"One Small Serve" - homegrown food on a very small scale

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This is an expanded version of an article that was originally published in the  May 2025 edition of What's On. 

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is a tropical, starchy root crop. For backyard food growers, it's an easy, low maintenance producer of nutritious homegrown carbohydrates.

Once a taro patch is up and running it's a self-renewing, sustainable food source. And it can handle going underwater -- so when there's a big weather event that cuts the supply chain and the supermarkets run out of rice and pasta, your taro patch will come to the rescue.

If you live in the tropics or semi-tropics, are interested in food self-sufficiency and perhaps already enjoying a sense of achievement about growing some of your own food but still relying on supermarket staples to bulk out your meals -- you need to get acquainted with taro.

Taro - a staple food throughout the tropics and subtropics

Taro is recognized as one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world. It has a fascinating history including its part in the story of the Polynesian Way-Finders -- these amazing seafarers crossed vast oceans in canoes long before modern navigation instruments, and they brought taro with them on their voyages across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii.

Taro ("kalo" in Hawaiian) became a staple food in Hawaii and has huge significance in Hawaiian culture.

Besides Hawaii, taro feeds millions of people in all tropical and subtropical regions, including Africa, China, Japan, New Guinea, all Pacific islands, the Caribbean islands, parts of Central and South America, and some regions in the United States¹.

How to tell taro apart from other plants with "elephant ear" shaped leaves

All taro varieties have large, heart-shaped leaves on long stems coming from a thick, starchy base called the corm (the corm is the part you eat). The leaves, leaf stems, and corms vary in colour and size between the different varieties, but the general shape of the plant and the leaf is always similar.

In particular, taro leaves have a closed in "V" at the top of the heart shape. 

Have a good look at the taro leaves below...  

...and then compare them with the leaves in the next picture, which is a picture of "cocoyam" (Xanthosoma sagittifolium).

What did you see? 

Look at the top of the leaf. See how the "V" at the top is closed in on the taro leaves, and  open on the cocoyam leaves? 

To the best of my knowledge all taros (Colocasia esculenta) have this closed in "V" at the top of the leaf.

Also to the best of my knowledge, plants whose leaves have the open "V" include some that are edible and some that are poisonous. The plant pictured above -- "cocoyam" (Xanthosoma sagittifolium) is one of the edible ones.

Having said all that, the safest advice I can give you about identifying taro if you're still unsure is to do what I did:

Get your taro (and any other plant you're going to eat) from someone who is eating it regularly. That's the one way you can know for sure that the plant you have is edible.

Taro's many "common" names and its one Scientific name

Plants have "common names" - often a great many different common names for the same plant, and scientific names - one scientific name for each plant.

Common names arise from local dialects and uses. If you're unfamiliar with the dialect, the uses, or the plant itself, common names can be misleading. 

Scientific names are hard to learn, say, and remember, but they're more reliable than common names because (generally speaking) one plant can't have more than one scientific name. 

Everywhere I look on the internet, I see confusion about the names of plants with "elephant ear" shaped leaves. Maybe one day I'll have a go at untangling it all and writing a post to try to clear up some of the confusion, but for this post I just want to make it clear that I'm talking here about "taro," also often called "dasheen" or "eddoe" along with dozens of other common names, too numerous to list here. 

Lots of common names but only one scientific name: Colocasia esculenta. 

(More on "dasheen" and "eddoe" in the next section.)

Two types of taro: "dasheen" types and "eddoe" types 

Taro varieties can be loosely divided into two main types -- 

"Dasheen" types, or "wet-land taro," which are large to very large. They need very moist soil and are even happy to be periodically inundated. Dasheen types of taro produce a large central corm that you eat, and lots of baby offshoots for new taro plants.

"Eddoe" types are smaller than dasheens and can tolerate drier conditions. They produce small side cormels that you can eat all year round.

(If you really want to nerd out on taro types and names, you might be interested to know that "eddoe," Colocasia antiquorum, and "taro," Colocasia esculenta, were originally described as two separate species. But many later botanists consider them all to be members of a single, very variable species, the correct name for which is Colocasia esculenta².

Within these two types, dasheen and eddoe, there are literally hundreds of varieties of taro to choose from in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the world. Ask around in your local food growing community and be guided by local knowledge to find the ones that suit your area and your needs.

Growing conditions for taro

All taros like moist soil, and the large dasheen types are happy to be water-logged. If you have a wet area that you're not sure what to do with, plant some taro there.

If you don't already have a wet area and you want to make one, choose a spot and dig down at least 20 cm deep, line your hollow with lots of newspaper to slow the drainage, and fill/refill with compost or good quality soil. Once the taro is established, it and the soil microorganisms will start to change the soil so that it retains moisture more easily. 

As well as consistent moisture, all taros love compost or well rotted manure and some extra potassium. To provide potassium, you could use ash from your fireplace, banana peels and leaves as mulch, or a potassium rich fertilizer.

Taro grows in partial shade to full sun. The larger varieties will shade out other plants, so it does need space.

In frost free areas you can plant taro year round. It may slow down or go dormant in the cooler months, and it will explode in warm, wet conditions.

In the image above you see "dasheen" type taro, or "wetland" taro, probably growing in Hawaii where taro is an important food crop.

Planting and growing taro

One of my favorite things about taro is its perennial, self-renewing nature. In the act of harvesting some to eat, you can also propagate more.

Taro connects your garden to your kitchen -- the more taro you take to the kitchen, the more you have in the garden. 

