Brian White

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Jason Learned wrote:

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Kaarina Kreus wrote:In the North: carrot, parsnip, black root, oatroot

Carrots and parsnips are not perennial, but bi-annual (first year they make the root, second year flowers and seeds).

What do you mean by 'black root'? Can you give the botanical (Latin) name?

I grow this as well, and its cousins, purple and meadow salsify. The latin name for Black Salsify is:  Pseudopodospermum hispanicum.
I've had some come back for 5 years and bloom every year. So it seems pretty perennial as far as eating the leaves go, but if you pick the root you'll have to plant some seeds. I'm not sure if you just leave a piece of root if it will work. If you try it let me know.

Hi Jason. I agree with you. Although officially the (black) Salsify is bi-annual, it comes back from the (forgotten) roots and acts as if it's a perennial. I have them in my allotment garden too. They are called 'schorseneren' in Dutch (like Scorzonera).

 Ok,  Scorzonera is perennial,  not biennial. I had some for a decade in one spot.  The german name for it means "Black Root" and it isn't a salsify at all, its scorzonera.   I saw the pictures, of "black salsify" and it is scorzonera! To cook it, you parboil it, and then rub or grate off the black outer part of  the root skin.  You have to parboil, because the white "milk" or scorzonera juice is like glue and it will turn your fingers yellow for a couple of days.  Boiling for a minute clots it and you avoid the mess. What I did to replant is sometimes grow from seeds but mostly, replant the top with 1 to 2 inches of root attached (if your top has several buds on it, you can even divide it like you would with rhubarb,  I usually divide in 2 when this is the case.  The roots by the way go down a foot and a half or so into the ground,  it is a real pain to dig them out of clay soil.  Scorzonera are loved in parts of Germany and Holland.  You buy them in glass jars.    

I made a solar oven to go at the focus of the solar reflector.  I haven't used it to cook food.  Instead, I left the door a bit ajar and dehydrated apples and herbs. As a dehydrator, it needs some work.  I have  metal fan blades and I just need a long shaft 12 volt motor and I can have that running to distribute the hot air better.  It was pretty amazing how quickly it dehydrated herbs, (faster and simpler than my kitchen dehydrator,  and of course far cheaper)  but I worry that the sun through the window did the dehydrating, and it would be better to just do it by hot air contact. I need a black surface to block the light inside the solar oven,  to absorb the light and transfer the heat to the air , but I don't want to paint stuff black because I don't think paint fumes are any good for food in an enclosed space.  I dehydrated nearly all my apples in it, but now we are in our rainy season and I will have to choose my moments, depending on the weather forecast and they will be few and far between. There are 2 very nice feature to my solar device.  1. Tracking.  The reflector is always pointed at where the sun is, from dawn to dusk.  and 2.    The solar oven is stationary because the focal area is stationary.  This permanence is something you can build on.  I have been looking at research papers about parabolic solar cookers and parabolics to drive steam engines and to drive sterling engines on academia.edu,  and they are all stuck in the full parabolic dish mindset.  But if you have a full dish,  you can't have a stationary focus!   And that means that they show stuff like sterling engines at the focus. Moving as the dish tracks the sun! This is ridiculous! Commercial sterling engines share a feature.  They are heavy.   Last year I made a tracking full dish.  My partial dish from this year has another feature that is very valuable, it has not blown around in the wind.   A parabolic dish is like an umbrella,  it seems to catch the wind.  Last years model blew off its hinges maybe 5 times.  This years has not yet blown off so it seems a lot more stable.  Having made my proof of concept, I hope people quickly see it's merits and start making their own versions.  

I have some tobacco for insecticide. It's the small rustica species. But I really don't know what I am doing.    Thanks for the info about boiling to kill the virus and I am interested in the stuff about soaking the stems too.  I was going to dehydrate it in my solar dehydrator because the thoughts of it hanging for 2 to 8 weeks in my house of non smokers,  just to make a pesticide does not appeal to me.   I hope to use it on spider mites.  I think spider mites are up there with tardigrades and cockroaches as the indestructible pests.  Has anyone experience with how concentrated you make it from dried leaves?  I tried to dry leaves slowly in the house a few years back, and some of them went moldy, so that was a fail for sure.  Anyone know the standard "withdrawal period" for tobacco?    

