Idle dreamer
Mike Turner wrote:The new growth on mimosa (Albizia julibrissin) can be eaten as a cooked green, the tree fixes nitrogen, and is a fast grower, continuously producing new growth all summer long. The tree also blooms for several months, producing flowers attractive to butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, and can be cooked as a vegetable.
Mike Turner wrote:I was wondering how many of these vegetable trees are good tasting as opposed to "edible" or "acquired taste". There are a number of plants that are listed as edible and were eaten locally in quantity in the days before worldwide explorations introduced the best tasting and productive plants throughout the globe, at which time these edible but poor tasting, tedious to process, or low productive plants fell out of use. An example would be the camas lily, which was a mainstay vegetable for the natives in the Pacific Northwest interior, but now is little used as an edible. Also acorns were a mainstay for the natives in California, but was quickly dropped in favor of the many plants from other parts of the world that were introduced by the Spanish missionaries. Poi in Hawaii is probably also heading down this route since now there are so many other easier to process and less "acquired taste" food plants available now.
Today, we have plantings of the "lettuce tree" - Tilia cordata - which is an excellent salad green. (recommendation: coppice/pollard to get fresh leaves from april to august)
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