Planting, harvesting, and replanting dasheen taros

The thick, starchy, hard corm at the base of a large dasheen-type taro plant has lots of little "eyes," each of which will produce a new taro plant. 

You can twist the baby plants off when they're about 15 cm tall, and plant them in a new location. Or you can let them grow right where they are and as they become more crowded they'll push the large, original corm up out of the ground so it's easier to harvest for eating. 

Lift the largest corm out and settle the others back down into the hole it leaves. Twist off and plant any little baby taros that have formed from the eyes of the mother corm -- even if they're still tiny, most of them will grow. 

Planting, harvesting, and replanting eddoe taros

Eddoe-type taro plants also produce small side cormels from the mother plant, but in this case you can eat the side cormels all year round (leave a few if you want your taro patch to grow larger) and leave the mother plant to produce more.

Growing new taro plants from the top of a corm

You can also grow new taro plants of both types by replanting the top of the starchy corm after harvesting the bottom section for eating.

When you replant the top of a taro plant, cut off all the leaves to reduce moisture loss. It'll grow new leaves after it has enough roots to draw water for them.

In the image above, you can see two taro tops that have been cut off the top of a corm, ready for replanting. On the right, you can see a small corm with a little "eye" sprouting into a new baby taro plant.

Spacing your taro planting

When I'm planting a dasheen taro patch I crowd the plants together in a tight clump of 3, then enough space to allow for compost and mulch between the clumps, then 3 more.

Eddo types can be spaced out a bit more, leaving room around each mother plant for lots of cormlets. 

How will I know when to harvest?

It can take up to 7-12 months after planting before your taro patch is producing lots of corms big enough to harvest. From then on, so long as its moist and well fed and you keep replanting as you go, your patch will be perpetually productive in frost free zones. 

Preparing your taro for cooking 

Ok, so you've harvested some taro -- you have in hand a muddy corm, possibly very large if it's a dasheen (the ones in the pic above are very small; I was impatient to try some), with roots sticking out all around the bottom and leaves growing out the top.

Cut off the top, including about 2 inches of corm (like the two on the left in the pic above), and replant it.

These have been scrubbed and allowed to dry. To the bottom left, you can see a top that could be replanted:

Scrub the remainder under running water, removing the roots and debris, then rinse, peel thickly, and keep rinsing as you go. It can be slippery, and may be slightly irritating for some people - so keep rinsing your hands as well as the taro. 

Cleaned, peeled, ready to cook:

Once it's well peeled, cut out any brown bits and it's ready for cooking. The simplest way to begin is to chop into chunks and boil until it's easy to pierce with a fork. Discard the cooking water.

Now you can do anything that tickles your fancy, from eating it as is with butter and salt (yum), to mashing it and using it as a flour replacement in a cake recipe (google "taro cake recipes" for ideas), to freezing it for later use.

You can also bake or steam taro, or slice and fry it to make chips or crisps.

The well known Hawaiian dish, "poi," is made from steamed/boiled, mashed, fermented
taro -- sour but nourishing and said to be very good for invalids, babies, or those with
compromised digestion.

One Small Serve - an eBook

Includes a series of free extra tips + free email support

This article was originally published in the  November 2024 edition of What's On.

In this post I'll share why sweet potatoes are a super crop to grow at home, some ideas for protecting them from bandicoots and rats, and why it's a good idea to eat the leaves as well as the tubers. 

The sweet potato plant (Ipomoea batatas) is a climbing and ground covering vine that forms swollen roots - these are the sweet potatoes themselves. You can also eat the leaves and vine tips -- more on all of this later.

Sweet potatoes can be very easy to grow, once you overcome a few challenges. 

One such challenge is that the tubers can be hard to find if you allow the vines to sprawl out across the ground. Another is that rats (particularly a native rat that burrows up from underneath where we live in North Queensland, Australia), and bandicoots love sweet potatoes as much as people do. 

But please don't give up! Sweet potato plants are really, really worth the effort to grow yourself and this article I'll share some tips that might help.

But first, why are sweet potato plants so worthwhile? The answer in a nutshell is "nutrition plus calories."

Sweet potatoes - nutrition AND calories

Did you know that you can eat the tips and leaves of the sweet potato vine as well as the tubers? 

Sweet potato roots and greens combined give you a calorie and nutrient dense food from one growing space. Usually you get either calories or lots of nutrients, and you have to combine different plants to cover these two bases.

In the image above you can see sweet potato greens on the right (and okinawah spinach on the left).

Nutritional qualities for sweet potato tubers and greens combined

So long as you eat the leaves as well as the tubers, sweet potato plants can yield significant levels of Vitamins A, B, C, and K, as well as Thiamine, Niacin, Zinc, Folic Acid, Calcium, Riboflavin, and Iron.

Sweet potato plants are also mineral rich, providing significant magnesium, copper, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium. The tubers (especially the orange-fleshed varieties) are a good source of beta-carotene for healthy vision, and tryptophan, an essential amino acid that supports healthy sleep.

They also have a low glycemic index rating, meaning they're easy on our blood sugar balance.

The possible outcomes of regularly including sweet potato tubers and greens in your meals include improved artery and heart health, healthier eyesight, reduced inflammation, reduced risk of diabetes, cancer, and neuro-degenerative diseases, stronger bones, and healthier skin.

Cooking tips for sweet potato greens 

Cook sweet potato greens any way you cook any other leafy green. Use the more tender, newer leaves, or add older leaves earlier to whatever you're cooking to give them a bit more time. 

Sweet potato greens taste bitter, so add a dash of vinegar to them and serve them alongside the sweet tuber to encourage your people to eat up and get the health benefits of the bitter taste.

