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Hardy kiwi plants can yield upwards of 100 pounds of sweet, nutritious fruit annually. Grower Jim Gilbert of Northwoods Nursery refers to them as “candy on a vine.” Photo by Peter szymczak

By Peter SzymczakEdible gardening has been on the

rise for a while now, as consumers embrace the idea of growing their own food and knowing where it came from. But once they have grown the standard things — potatoes, blueberries, apples, spinach and other favorites — some are left hungering for different, healthier selections.

Ann Detweiler of Fry Road Nursery and Jim Gilbert of Northwoods Nursery/One Green World offer a host of inter-esting edible alternatives off the tra-ditional culinary radar. Many of these plants can be classified as “superfoods” — fruits and vegetables that contain

Nursery growers cultivate superfoods

that enliven and enrich the culinary

landscape

Exotic edibles

18 NOVember 2013 ▲ DIGGer

a high content of antioxidants, protein, omega-3, minerals, fiber or other essen-tial nutrients.

Health benefits from eating these so-called superfoods range from help-ing lower cholesterol and controlling blood sugar levels, to reducing the risk of heart disease and cancer, and even improving one’s mood.

Tuber-rific: yacón, ulluco and oca“As the nursery industry expands

into the culinary world, there’s tre-mendous growth potential,” said Ann Detweiler, co-owner of Fry Road Nursery in Albany, Ore. with her hus-band Mark Leichty. “Because we do retail, I see more and more people who

both find it entertaining and just feel good about incorporating edibles into the landscape. If you’re doing all this landscaping, why not grow a pretty blueberry that’s pink, or an elderberry that has variegated foliage, or a fig that is gorgeous on its own? It’s satisfying to go in the backyard and eat something.”

Detweiler sells a range of exotic edibles, from crosnes (Chinese arti-chokes) and ‘St. Thomas’ Pepino melons, to different varieties of turmeric and edible canna. But one plant that has proven especially popular is yacón (Polymnia sonchifolia), also known as Bolivian sunroot or Peru’s apple of the earth.

“It is probably our most often

▲ exOtIc eDIbles

Above: Ann Detweiler of Fry Road Nursery holds a variety of edible canna in her retail greenhouse.Photo by Peter szymczak

Inset: Oca (top) and ulluco (middle) are comparable in size to new potatoes. Photos by anne tanne

Right: Growing and harvesting yacón is child’s play. Even in poor soil, one plant can produce up to 10 pounds of tubers. Photo by jasonunbound

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ordered thing out of 700 items,” Detweiler said.

Yacón (pronounced ya-kon) is a South American tuber from the Asteraceae family that looks a bit like a potato, but tastes more like an apple. Most commonly eaten raw, its texture is comparable to water chestnut and jicama.

The plant grows fast and easily, up to 5 feet tall and wide, and survives even in poor soil. It has shown excel-lent growth at sea level, is resistant to heat, and is cold hardy to 5 F.

Fry Road Nursery sells the plants in 4-inch pots and as plugs. “Traditionally, the way of growing and propagat-ing has been through tubers, so we’re doing something new and offering it as a liner,” Detweiler said. “The first year, it won’t produce quite as much as a tuber, but still a good 10 pounds.”

She estimated the average yacón would produce three times the yield of a typical potato plant.

Yacón’s health benefits and pleas-ant taste have been appreciated by native Peruvian, Argentinian and Ecuadorean cultures for thousands of years, but only now are they finding a modern consumer base. Because of its high levels of inulin (a naturally occur-ring sugar), yacón has shown promise as an alternative sweetener for diabetics and as a weight loss aid. The human body has no enzyme to hydrolyze inu-lin, so it passes through the digestive tract unmetabolized, which means that yacón provides few calories.

It does, however, give sustenance to the souls of immigrants. Detweiler has shipped plug trays to home garden-ers of South American descent who have settled in Canada, Texas, Florida and elsewhere. “People want the pro-duce of their homelands,” she said.

Detweiler sells other tubers of South American origin, including ulluco (Ullucus tuberosus) and oca (Oxalis tuberosa), both of which were once farmed by the ancient Inca civilization. “They’re basically healthier, more sus-tainable potatoes that you can harvest all winter long,” she said. “It’s like

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having new potatoes from November through March.”

High in vitamin C, potassium and iron, oca (pronounced oh-kah) pro- duces brightly colored tubers with a complex flavor reminiscent of sweet potato, winter squash, carrot and pota-to. Most varieties have a slightly acidic taste, which has given them the nick-name “potatoes that don’t need sour cream.” Its clover-like foliage has an especially strong citrus flavor, too.

The greens of ulluco (pronounced oo-yoo-koh) work better as an edible, with a taste similar to spinach, yet more succulent texture. The tubers have an earthy, beet-like flavor. Hardy to USDA Zone 8, the plant dislikes excessive heat and overly rich fertilizer.

