Common + Botanical name

Culinary uses and description

Asparagus
Asparagus officinalis

This familiar plant is long-lived and

productive, bearing delicious green or
purple shoots in spring

Caucasian Spinach
Hablitzia tamnoides

A pleasant, mild tasting, spinach

substitute, the leaves of this
deciduous vines and be eaten raw or
cooked.

Daylily
Hemerocallis fulva, H. minor
and H. lilioasphodelus

Chop and use the young shoots raw in

salads or sandwiches, or steam, saut
or stir-fry them. Add them to soups,
stews or casseroles. Virtually any
cooking method works with them, and
their tasty, string bean/onion flavour
always shines through, no matter what
other ingredients or spices accompany
them.
Cook the larger unopened flower buds
in recipes that call for green beans.
The flavour is similar. You can also
reconstitute the previous days wilted
flowers in soups, or pure them and
use them as a flavourful thickener.
The flowers are sweet and pungent.
Add the flowers to salads that youre
going to eat the same day. Italian and
Chinese cooks dip the flowers in
batter and deep-fry them. Theyre also
excellent in soups. You can stuff the
fresh flowers with dried fruit, nuts or
sweetened cottage cheese with sweet
herbs, close them with toothpicks, and
serve these stuffed daylilies as a fancy
dessert at parties.
You can also scrub and slice the
smaller, firm tubers and saut them in
olive oil with garlic, salt and pepper, or
add to soups, stews or casseroles.
They taste a little like nutty turnips.

Image

Earth Chestnut
Bunium bulbocastanum

Sweet crunchy little tubers good raw

or cooked, taste of chestnuts.
troot - raw or cooked. A delicious taste
very much like sweet chestnuts when
cooked. Seed and flowers used as a
flavouring they are a cumin substitute.
Leaves - raw or cooked, they are used
as a garnish and a flavouring in much
the same way as parsley.
Roots delicious roasted with sesame
oil.

French Sorrel
Rumex acetosa

The lance-shaped leaves of sorrel add

a wonderful, lemony tang to salads
and soups, and they can be harvested
from early spring to late autumn.

Ground Nut
Apios americana

It belongs to the pea and bean family

and, like many other members of that
family, it helps to enrich the soil with
nitrogen by means of bacteria that live
on the roots and fix atmospheric
nitrogen. The root, which is unusually
high in protein, has a very pleasant
sweet taste when baked. It can be
cooked in many other ways and can
also be eaten raw, though it is rather
tough to chew.

Lovage
Levisticum officinale

The young leaves and stems of this

6-foot-tall perennial are an excellent
substitute for celery in springtime
soups. The seeds and roots are also
edible, and the umbel flowers attract
beneficial insects

Oyster Plant
Mertensia maritima

French Mountain Spinach-Cut &

Come again , (Circa 13th century)
Very Pretty heirloom kitchen garden
Red salad leaf yet sturdy enough to be
carried & grown by American settlers
as they crossed the american frontier.
Beautiful colour as it grows, with its
tender, mild, spinach like flavour, Use
fresh in salads or as a cooked green
(Spinach), In the distant past is was
used as a herb for sore throats & to
ease indigestion. Use in pasta, soups
& stew.

Portugese Kale
Brassica oleracea var
tronchuda

RARE cabbage relative producing a

stout 2 ft tall stem, with broad, wavy,
blue-green leaves along stem like
Kales, but its loose-leaf leaves are
more in style & colour with outer
leaves of a flathead Cabbage &
fleshier than Kale, yet with a thick
blade & heavy veins or crunchy leaf
stalks tender enough to be easily
edible - like Cabbage. Its sweet
flavour falls between Russian Kale &
Cabbage, with some of the body of
kale & less of mustard or sulphur often
found in Cabbage (Cut & come Again)

Rhubarb
Rheum x cultorum

Although most people think of rhubarb

for dessert, the reddish stems have a
long history of use as a vegetable in
soups in Asia. Caution: Dont eat the
leaves or roots,
which are poisonous.

Sea Kale
Crambe maritime

Sometimes grown as an ornamental,

this coastal native bears gray-blue
leaves and white flowers on 3-foot-tall
plants. Cover the plants in spring and
harvest the blanched,hazelnutflavored shoots when they are about 6
inches tall. The young leaves and
flowers are edible, too

Skirret
Sium sisarum

Also known as a perennial parsnip,

skirrets are a rare perennial vegetable
plant not easily found in the UK. They
date back centuries, pre-dating the
potato, and were one of the main root
crops eaten across Europe before
potatoes were introduced. They fell
out of favour because potatoes were
easier to prepare, not because of the
taste. Skirrets actually taste
somewhere between a parsnip and a
carrot with a hint of pepper. Grown in
the Tudor and Stuart periods through
to the 1750s they were used in sweet
& savoury dishes and such things as
Skirret Pye.

Tree Onions
Allium cepa var. proliferum

Egyptian Walking Onions taste just

like a regular onion, only with a bit
more pizzazz! The entire plant can be
eaten. Shallot-like onions form at the
base in the soil. They can be eaten
and prepared just like any other onion.
The hollow greens may be chopped to
eat like chives or green onions. They
are excellent when fried, cooked in
soups, or raw in salads (my favorite).
The topsets are excellent when peeled
and fried. You can even pickle them.
Or just pop them in your mouth like
popcorn! Watch out, they're a little
spicy!

This onion variety, AKA the

Egyptian Walking Onion, like
other onions, produces bulbs in
the soil with green shoots out of
them. However, in addition, these
produce a set of bulbs at the top
of some stalks, which bend over
and plant themselves, effectively
walking across the garden.

The flavour is akin to beet and the

texture, when cooked, is dense and
somewhat like boiled peanut. It
remains crisp even after long cooking
Ulluco is one of the most widely
grown and economically important times that would cause a potato to
root crops in the Andean region of disintegrate. Ulluco can
South America, second only to the also be eaten raw, but is mucilaginous
(slimy) when uncooked.
potato
Ulluco
Ullucus tuberosus

Walking Stick Cabbage

Brassica oleacea var. longata

The young leaves of the cabbage are

eaten steamed or lightly sauted. The
plant lives for 2 years, reaching
heights of over 4 ft. The strong stalks
were traditionally dried and turned into
walking sticks.