Advantages of growing sweet potatoes in containers

Sweet potato greens and tubers can be produced in containers in a smaller space than you might think, and container growing has a few advantages for the home gardener...

Larger, impossible-to lose-tubers 

Sweet potato vines grow roots where-ever the leaf nodes come in contact with the soil, and some of these roots will swell into tubers. So a sprawling, ground covering vine will produce lots of tubers, but they'll be relatively small and hard to find.

Containing them in tubs and training the vines up a trellis means less tubers, but it also means more sunlight-harvesting leaf surface (up on the trellis) per tuber. So although your tubers will be fewer, they'll impossible to loose track of and they'll also be bigger, sooner.

Rat and bandicoot proofing

By using containers with full bottoms or setting them on concrete or a hard surface, you can foil the native rats that burrow up from beneath³. You can also use containers that are too tall for a bandicoot to climb into (see pics below).

Easier to start again in case of soil-borne problems 

Sweet potatoes are relatively pest and disease free but what problems they do have are often soil-borne -- so growing in containers enables you to contain the soil they grow in, and start again more easily if you need to. 

In some areas, common advice is to rotate your sweet potato crop with other crops annually as pest/disease control measure - this is also easier if your sweet potatoes have been contained rather than wondering around all over the place. 

We placed these sweet potato containers (above) on concrete to foil the native rats that burrow up from underneath, and on the edge of the porch where our dog lives, to foil the bandicoots. This worked as far as the rodents go, but our crop of tubers was small and disappointing. 

We decided we need a trellis to keep the vines up off the ground, and bigger containers. Scroll on to see a picture story of our next iteration...

Setting up the containers and trellis

Above -- a 44 gallon drum with the top removed (keep the rim, for structural integrity) and holes drilled in the bottom and around the sides near the bottom. We were going for a balance between good drainage, which is really important for sweet potatoes, and rat proofing. 

(The garden hose is not relevant; please excuse my mess...)

We placed the barrels in a trench for stability and also to try to encourage free movement of moisture, nutrients, and small soil critters between the container and the surrounding soil, while hopefully still having the tops too high for bandicoots. 

We filled the barrels two thirds full with our local soil which is acidic and very free draining, both of which sweet potatoes appreciate. Then we topped them up with the heavily composted garden top soil that we had moved aside when we dug the trench. 

Next will be a thin layer of composted chicken shed litter and a thick layer of mulch on top.

We started with a sturdy trellis like so (might be a bit hard to see against the background). We hope this is big/high enough -- time will tell.

Growing conditions

Sweet potatoes like well-drained, loose soil, slightly acidic.  Potting mix is fine. Loose soil is important for drainage, for your tubers to be able to expand as they develop, and for easy harvesting.

For a crop of big tubers, you'll need plenty of sunlight. If open sunny spaces are limited, arrange for  the vines on the trellis to reach up into the sunlight. For greens only, a shadier spot will be fine; the leaves will be bigger and softer if grown in partial shade.

Sweet potatoes need about 2 to 4 months of warm weather, reasonable sunshine, and consistent moisture to produce decent sized tubers. In tropical areas, you may be able to grow them year round. 

If you're after greens only, you can use a small container. If you also want tubers, you'll need space for 5 to 10 large tubers per plant and lots of sunlight.

Starting off

Sweet potato plants can be started from "slips," which develop from sprouts on a sweet potato tuber. Or, you can take cuttings (runners) from an existing plant and use those. 

Start slips throughout spring and early summer. Cover a sweet potato in soil or just leave it in a undisturbed spot well away from direct sunlight,  and wait for it to sprout. (There are also tutorials available online for starting slips with chunks of sweet potato and in water, if it's of interest; that's a bit fiddly for me.) 

When the sprouts are about 15 cm in length and have little roots of their own, twist or snip each one off, bringing its roots with it. Trim off the leaves on the bottom third or so and plant it carefully up to its arm pits in soil.

If you're taking cuttings from an existing plant, choose runners that are robust and growing strongly (avoid older woody ones or thin new flimsy ones). Cut them into pencil-length cuttings, remove all the leaves, and plant them upright. Submerge the bottom one third to one half of the cutting in the soil. Or you can use longer cuttings, leave a leaf or two on them, and lay them down with only their leaves exposed. They will root at each leaf node. 

The pic above shows a trimmed sweet potato runner ready to plant. Zoom in to see the roots already starting at one of the leaf nodes.

Keep your baby sweet potato plants consistently moist and safe from scorching in direct sunlight until they're big and strong. Depending on how easy it will be to do this, you might want to get them big and strong before putting them out in their final postilions, or plant them direct where they are to grow. 

Harvest

Harvest leaves and tips once the stems are at least 30 cm or so long, a month or two after planting. If you’re using leaves from a crop intended for root harvest, limit harvesting to a couple of  times a month. If you only want greens you can harvest more often.

Harvesting tubers: Search for hard mounds indicating swollen roots just under the soil surface. Either tip the container out or burrow into it with your hands and pull out your treasures. After harvesting, lay your sweet potatoes in the sun for a few hours to dry, so the the skins can start to "cure" -- to harden against injury, mold, etc. Continue curing in a warm dry place for a few more days and then store in a cool, dark, dry place. Do not refrigerate.

Sources 

Nutritional information about sweet potato tuber and greens from"Sweet potato leaves for family nutrition: Overview of research"and "Sweet Potato Nutrition Facts and Health Benefits."

Tips on propagating sweet potatoes from cuttings are from Gardening Australia. 

