Pignut
- Thread starter TeeDee
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Roast them like nuts and munch 
or they slice up crisply and are a bite in a foraged stir fry.
Good food, tasty and nutritious....if you find them on friable soil, or grow them in a big pot
or they slice up crisply and are a bite in a foraged stir fry.Good food, tasty and nutritious....if you find them on friable soil, or grow them in a big pot
Roast them like nuts and munch
Good food, tasty and nutritious....if you find them on friable soil, or grow them in a big pot
I have ordered a shipment of seed to try colonizing a large growing area.
Try the pot, it's worth the bother.
First year you'll just get some low growing leaves.....and not worth disturbing for the nut.
Second year they'll come up taller and you might get white flowers, nut's still pretty small. Definitely pignut though.
Third year you will get flowers and you will get a nut worth munching....and seeds scattered and will come up where you don't expect them. Mine managed a four foot stretch into the ground under the blackcurrants, and I have no idea how they got there.
I dug on an Iron Age farmstead site in the Lake District. It was a sodden wet stoney field full of rushes, etc., and dug up so many pignuts I was fed up eating them.
Farmer said they'd always grown there for as long as he'd lived and he was in his late fifties then.
Mine self sow in the gravel path and happily come away. I transplant them because they're trapped above the semi-permeable membrane, but it's a good nursery for the seeds.
Best of luck sowing loads of them That's a legacy
First year you'll just get some low growing leaves.....and not worth disturbing for the nut.
Second year they'll come up taller and you might get white flowers, nut's still pretty small. Definitely pignut though.
Third year you will get flowers and you will get a nut worth munching
....and seeds scattered and will come up where you don't expect them. Mine managed a four foot stretch into the ground under the blackcurrants, and I have no idea how they got there.I dug on an Iron Age farmstead site in the Lake District. It was a sodden wet stoney field full of rushes, etc., and dug up so many pignuts I was fed up eating them.
Farmer said they'd always grown there for as long as he'd lived and he was in his late fifties then.
Mine self sow in the gravel path and happily come away. I transplant them because they're trapped above the semi-permeable membrane, but it's a good nursery for the seeds.
Best of luck sowing loads of them
That's a legacy
As Toddy says, great in stir fry - treat them like water chestnut. It's not surprising I react to them, I get a milder reaction out of raw carrot now.
I'm lucky, my wood is full of them
I'm lucky, my wood is full of them
Nah, not when they are growing like proverbial weeds. You just turn the soil over with a fork and pick them out - none of the following the stem down to the tuber
Just going through some older foodie threads and found this one.
Now I know what Tengu is saying about being a faff to harvest they certainly can test ones patience.
Which is a shame because they are a tasty good sized treat which I would guess provides a reasonable amount of calories as many tubers do and have a good taste and bite that if were available on a more commercial scaled basis could appeal to a larger market .
Which made me think. Would it be possible to create a structure that one could seed with Pignut seeds that would allow easy to harvest?
A vertical dual layered sheet - coir mat on one side , finer mesh on the other with rich compost inbetween - a sort of thin vertical twin sided sheet of pignuttery goodness?
Seed. Easy to collect and grow. I would just grow in a pot of sieved compost and knock the nuts out in the autumn after a couple of years growing.
It took you four years to think of that?
Indeed. Proper Devon lad me. Can't rush these things.
Grow them in pots as @slowworm said. It works, I've done it for years. Deeper the pot the better, sandy mix seems to suit them fine. I just scatter gravel on the top of the pot, shake over some of the seeds from that year's dried flowering stems and let them get on with it.
First year it's not worth harvesting, just green fronds a couple of inches high. Second year you 'might' get flowers, and there are peanut sized nuts, but third year they're well worth harvesting.
If I had room though, I'd grow them in something like a deep cold frame and just leave them in peace.
They take time to make something worth eating, but they are good eating.
First year it's not worth harvesting, just green fronds a couple of inches high. Second year you 'might' get flowers, and there are peanut sized nuts, but third year they're well worth harvesting.
If I had room though, I'd grow them in something like a deep cold frame and just leave them in peace.
They take time to make something worth eating, but they are good eating.
I HAVE grown them in pots and also grown them on some land - I was just thinking that there would be a more intensive ( is that a nasty word when it comes to plants?? ) way in a more efficient manner and one that would make harvesting a wee of papaya.
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