“If it gets too hot for too long, the plant goes dormant and tubers up, so they don’t get the greens on top,” Detweiler said. “Here [in Oregon], we’ve been in the 90s, but we don’t get really hot until the late afternoon, so they’ve been fine.”

Fruit-tastic: kiwi, pawpaw and sea berry

Self-described “fruit nut” Jim Gilbert of Northwoods Nursery/One Green World in Molalla, Ore. stocks more than 25 varieties of hardy kiwis and a dizzying array of other unusual fruits. Several fall under the superfood heading.

Health benefits attributed to eat-ing kiwis include improved respiratory function for asthma sufferers, reduced potential for blood clots, and protection against DNA damage leading to cancer — not to mention, they taste great!

“It’s candy on a vine,” Gilbert said, as he popped into his mouth one of the bite-sized fruits from one of his most popular kiwi varieties, Anna (Actinidia arguta). Native to Asia and Eastern Russia, the vine is hardy to minus 25 F, pest and disease resistant, and can yield upwards of 100 pounds of fruit annually. The skin of the fruit turns a blushing shade of red when it has light exposure, adding to its appeal within the edible landscape.

“I like to tell people that they

haven’t figured out how to digitize food yet, so there’s no danger of fruiting plants going out of style,” Gilbert said. “People have to eat, and the recession is what really propelled people into growing their own food again. There’s so much interest in healthy food, and homegrown food is tastier, since you pick it when it’s ripe, not when it can be shipped.”

A good case in point is pawpaw (Asimina triloba), a native American fruit that can spoil quickly and turn an unsightly brown during shipping. Its soft, custard-like flesh is reminiscent of a banana-flavored avocado.

“It’s not like an apple that you can just dump out into a bin,” Gilbert remarked.

The greenish yellow, 3–6-inch long fruit, which can weigh up to ½ pound or more, is exceptionally high in protein and a good source of vitamins and min-erals. Pawpaw was a significant part of the Native American diet and provided important sustenance for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. What should be a signa-ture food of the pioneer West is virtually unseen on grocery store produce shelves.

“We’re probably the biggest paw-paw nursery in the world, yet they’re not even grown [commercially] on the West Coast, although they should be,” Gilbert said.

Another plant Gilbert champions is sea berry (Hippophae), a vitamin- and antioxidant-packed fruit that already has an established market in Germany, Eastern Europe and China but is largely unknown in the U.S.

As an ornamental, sea berry has spindly, gray-green foliage that flesh out in the fall with broad swaths of bright orange clusters of berries. The fruit is high in vitamins C (about seven times more so than lemons), A and E, and has a mouth-puckering tart flavor which, when sweetened, makes deli-cious juice — just like cranberries. The fruit is also unique for its oil con-tent, which is used as a treatment for burns, skin diseases and ulcers, and also in cosmetics.

Despite all its beneficial attributes, sea berry has yet to catch on as a commercial crop, probably due to the challenges of harvesting the fruit. Berries adhere strong-ly to the thorn-covered limbs.

▲ exOtIc eDIbles

Above: A ripe pawpaw, sliced open to reveal its inedible seeds and custard-like flesh, similar in texture to avocado but tasting more like banana. Below: Fruit on a tree at Northwoods Nursery in Molalla, Ore. Photos by Peter szymczak

Laden with vivid orange fruit in the fall and extending into winter, sea berry spruces up the edible landscape. The berry clusters can be harvested and made into vitamin C-packed juice, jam or sorbet. Photo by kostya tykva

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Gilbert has found the easiest, yet labor-intensive method is to prune whole limbs from the shrub and then freeze them. This allows the berries to be shaken off — a doable endeavor for the home gardener who just wants to make a few pints of jam or gallons of juice.

Future of homegrown superfoodsIn a retail garden center, selling

fruiting plants is different from flowers or ornamental plants. “People aren’t buying the plant for what it looks like then,” Gilbert said. “They’re buying the apple pie, so to speak — the kiwi milk-shake, the pawpaw ice cream.”

The biggest challenge is giving home gardeners the information to know how to grow these plants. All the fruiting plants mentioned by Gilbert, for instance, require both male (for pol-lination) and female plants, which bear the fruit; and they require patience — anywhere from 2–4 years before they become fruitful.

“The knowledge of how to grow fruit seems to have stopped with our grandparents’ generation,” Gilbert said. “People nowadays have a tendency to baby them, use the best fertilizer, overwater them. They need to learn to adapt to their environment, or the plants will grow too big and too fast, and won’t bear fruit.”

Detweiler shared the same senti-ment. “Too much watering is the big-gest danger,” she said. But given the plants’ potential of producing abundant crops of nutritious food — and eye-pleasing decoration — the time, effort and education are well worth it.

“I would love to propagate for grower retailers and wholesale growers to introduce these plants to home gar-deners, so that they become as assumed a part of somebody’s garden as tomatoes or potatoes or peppers,” she said.

Peter Szymczak serves as publications assistant for the Oregon Association of Nurseries and as a writer and art direc-tor for Digger magazine. He can be reached at pszymczak@oan.org.

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