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This post discusses loosely related ideas for growing a vigorous, productive, low maintenance food garden with as little effort as possible on the part of the gardener. 

It began as a reply to a reader's comment on "How to Hand Pollinate Pumpkin Flowers," then those ideas expanded themselves and became this post. 

As you'll see, this is a discussion not a lecture: I'm far from having it all worked out and I'd love to hear your comments and tips at the bottom.

On self-seeding/self-selection

Pumpkins, tree lettuce, and paw paws all volunteer themselves by self-seeding in our gardens and animal areas.

We assist the process by feeding pumpkin seeds to the pigs and paw paw seeds to the chickens, and by allowing tree lettuce to go to seed where-ever it chooses.

This has been particularly successful with pumpkins, which we never plant "on purpose." We just welcome them and make space for them where-ever they volunteer to grow. 

By definition, self-seeding also means self-selection for the specific local conditions a plant finds itself in. My assumption is that if you can establish populations of annual or short lived perennials that self-seed without your help, you're encouraging/allowing them to self-select towards being able to thrive in your specific conditions. And the better they get at doing that, the less maintenance you have to do -- a win for everyone. 

On transplanting seedlings - or not

Every year for a while now I've purchased seedlings of annual European-style vegetables like kale, fennel, celery, lettuce, etc, to plant in our blue barrel garden during the winter months. (We live in the semi-tropics; winter is our season for growing veggies of European origin.) 

Being able to buy healthy seedlings from a like-minded grower near us has been super-helpful. It saves me from the forethought and effort it would take to be ready with seedlings when our peak veggie growing season arrives. 

But it has also allowed us to avoid examining the question of whether it would be better for us to either raise our own seedlings, or start our seeds right in the beds (we're in a  frost free area), or figure out other ways to make the most of our cool growing season. 

So transplanting seedlings has its pros and cons. One of the cons is that some plants just don't like being transplanted. Pumpkins have been one of these for us; transplanting pumpkin seedlings has always seemed to result in weak plants that don’t really get going.

I'm lazy and I also think there's a much smarter presence in our garden than me -- Mother Nature. So I like to let her do as much of the work as possible. With that in mind, should I be transplanting seedlings? Possibly not.

But some plants are difficult to get to self-seed for various reasons. Kale is one of these for us; the way our seasons role, kale just keeps going and going and never receives the prompt to set seed. Which is all very well until it gets too wet, rots or suffers an insect attack, and keels over without having provided for a subsequent generation.

I know -- maybe I shouldn't be planting kale. I'm having better luck with fennel, celery, and lettuce -- they all go to seed reliably for us. But I haven't gotten the hang of getting them to come again from their own fallen seed yet. It's a case of collecting the seed and saving it for replanting, which can be tricky in our wet conditions and so usually gets neglected.

On encouraging "weeds"

Dandelion and borage are usually prolific self-seeders, and I'd like to establish both of them in our gardens for all the useful functions they can serve. Neither of them are super-keen on our wet conditions and borage prefers alkaline soil whereas our soil tends toward acidity. But I'm thinking if I could get them going in a few areas and then support their self-seeding efforts, maybe they'd adapt and develop themselves into strains that can thrive in our conditions. 

Stinging nettle, chickweed, and many others do love our wet conditions and i make space for them where-ever I meet them (except I'm a bit choosy where nettle gets established for obvious reasons).

Now just in case you're stuttering, "but... weeds..."

You're probably not. If you're reading here, you're probably well aware that dandelion, nettle, chickweed and others are tremendously useful  nutritional and medicinal herbs.

But just in case, and also because this is a favorite soap-box topic of mine: I believe that dandelion keeps persisting in our lawns, and all the the other "weeds" keep following us around in our gardens and farmlands, for two very good reasons.

One reason is that  they're able to thrive in the conditions we create. If we created different conditions, different plants would spring up in them.

The other reason, which I think is strongly related to the first, is that they show up to offer us the medicine our soils need. And also, the medicine we need. Many (perhaps most?)  so-called "weeds" are actually highly beneficial foods and medicines if you know how to use them.

Our grandmothers knew this; indigenous people, herbalists, and wild-food foragers know this. It wouldn't hurt if the rest of us remembered it and went back to partnering with the weeds instead of fighting with them. 

On diversity, inter-connections, and resilience

The topic of weeds leads onto the topic of diversity. Some of our garden areas are diverse, but tidy (these are the areas Alain takes care of). 

Other areas are just plain messy, full of odd jumbles of grasses and other plants as well as food plants. This is because of my long and frequent absences, along with my high tolerance for mess. 

But I do think that all that diversity, whether deliberate or due to neglect, helps with vigor and resilience. The more closely a garden resembles a wild ecosystem, the stronger it is. 

And stronger = lower maintenance = less effort on our part. We're always looking for ways to manage things and for plantings to choose that are as productive as possible with as little input from us as possible. 

We count a wide range of things under the definition of "productivity:" insect habitat and food, mulch production, shelter and wind protection, water harvesting (bananas in particular harvest and hold water in our system, as does Queensland arrowroot), nitrogen fixing, fodder for animals.

Food for humans is important, but it's only one in a long list of productive functions.

Which makes it go almost without saying that we especially value plants that fulfill multiple functions. Arrowroot is a good example: it provides food for humans, food for pigs, leafy fodder for chickens, mulch for the garden, water-harvesting and soil improvement abilities, and shelter for other plants like ginger. 

On fertility

How are we to build and maintain the fertility of our soil? We can make our choices along a continuum that runs from chemical fertilizer inputs, to organic manures and composts using imported materials, to creating systems that can produce and recycle their own fertility on site without having to import anything. 