Beside my first house, my neighbour was a permaculture girl and she used to grow buckwheat as a cover crop.  I was ignorant, pretended to know which plant it was and never even asked what it actually is and how she processed the grains.  (She didn't, it was purely as a cover crop between veggys).  I moved, and then, a few years ago,  I watched "Goblin", a K-drama where Buckwheat flowers are a symbol of love,  Canada post is a symbol of timeless ineptitude, and Quebec City is shown as a glorious tourist attraction.  So now,  I have started to grow buckwheat, and I would like to know some more about harvesting and processing it. How thickly to seed it? can it be harvested before it is dry and processed and eaten at the half ripe stage?  Is it easy to dry it?  (I have a fancy tracking solar cooker that I can dry stuff in).   Also I grow "Good King Henry",   I generally just boil the leaves, (tastes like nettles),  but when the seeds are ripe or half ripe, I strip them off the stems and add them in. It ends up "mealy" and tastes somehow better.  Sometimes the seeds come apart and part what would turn into the growing shoot looks like tiny worms in the food. But it really is just the shoots!  (you MUST discard the water after you boil good king henry, cos the plant makes a soapy insect repellant that tastes foul).  I am Irish and I  eat most things with mashed potatoes. Actually, if it works out, that might be how I would eat some of my buckwheat too, unripe seeds cooked in with my dinner.   The other thing is,  sugar beet.  My father grew sugar beet for over 40 years. When it was processed in the factory, they would return the growers dry "molassed beet pulp"  (Dried beet pulp) with molasses added. The pulp and the molasses were a byproduct of sugar production, and it was used as a "cereal substitute' to feed sheep and cattle during the winter.   As part of an European union agreement,  and partly to support Caribbean sugar cane farmers, Ireland agreed to shut down its Sugar factories, and the only beet left in Ireland was Fodder beet.  Ireland had a beet sugar factory as early as 1851.  Anyways, so dried sugar beet pulp is considered a pseudo-grain for animal feed.  BUT we loved munching on the beet pulp.  There was even a French company that trialed selling pulp as a toothpaste substitute! (It does clean your teeth).   I still miss the mollassed beet pulp!  So, maybe that could be a thing again for human consumption!  No need to remove the sugar,  just skin it, grate it and dehydrate it as is.   Sugar beet is about 18% sugar,  so it can be an energy food in the cold days, or when you are doing physical work.  If you feel that you have to reduce the sugar content, there is grating then add water and make an alcoholic beverage, then press the gratings, and dehydrate them.     Anyways, that's all for now, what do you think,  smallholder sugar beet industry as a pseudo-grain?  

Nancy Reading wrote:

Brian White wrote:   When you harvest it, you can take the top  chop off most of the leaves and leave an inch or 2 of root on it, replant it and it will regrow!  You can even divide the top, and most likely the 2 or 3 pieces you  have will regrow.  

Ooh, that's good to know Brian! I've mainly been using the leaves, but I have got some scorzonera of various ages, so I may dig some up and experiment a bit with the roots.

Silly question perhaps - Do you divide the top like a pie to regrow it? Or will each length of root regrow like a dandelion?

 Hi,  Nancy,  Just the top couple of inches.  I only divide it "like a pie" if it has several growing buds.   If it has one, I just leave it as is.  As far as I know, the root lower down  doesn't regrow,  just the top where the leaves come out.  I have tried eating the leaves in the past but I didn't like the taste.  

Scorzonera is great! First off, it is a perennial root crop. You can leave it in the ground for years and still eat it.  It is beloved by some people in Germany and The Netherlands,  and probably further afield too.   But there are a few things you need to know for good results.    When you harvest it, you can take the top  chop off most of the leaves and leave an inch or 2 of root on it, replant it and it will regrow!  You can even divide the top, and most likely the 2 or 3 pieces you  have will regrow.  Or you can grow from seeds but that takes longer. Another,  the roots grow extremely long.  I am on clay soil, so this is an issue.  I think if you are on clay,  it probably needs to be grown in very high raised beds, where you can break out one side of the raised bed, and remove the soil to harvest the damn root! I'm talking about 1.5 or 2 ft high raised beds, just for the scorzonera!  So, that is a lot of work, I think.  But it is totally worth it.  Cooking scorzonera.  Scorzonera has a dirty crackled black skin on it, like the root of a tree,  and your initial thoughts might be to peal it like a carrot.  That is wrong!  It has a gooey white rubber that is like glue just under the skin. (It IS rubber, by the way,  and some species of scorzonera are or were used for rubber production in the past).   It makes your fingers turn yellow and stick to each other!  Its really hard to get the yellow off!  The secret is to parboil it for a couple of minutes. This coagulates the white goo.  Next stage is to use something like a cheese grater or a file or mild rasp to rub off the black skin. The rest of the skin layer is edible.  Chop it to 2 or 3 inch lengths and boil it till tender.    Salsify is called the "vegetable oyster" and scorzonera is sometimes called "black salsify" because it tastes similar.   But many people think scorzonera is nicer.   Salsify is biennial.  You eat it in the first year, like carrots, and it goes to seed in the second year.  I found that when you grow salsify you need to baby it, water it well, etc. But at least, the roots are more of a standard length.   It's so long since I grew it, that I don't remember if it has the white rubber in it or not.    Scorzonera on the other hand is very hardy.  It is drought tolerant. So it is probably a much better fit for most people.    

