cater to that addiction we have a bit of a problem. I try to push myself in just being grown up about taste. I like beer. My friend made a beer with 17 times the normal amount of hops, i loved that one, but he had to bring it down because he lost money and it's making people sleepy.. But yeah, i guess we're all in this together that it's hard to overcome this bitter veggie sentiment, so here is just one thing we can try to make this wonderfull perennial more usefull for us as Permies.
@ Nancy, yours is sooooo greeeen. Mine tasted sweet i dare say but the stems were a bit fibry so i cut them up with a pair of scissors.

I see repeated allegations that modern people are just soft and don't like bitter food. That's not what's happening with me. I do like some bitter foods -- for example I love bitter gourd and am planning to grow it this year. And that's really very bitter. And I like some other bitter vegetables. So that's not why I didn't like the specific bitterness of this plant.

And then some people in this thread say their Good King Henry is not bitter. I wonder if maybe in the high desert environment I was growing it in, it was more bitter than usual.

I agree, not all bitters are created equal. Coffee is not the same as willow bark, and neither is anything like the saponin bitter of good king Henry. I think saying that we can just differentiate five basic flavours is probably a huge oversimplification. And how we perceive taste does vary hugely between people. For example, I find wintercress, Barbarea vulgaris, to be horribly bitter when raw (but tasty cooked) while a friend of mine insists that it just tastes sweet to him.

Rebecca Norman wrote:And then some people in this thread say their Good King Henry is not bitter. I wonder if maybe in the high desert environment I was growing it in, it was more bitter than usual.

I think you might be on to something there. A lot of secondary plant metabolites are more abundant under different forms of stress. On the other hand, Stephen Barstow doesn't exactly live in a very dry climate (I know, since our place is just a little bit north of his) and even though he's very much used to bitter plants, he doesn't like his good king Henry raw... I think our bodies are probably just telling us that those saponins are not something we should be eating in larger quantities. I've never even tried GKH raw for this reason, don't like any of its relatives raw either, including spinach...

I find wintercress, Barbarea vulgaris, to be horribly bitter when raw (but tasty cooked) while a friend of mine insists that it just tastes sweet to him.

Haha, I only just tasted bittercress for the first time a few days ago and it was delicious, not bitter to me at all! It tastes like arugula (rocket) when it's just right and not spicy at all. (And BTW arugula was rarely too spicy/hot when I grew it in the high desert. Go figure!)

Interesting about the blanching trick with the black container. I've been meaning to try GKH but keep putting it off because of the mixed reviews on taste. Might just stick a pot over it like Hugo did and see if that sorts it. I find most perennial greens need a bit of coaxing to be properly enjoyable, sorrel being the exception, that one's good from day one.

We have grown GKH for several decades. After understanding the absolute reliability of this plant, I stopped growing spinach. It has thrived in horrible cold winters and produced well in horrible cold summers. We don’t care for GKH raw but love it cooked. I always put up a bunch so we can have it all winter. I consider it a nutraceutical. Germinating the seeds requires cold stratification.

Tried it in a starter tray. One may have peeked through, then disappeared, and even that took a long time.

If you like nettles, or new Zealand spinach,  you will probably like good king henry.  It is clear from the comments that people don't know how to cook it.  Its leaves feel "sandy" because they are covered in kind of soapy granules to keep insects away.   So you pick the leaves and young shoots and put them in a pot and boil them for about 20 minutes.  And then you discard the water, because the soapy stuff is in the water.  So, that is the trick,  throw the water away, and never use it in soup.   You do not drink the water and yes, chickens won't drink the water either, because all the horrible is in the water.  Then chop up the leaves and shoots and have it with butter and potatoes and it is lovely.  You can also use the young seed and flower shoots.  When the seed stem gets a bit woody, you can rub the seeds off the woody bits and cook them with the leaves.  It ends up a bit "mealy" and tastes like quinoa but the seeds are black not white.  So that is the key to using GKH,  boil it in plenty of water and get rid of the water, cos the soapy stuff is in the water.  I tried spray the water as insecticide or miticide a few times, but I don't know if it worked or not.  Spider mites have spidey senses and seem largely unkillable in my world.   I far prefer good king henry to spinach.

I'll just add a note on germination: It may be that older, dried seed requires vernalisation, but I can say in my experience that you get very good germination in autumn from fresh seed! I sowed some of mine in a seed snail pot to over winter just after i harvested it - maybe the end of August. Our temperatues have been fairly consistently in the mid teens celsius, but I got pretty good germination within a couple of weeks!
Now I just need to keep the seedlings alive over the winter...

There are three pots - one has bistort, one aronia and the third (with sprouts) good king henry.

It germinated faster than bistort bulbils? Now that takes some doing...

Eino Kenttä wrote:It germinated faster than bistort bulbils? Now that takes some doing...

I don't know whether my bistort seed will be viable. I have only got one clone I think (a garden plant) so I am not sure if the seed will be good - I'm interested in developing a bistort seed strain, but that is a different subject!

Oh, sorry, confusion over species. I was thinking of Bistorta vivipara, which generally doesn't set true seed. (I do hope to coax it to set seeds in order to breed it, but that's a very different topic.)

There's plenty of Good King Henry growing in my allotment garden (it was planted there by someone who rented it before me). So It's growing there, but I hardly do anything with it. That's because it's fibery, tough, and there are other plants (even 'weeds') growing there that have a much better taste.

But now I see here something interesting: put a black bucket over it before it starts growing. That's an experiment I want to do!
I hope I won't forget. And then (next Spring) I can show you photos and tell you more ...