Replacing chemical fertilizers with manures and composts is a step in the right direction. We can take it further and build more resilience and interconnections within our system by striving towards zero-input systems. 

Natural systems cycle fertility continually within themselves to stay viable and thriving. The only inputs are sunlight and rainwater (assuming we're talking about land-based systems).

To be fertile enough to support large animals like humans without requiring fertility inputs, a garden system has to be very complex. Tidy rows of vegetables braving the elements all by themselves aren't going to cut it.

There are lots of things you can add to your garden system to make your garden more productive and less reliant on inputs:

• mulch-producing (or "chop and drop") plants, including deep rooted plants that draw water and nutrients up from beyond the reach of shallow rooted veggies
• legumes (nitrogen fixing) plants
• worm farms or black soldier fly larvae farms
• small animals like chickens or rabbits, or larger ones if you have the space and inclination
  

And finally, if you're eating from your garden and not returning your own manure to it via a reliable composting system, that's potentially quite a significant loss of fertility from your garden system.

In closing 

That's a lot to think about. Let's not drive ourselves around the twist trying to do all that at once. But I hope you found one or two useful ideas or reminders, and if you have more suggestions for a productive, low maintenance food garden I'd love to hear them in the comments below.

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Why would you want to grow your own food?

In this series of posts we're focusing on reducing our reliance on supermarkets and industrial food for lots of reasons. Some of the main ones are to reduce our costs, to improve our nutrition, and to tread more lightly on the earth.

In case you missed the previous posts in the series, they are:

3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better

Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket

Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?

Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

This post - Strategy #7 - is about replacing some of your supermarket needs (in small steps) by making a start on growing your own food.

If you’ve never grown anything before, or if you live in an urban environment without access to garden areas, take heart. There are easy, small ways to start -- including if you are short on time, space, or confidence.

I've listed the following suggestions roughly in order from easy towards more challenging. We'll begin with what must be the simplest, cheapest, quickest way there is to get started growing a little bit of fresh food in your own home. 

Start sprouts in a jar on your kitchen bench

Sprouting seeds, grains, and legumes is a simple process that takes no more space than a kitchen draining board. It's a way that you can use indirect sunlight and moisture to increase the volume, digestibility, and nutrition levels of seeds, grains, and legumes.

All you need is a clean jar, a piece of loose weave fabric or netting, a large rubber band or some string, water, some indirect sunlight, and some edible seeds grains/legumes. (Preferably organic and definitely not treated in any way that would stop them from sprouting.)

At its most basic, sprouting goes like this: Put a small amount of seed or grain in the bottom of your jar, cover with water, and leave for up to 12 hours (less for smaller seeds).

Cover the mouth of the jar with a fabric or net that will hold the seeds and release the water; drain. After that, rinse and drain your seeds at least every 12 hours, keeping them moist but not wet. Watch for them to start to sprout, which should happen within a day or so. Keep rinsing and draining till the sprouts are the size you want, and viola: homegrown food!

You can use your sprouts in lots of ways: toss them into a stir fry, add to salads, add to sandwiches, blend them up in smoothies... 

Food that grows in soil is always my preference, but sprouting is hard to beat if you're short on space or time or you just need a not-too-daunting way to get started growing something.

A how-to resource and a word of caution

There are a different soaking and sprouting times for different sizes and types of seed, and its good to be sure you're not letting your sprouts get slimy or moldy - for details, this post is a comprehensive  guide covering pretty much everything you could want to know.

The only thing I would add to it is a word of caution about soy, which I suggest you avoid entirely, and other legumes, which I suggest you cook after sprouting.

(See this article by environmental journalist Tara Lohan about soy effects on human and environmental health and how soy got so big, this one about soy farming as a deforestation driver, and this one about soy in processed foods, if you're keen to know more about why I suggest avoiding soy.)

All other legume sprouts, in my opinion, should be cooked before you eat them. All legumes are hefty to digest and some more so than others -- cooking them after sprouting gives you double insurance that you'll get their health benefits without an upset tummy.

Kidney beans are particularly tricky according to some sources, so give those a miss unless you've done your own research and you're confident you know what you're doing. 

Other than the legume family, if you can sprout it you can probably eat it! Have fun experimenting, compost your failures learning experiences, and enjoy your successes

Grow edible things in containers

(Or your could grow drinkable things in containers -- see the section below for ideas on that.)

The great advantage of growing food plants in containers is that, well, they're contained. So they're more manageable than even a small garden plot. Small and manageable is good, because we need strategies we can maintain.

If you're doing this for the first time and you can afford to buy seedlings and potting mix, do.

Or you can get off to a slower but much less expensive start by starting your own seeds and making your own compost and potting mix, which is beyond the scope of this post but isn't as hard as it might sound. You can also get creative with finding free containers, such as unwanted polystyrene boxes, instead of buying pots.

Whichever way you go about it, start small and then build slowly, so you don't get overwhelmed. 

Greens and herbs of many kinds are super easy to grow in pots, and so long as you feed them, keep them moist, and can put them where they receive enough sunlight, the more you harvest the better they grow.

Learning about ways to feed your potted plants can be a whole other adventure, just as composting can -- there's so much to learn and explore.

But for now, just start. If its really daunting, limit yourself to starting with ONE pot. The first time you snip some chives to add to a bowl of soup -- even if the chives came already potted from Bunnings and the soup from a can -- you'll have started growing your own food. Anything's possible from there. 

Grow low-maintenance perennial herbs and make chilled teas

Growing something you can drink counts too.

