Cardoons, woodlice, Caramac and Apios americana
ABUNDANCE: Tuesday 30 April 2024
A blackbird is sat on the chimney, singing its little heart out. Unbeknownst to it, the pot right by its feathery arse funnels its song, magnified by the chimney’s lining, to be broadcast live and loud in the kitchen three floors below where I am stirring a white sauce for tonight’s supper.
After a day of actual sunshine, what seemed impossible just an hour ago: the wind turned and the rain lashes down. That blackbird isn’t bothered one bit. It’s been singing like this two or three times a day. Only once have I not stopped to listen: this morning, when carrying egg boxes of potatoes from the sunny window sill - where they’ve been chitting - to their new home in the garden.
I don’t believe anyone has ever paid more attention to anything than me carrying those egg boxes, each carefully labelled with the varieties of potato within: spill them now and I’d lose any idea of what they are, when they mature, and how best we might enjoy them.
It’s later than I normal plant them, but the soil and the weather are the boss: it’s been too wet and too cold.
I thought I was only planting; it turns out I was harvesting too. In exactly the spot I planned to sow potatoes, my copper trowel found - if not exactly gold - burnished caramac1. A couple of metres away, the neighbouring bed was home last year to Apios americana. I say ‘was’: I left them to overwinter, that they might multiply over summer, giving me plenty to eat and more to plant next year.
So friable is the compost in this raised bed - one I built 18 months ago from a storm-fallen Monterey Cypress just a few postcodes away - that the Apios’ roots could push through it as easily as fingers into a bath of feathers.
Under the surface, strings of oval tubers, 5cm or so in diameter, grew: they have a nutty flavour somewhere between Jerusalem artichokes and sweet potatoes. I love them. You can harvest whenever you like from late summer, but if you wait until the cricket season is over and the football well underway, the plant will be preparing for - or even into - dormancy, and be less disturbed by an inquisitive hand.
I’ve no idea2 why so few grow Apios. Perennial (buy them once and you have them for life), delicious, unavailable to buy in the shops, beautiful, largely untroubled by pests; instead, we grow what we can already buy. Of course, homegrown potatoes - earlies at least - are a different world to those in the shops, but we dedicate so much of our edible gardens to the most widely available, most disease-prone, cheaply available food, missing opportunities to widen our culinary and horticultural larder. It’s so easy to be a tribute band, playing songs we already know, when so much deliciousness - and the cultural connection that comes with - is out there to enjoy.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t grow the best of the familiar - here I am planting potatoes after all - but let’s make room for the lesser known too.
Apios grow beautifully. In midsummer, their winding tendrils cling to and scale long canes; they might make 2m or more. By the height of summer, flowers - the peculiar burgundy so common in the 80s3 and so absent since - dot its height, held at distance as if they think they’re too regal to be in the leaves’ company.
While that’s going on, strings of tubers form unseen, plumping up late in the growing year once they’ve reached their available wingspan.
Read on for more about apios and a recipe for Cardoon gratin