Frame for new trays is done. It took a long time because it needs to be removable and I am not good at carpentry.

Benjamin Dinkel wrote:Cool idea.
Does the food get very hot while being dehydrated?

 It can get too hot now,  I am hoping to correct this soon.  One issue is that I can get a solar powered fan for inside the solar oven, but it has to have a long shaft so the motor is outside the oven. I haven't found one yet.

The sun scoop is a parabolic "dish" tracking solar cooker.   It only uses one small section of the actual dish because otherwise the dish would get in the way of the target-focus-cookpot-solar oven.  I finally built a solar oven for the sunscoop and its first job is to solar dehydrate my windfall apples.  I know from previous work with it that it delivers over 600 Watts to the cook pot and it boils off water fairly quickly (more than a liter in a couple of hours when I was steaming soil),  and that it can easily char wood,  so I got to figure out how to get the right amount of draft or wind, to achieve this much evaporation, while not letting the apples, plums or whatever else is in it, get too hot.  I have ran it with the solar oven window  closed up, for about a week, and with the door open a little to let out excess heat and moisture.  Next, I might put something behind the glass to open it a crack,  and maybe air can come in around the window and exit at the back for better draught.  Another plan is to get some aluminum oven "trays"  (the ones from the dollar store) and cut them to make a "grill" (like on some cars in front of the radiator.  The grill would be little squares,  with sides around half  an inch and 2 or 3 inches deep.  Imagine something like a bee hive, except the cells are open at the bottom as well as at the top.   I am going to spray the grill black so it absorbs the light  and converts it to heat in the grill.   This is something that people will have to see to understand.  I don't know how well I can make this grill,  but anyways, I will give it a try.  I went off looking for something ready made that I could repurpose and I found nothing.   Anyways,  I did some very rough calculations,  The solar oven contains about 125 liters of air.  That is approximately 153 grams of air. The heat needed to raise a gram by a degree centigrade is 1.47 Joules.  So  if we could just heat the air in the solar oven (and not the metal from which it is made,  I calculate that 600 Watts would take 11 seconds to heat the air from 25 C to the more or less ideal temperature of 55 C.  I think this means to maintain this temperature (just with air in the Solar oven and no food) we need 11.4 liters per second of air flow!  That is a lot!  Of course, when there is food in, that much airflow is not needed because moisture is evaporating from the food pretty fast, and that process is absorbing a lot of heat.  Anyway,  as I see it,  I have a choice. The grill in place of the glass window to let in heated air,  and  how wide open the back door is, to control the speed of air flow or a fan  to circulate air in the oven, and maybe a valve to let out air and steam rapidly when it gets too hot or humid.    I hope this is fairly clear.   I have figs, tomatoes,  chunks of apples,  and 2 types  of plums in the solar oven right now.  Tomorrow,  I might get the new trays done.  (4 trays).  I think there is room for those 2 plus the additional 4 and maybe a couple more,  we shall see!

In another forum, on the topic of steaming soil and chopped weeds,  someone posted a link to terra preta and from that link  I found "Slash and Char"  and that was interesting, (actually a lot more like what happens when you solar cook the woody material).  It probably needs some sort of equipment to distill off the wood "steam" to collect the chemicals (methane and wood acid, etc.) in it.   Probably some are insecticidal, etc. I think that if you are using solar heat to do the job,  it can be more controlled and also more likely to get the carbon trading money that is on offer in some poverty stricken countries at the moment.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-char