Do you buy soft drinks, carbonated water, cordials, or fruit juices? Consider replacing them with teas made from things that grow in containers (see above) or in your garden. (Actually, its only called "tea" if it includes leaves from the tea plant Camellia sinensis; otherwise its proper name in herbal lore is a "tisane." But we'll stick with "tea" to keep things simple.)

Any herb you collect fresh from your containers or your garden to make tea with will be way healthier for you than herbs grown in mono-cultures, packaged, and transported. And don't even get me started on the sugar content and other non-food ingredients in bottled beverages. And, on top of all that, there's the cost savings.

Chilled herbal tea examples

If you live in a more temperate region with proper winters, here's a list of 18 herbs for you.

Let's start with ginger tea. (I wrote a detailed post about growing ginger here.)

Grate fresh ginger rhizome into a heat proof jug or jar (scrub it clean first, but no need to peel) and pour boiling water on it. Let it steep for as long as you like. Overnight is fine (it will be stronger, so you can dilute it more and it will go further) and ten minutes is fine too.

Add honey (its easier to dissolve if you add it when the tea is still a bit warm, but I don't add while its hot because I use live, raw honey, and I don't want to destroy its goodness with heat).

Then chill, dilute to preference (I put a bit in the bottom of a cup and add water; my husband drinks it straight), and enjoy as a refreshing, healthy, thirst quenching drink. 

Another plant you can use to make a refreshing chilled tea is Mexican tarragon, which I wrote about here.

Another is lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus), a low-maintenance tropical perennial which also does ok in a large container if you need to bring it in to protect from frost. It has a slew of health benefits you might not have known about (I didn't).

Yet another is hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) -- yes, hibiscus flowers that we grew up thinking were just for decoration can be made into a healthy tea.

There are many more, but that should get you started. Now you can skip the bottled beverages section next time you're down that aisle.

Next, another kind of drink. 

Make kombucha 

Kombucha is regular sweet black tea that has been converted to a fermented beverage . It's cheap to make and is a delicious and healthy replacement for sweetened drinks.

What transforms the sweetened tea into a sugar-free probiotic (and puts this in the "homegrown" category) is something that grows on top of the tea, called a Scoby. Scoby stands for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts." Fear not - they're all friendly varieties that build healthy gut flora in humans.

It takes a bit more to learn kombucha making than it does for herbal tea, so rather than try and condense it here I'll share a basic resource to get you started.

By drinking kombucha regularly (especially if you also eat un-pasturised sauerkraut and/or un-pasturized yogurt/kefir) you can scratch probiotic powders and pills off your shopping list too.

Grow tough, easy fruit/vegetable climbers in narrow spaces

This is really an extension on the container growing section above, except that now instead of talking "balcony or porch," we're talking about narrow places where there's not much space but what there is goes all the way up.

Plants like cherry tomatoes, regular climbing tomatoes, peppers and capsicums, egg plants, pepinos, cucumbers, peas and green beans, and probably more that aren't coming to mind, can all be grown in containers and trained up trellises to make use of vertical spaces.

Other, more rambling vines that we think of as space hogs can be used cleverly, too, for example by allowing them to grow up a trellis and then over a pergola or car port. Chokos, pumpkins, and passion fruit come to mind.

Sweet potato vines can be grown in a large pot to give space for tubers, or a smaller one if you plan to just eat the vine tips as a nutritious green vegetable. 

Chokos are less nutritious, but so easy once you get them going. I wrote about 7 Ways to Use the Humble Choko Vine, here.

Even pumpkins can grow on trellises. I always fear that the vine won't hold that heavy fruit up in the air, but it does. And pumpkins can also be harvested before they're large, and be cooked and eaten like you would a zucchini. In my experience small unripe pumpkins are interchange-able with zucchini in the kitchen, and a LOT easier to grow.

Grow mushrooms

Full disclosure: mushrooms in my experience haven't been the easiest things to grow. I can't (yet) count them among my successes. But so far I've only made a few attempts, and I'm not giving up because mushrooms are SUPER nutritious and many types are also safely medicinal.

I believe that food should be the first place we turn when we need medicine. And I'm convinced that food from our own immediate environment is a significant key to building our health and resilience, so we can reduce our reliance on pharmacies as well as supermarkets. Mushrooms are such super-foods that no matter how many times I fail at growing them in abundance, I intend to persist till I crack it. (It's mainly a case of moving it up the list of priorities...)

Anyway, if you're keen, consider starting with a kit the first few times to dip your toes in. There are lots of mushroom growing kits out there; search online for "mushroom growing kits" in your area. 

And while you're waiting for your kit to sprout, you might like to check out these online courses, the first one free and the other so reasonably priced that its almost a no-brainer.

Free Mini-Course: Get started with your Mushroom Growing Journey

Grow a Mushroom Garden at Home: an Online Course

Or search for another mushroom growing resources that tickle your fancy - they're springing up everywhere (pardon the pun).

Grow edible insects in a tub on a bench

The insects in the picture are silkworms, which are easy to raise on mulberry leaves at home. Many other types of insects can also be raised at home -- as food for you, your chickens, or your fish.

Around 2 billion people, world wide, eat insects.

Yes, we picky folks would need to get past the ick-factor.

And no, insects aren't pettable.

But if you have serious space constraints and you can get past those two hurdles, you could produce your own ethical, high-quality, super-local, balanced and complete protein at a fraction of the cost of any other comparable protein source, on a bench in a corner.

