The newcomer this week is celeriac, or celery-root. The leaves are like very strong-flavoured celery, good for making soup stock. The enlarged “root” is really the hypocotyl (How about that! Thanks, Wikipedia!), growing above the soil level, but with all those weird-looking roots anchoring it to the earth. Strange as it looks, it tastes wonderful, and since ours are quite small (and fresh!) I suggest that you scrub rather than peel them. Read more.
Also this week, some summer turnips (either the pink Scarlet Queen or white Hakurei), lettuce, tatsoi, potatoes, carrots, fennel, sprouts, some odds and ends, and ground cherries.
Our current favourite with ground cherries is to cook them with some sugar (estimate 3:1 ground cherries to sugar, by weight), a bit of lemon juice and lemon zest, and when cooled, add to plain yoghourt. Lovely…
I found this recipe for Ground Cherry Chutney on a food blog.
Harvesting went pretty well in spite of the rain. We are grateful to Julie and James, who helped out with the ground cherry and potato harvest on Saturday.
30/09/2009 at 9:09 am Permalink
The ground cherries were awesome! My 3yr old gobbled them all up the evening the basket arrived. I think peeling them was half the fun. (My 5 yr old was less of a fan, but liked the turnips).
30/09/2009 at 9:26 am Permalink
Kamé and Mateo can always be counted on to help pick ground cherries, though not necessarily to share them! They are a fun plant for kids too because they grow only a foot or so high, and the ripe berries fall to the ground. In a home garden you would need about 5 feet square for a plant, in a sunny spot, and you would get a good harvest.