Roots like Potatoes
Food in plain sight
I bumped into an unfamiliar flower on a familiar walking route the other day and I wanted to make a quick note about it.
It’s Tragopogon pratensis, or possibly T. minor, but either way it’s in the delightfully named goatsbeard (salsifiy) family. The Wikipedia article has this casual throwaway sentence in it:
The roots can be boiled and eaten like potatoes.
I mean, you just can’t drop that kind of sentence and not talk about the implications. Goatsbeard just grows out in the meadows. What about the potential for domestication? How about we have a polyculture of Silverweed and Goatsbeard, then we just take a shovel and harvest spadeful after spadeful of excellent food?
Has anyone tried this plant?
Another one worth considering is Spurge Nettle. First time I heard about an edible euphorbia. "root tastes like pasta"
https://www.eattheweeds.com/spurge-nettle-the-nettle-with-the-mettle/
It grows wild in my garden. The roots you can eat like salify (not like potatoes). As it grows sparsely in my garden, I tend to leave the roots in the soil. But I do eat some of the spring leaves and flower buds and flowers, all in salads. Their gentle taste and nice stucture pleases most people.