No, I haven't tried this personally yet. (At least, not for human food. We've had a few goes at growing black soldier fly larvae for chicken food and fish food, but we're still very much in the learning stages.)

But if I had no space to raise other kinds of livestock and I couldn't afford to buy ethically raised meat, I wouldn't hesitate to put "learn how to farm insects for food" at the top of my list of priorities.

I don't believe that fake meat from a lab is the answer to any of our meat-related challenges. Nature placed insects near the base of all food chains with the same exquisite wisdom she applied to the rest of her Creation. I would much rather eat insects as designed by Nature than meat designed in a lab.

So. If that tickles your fancy, here are some resources to explore:

Insects are delicious and nutritious

Farming Edible Insects - hello zero footprint protein

12 Garden Insects You Can Eat

And if you're not keen right now, that's ok. File it away at the back of your mind for if you ever do need or want to explore it.

TAKE ACTION

Ok. That was lots of ideas. But ideas are utterly useless without action.

So don't close this tab until you've chosen one thing to take action on. The very first thing that pops into your mind as you mentally scan back through this list -- that's the one.

If you’re new to growing your own food:

• Choose an option and take a first step to get started. You could note in your notebook (from the first post in this series) what you need to do next to keep moving, but do that after you've taken action. 
• If you have to look something up, limit your research so you don't fall down the rabbit hole and never make it out! Just look up the basics so you can get started.
• Consider what basic supplies you’ll need and add them to your shopping list if you can't find them in your house.
  

If you’re not new to growing your own food:

• Chose one thing you’re growing but not making very good use of. Ask yourself, what would I need to do differently to bring this food from where-ever it grows, into my kitchen more regularly?
• Or, What one thing is there that I'm not growing yet but would like to?
• Or, What one thing I'm already growing would I like to grow more of, so I could use it more often?
• The best way to get better at growing your own food is to make it as easy and simple as possible to eat something--anything--directly from your garden on a daily basis.  “One Garden Meal Per Day” expands on that idea.
• The eBook  "One Small Serve" describes a selection of low-maintenance, nutritious perennial plants and ways to build a "one serve at a time" food growing habit that's small and simple enough to maintain -- including for someone who knows that gardening will never be the center-piece of their life.
  

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Today's short post is part show and part tell, and it covers:

• what male and female pumpkin flowers look like, 
• how to hand pollinate your pumpkin flowers, and 
• why you might want to.
  

Boy flowers and girl flowers on the same plant

Pumpkins and other Cucurbits (like zucchini, squash, gourds, cantaloupes) are monoecious, which means they have separate male and female flowers on the same plant.

In order for a female flower to produce a fruit, it needs to be pollinated with pollen from the male flower. Pollinating insects will obviously do this for you, but in rainy weather or if you have a shortage of pollinators, hand pollination is a simple and easy solution. (Although I also encourage you to consider how you can support your pollinator insect populations as much as possible!)

Telling girls from boys 

Some years ago our friends' young children were visiting to play with our young children and my friend later told me that her daughter had come home and said, "Mummy, I know how to tell boys from girls." 

"Really? What kind of boys and girls?" 

"Pumpkin flower ones!"

Most homegrown food and medicine is so simple a small child can do it, and this is certainly the case with pollinating pumpkins. In the image up the top you can see the swelling at the base of the female flower on the right. In the image below, you can see the multiple headed stigma in the center of the female flower on the left and the single stamen in the male flower on the right.

As another friend said when I was first learning about this, "it's pretty obvious which is male and which is female."

Hand pollinating 

So the next question is what do you do with these male and female flowers?

In a perfect world all you'd have to do is sit back and admire them, and feel gratitude for and wonder about the pollinating insects busily carrying pollen about with them. But in wet weather (which for obvious reasons reduces insect activity), or if you have a shortage of pollinators, you might want to lend a hand. 

In the picture below you can see the male flower removed from the plant, and then in the next picture with its stamen separated from its petals.

(You can eat the petals of the male flower while you do your pollinating, or bring them in and put them in a salad. Or if you don't want to destroy the male flower, collect some of its pollen with a cotton wool bud or a paint brush.)

Whether with the broken off male stamen or with a cotton wool bud or paintbrush, transfer some pollen to the multiple headed stigma in the center of the female flower. You'll see the powdery pollen on the male stamen and if you look closely you can see some of it transfer to the female flower.  Be thorough: brush a little pollen onto each of those little curving female parts.

Below, you can see a pumpkin forming from a successfully pollinated flower on the left, and one that missed out on the right.  The flower that was not pollinated had already fallen, and the browned off swelling from its base also fell when I brushed against it. Watch out for these browned off female flower swellings -- they indicate inadequate pollination in your pumpkin patch.

Making a hat 

We live in an area that can be very wet, so after hand pollinating, to prevent the newly pollinated female flowers from filling with rain and possibly failing to set fruit, sometimes I give them a hat. 

In the picture below I've broken off a large leaf and...

positioned it over the female flower as a rain hat, and...

brought its stem together with the stem of a leaf above to make it less likely to fall or blow away. (Same leaves. Sorry about the change in color from the last picture to this one... the sun must have come out or something. Photography isn't one of my strengths.)

A decent breeze would mess up my nice architecture of course, but it only needs to stay put for a day or so. 

When do female flowers open, and for how long?

Pumpkin flowers begin to appear when the vine is about 50-55 days old. The male flowers start opening about a week before the female ones, so if at first you see only males, don't panic -- the girls will be along soon. There are always more male flowers than female, and the female flower opens in the morning and will close by afternoon or evening. 

So it's worth paying a visit to your patch every morning to pollinate open female flowers and take note of where new ones are forming. In the picture below, I've circled immature female flowers in yellow and males in orange.

Where to put the pumpkin patch?

I used to think of pumpkins as a plant that belonged in a out of the way spot where it could be comfortably messy and no-one would see the mess. Now, I keep our messy pumpkin patch right beside our most used path, within easy view of the porch -- because that way I see the flowers each morning and remember to go out to the patch to pollinate. 

Those brief pollinating moments usually lead to further moments out in the garden that I might otherwise not have indulged in -- and all of that is good for the soul and also for the kitchen table.

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Arrowroot (Canna edulis)

This is Queensland arrowroot, photographed in mid August about a week into our Southern Hemisphere spring. You can see tired, yellowing foliage that's been hanging on all winter, old dead stumps where Alain has been cutting fodder for the chickens, old tubers for the pigs, and in the middle foreground, a new shoot just about to begin to unfurl its first green leaf. 

This clump needs to be lifted out, divided up and put to use as I described here.

The next pic, below, is a new row of arrowroot that Alain planted a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote this post.  

Chickweed (Stellaria media)

Chickweed is a salad staple in our garden whenever and where-ever it can find a cool, moist, protected spot. I don't know how to grow it on purpose; it's a generous volunteer whose presence reminds me that abundance is all around us, if we're looking. 

This time of year, when the weather is cool and has been consistently damp, chickweed is everywhere. In the images below, it's growing around the bases of our blue barrels and coming up in between the things in the barrels. As I see it beginning to volunteer, I often clear a space for it. It's a prolific seeder; once you have it, you have it forever

Chickweed needs regular harvesting to keep it from becoming stalky. Cut it with scissors, take it inside, and chop it into a salad or put it in a bag in the fridge where it will keep well for many days.

You can read more about chickweed here. 

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)

I love dandelions. Most of us know them for their persistence in lawns and roadsides, their sunny yellow flowers  (from which you can make wine), and their fascinating seed heads.

Your grandparents know that dandelions are deeply nutritious, both the roots and the leaves. Eat the leaves and flowers in the spring, and the roots in the autumn.

Dandelion leaves have an amazing array of nutritional benefits. Even their bitter taste is beneficial, which is an idea that takes some chewing on in our sugar-addicted culture.  

You can make, very simply at home, a medicinal tincture from dandelion roots (sorry 'bout the ads in this video).

Did you know that the word "officinale" in the Latin name for dandelion refers to its "official" use as a simple, safe, and effective medicine for a wide array of ailments?

Here is a great read on wild greens; scroll down to find dandelion near the bottom. Finally, I mention dandelions in the section on wild plants in this post.

Pepinos (Solanum muricatum)

Pepinos are related to tomatoes and potatoes, so they're similar, only tougher and don't seem to get as many pests or diseases. They can sprawl on the ground or be supported by a low trellis or cage. Super easy to propagate from cuttings and tolerant of neglect, although they will fruit much better with plenty moisture and mulch/compost top ups. Read more, and see pics of ripe fruit, here.

Taro and other water plants

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is an important staple food that grows in moist to wet conditions throughout the humid tropics. You eat the large corm at the base of the biggest plant, the mother plant, leaving the surrounding small plants in the ground to grow big in their turn. You can also replant the top of the mother plant. Taro is starchy and filling and can be eaten in many ways... search online for recipes and you'll find they're endless. 

In the pic above, you see taro planted in a wet area where our rainwater tank has a persistent leak. This was only planted toward the end of last summer, so it hasn't had much hot sunny weather yet to help it get going. 

And this (above) is taro planted in a container submerged in water. Its not looking very happy in this spot because its been cold. I'm hoping/expecting it to perk up as the weather warms up. 

You can learn more about taro here. 

Also in the pic above, floating on the surface of the water you can see azolla, which we grow as fodder for our chickens. Learn more about azolla here.

Finally, to both sides of the taro tub you can also see kangkong, or water spinach (also looking very sad and wintery after the unusually cold winter we've just had, but it will soon perk up). That's kangkong runners you see trailing out across the water, with leaves smaller than the taro but much larger than the azolla.

Kangkong is related to sweet potato and looks similar. You can learn more about kangkong here, and this article has a short video about growing  it in water.  

Another post I've written about water-loving food plants is "7 Steps to a Frog Pond That Also Grows Food."

Taro safety note: There are many, many plants with similar "elephant ear" shaped leaves to taro. Some are edible and some are poisonous. There is a great deal of confusion on the internet about their names, and I would love to learn more, especially about how to identify them effectively as they all look similar to the untrained eye.

Please, when you grow plants that look anything like these for eating, do what we did and get your propagation material from someone who has been eating it themselves, and whom you trust to be providing you with the correct plant.

Also, all parts of the taro plant must be cooked to make them safe to eat. 

(There is one exception, with the common name of celery stem taro or tahitian spinach, which we have in our garden. We put the stem of this one in salads, uncooked, and have had no trouble with it. But if you try this, again: get your planting material from someone who is already eating it raw; don't find out the hard way that it was the wrong variety!)

Modular veggies

I'm finishing this post with a couple of pics from our "modular veggie garden," which has lots of things in it but especially any European veggies we grow, because its set up to allow for netting to protect from insects.  You can learn more about our modular veggie project, here.

The reason I call them "modular veggies" is because I love the idea of taking care of one or a few barrels at a time, in small chunks of effort, rather than having to maintain a large annual garden area. We tried that in this earlier, larger veggie growing project, and found that we couldn't sustain the care it needed. 

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below

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