With a name just as pretty as its flowers, this hibiscus relative produces sweet-tart “fruit” that taste like cranberries! Delicious in sauces, syrups & drinks, easy to grow and, unlike true cranberries, no bog required!

Know it:

If you’re plant savvy, you may notice that Roselle flower looks a lot like hibiscus flowers. Gold star for you! Roselle is in the same tribe as many other well-known plants including Okra, Ornamental Hibiscus, & Rose of Sharon.

See the family resemblance? Roselle’s on the left, Althea is in the middle and Okra is on the right. Roselle is a member of a the mallow family, which are a very useful group of plants. To name a few more, there’s cotton, hollyhocks, and marsh mallows. No, not the squishy confection: Marsh mallow is a plant that was the original source of the marshmallow candy’s flavoring! (But that’s a plant for another day.)

Roselle originated in the Old World tropics, although there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on whether it comes from Asia or Africa. Regardless, its tropical origins mean that this plant can take the heat — which we’ve got plenty of in Texas!

The primary use of roselle is for the fleshy calyxes that it produces around the seed pods after the flowers drop off. A calyx is the sepals of the flower, which in most other plants look the green outermost petals. Here a photo on the difference between petals and sepals:

For the Roselle plant, however, after the plant blooms and the petals drop off, the sepals swell and turn a deep purplish-red. They’re rather like thick and juicy, sour and sweet flower petals. If you’re a botany/fruit nerd, this qualifies roselle as an “accessory fruit,” like strawberries.

In addition to the “cranberries” it produces, the leaves and flower petals are edible as well. The leaves have a bit of a sour taste, much like other plants commonly known as “sorrel”

Another use of roselle that is worth mentioning is that young roselle plants are grown for bast fiber production. The rough fiber can be used to make rope and a rough fabric that can substitute for materials like jute in making burlap.

Meet it:

If you want to get your hands on some Roselle — you’re in luck! It turns up quite a lot in different products, but it’s usually sold under different names.

You can buy the dried “flowers” (technically the calyx, remember? Not a flower) at most supermarkets under their Spanish name: Flor de Jamaica. (They’re usually near the dried chiles)

You can also sometimes find them canned in syrup. They’re usually marketed for making cocktails, usually under the name “hibiscus flowers.”

Hibiscus flowers? Yep! This is plant is the source of that hibiscus tea that a certain Seattle based coffee company made an expensive drink out of!

Roselle tea (technically a tisane) has actually been enjoyed in a multitude of countries all over the world — long before corporations were making pretentious beverages out of it.

Grow it:

If you want to get this plant on your hands to grow it, you can find the seeds online (I bought mine from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.) You can also get the seeds from a friend! It’s also possible to take cuttings, if you know how to do so.

Roselle needs a long growing season, a lot of sun, and a lot of space. Once it’s off to a good start, it’s really not fussy about where it grows.

It’s a good plant for an area that you may not access as often as others, or where a water source is a little farther away. It’s a great edible ornamental plant!

Unfortunately, the edible leaves have been a favorite of deer in my neighborhood. So if they frequent your area, don’t be surprised if you find your plant chomped down to bits!

In my own experience, I’ve seen Roselle survive without irrigation in shallow, rocky soil with few amendments other than a little mulch on top. I was very impressed! I can tell you that very few plants can survive those brutal conditions.

Of course, you don’t want your plants to merely survive, you want them to thrive! The more organic matter you have in your soil, and the more water you give them, the happier they will be! And happy equals a bigger harvest.

Here’s an important thing to note, however. This plant is day-length sensitive. That means it won’t start making flowers until the days shorten. In summer, when days are long, all this plant cares about is growing as big and strong and healthy as it can. But once fall comes, and the days shorten, it loads up with flowers and subsequent calyxes.

Eat it

You can eat the leaves, flower petals, and the red calyxes of the Roselle.

The leaves are used as a leaf vegetable. I haven’t had the chance to cook with them much, but I have tasted them. They have a sour taste, much like several unrelated plant species that share the common name “sorrel.”

But the best part is the calyxes, which need a little more processing than cranberries do. Calyxes surround a seed pod that resembles a small rounded okra (which, technically, are edible as well, but I remove them to avoid making the final product mucilaginous; I’ll experiment with leaving them in another time).

Turn the calyxes into “cranberry sauce” or syrup, or dehydrate them for later use. They also freeze well.

This little known tree is a superfood on steroids! Fast growing and highly nutritious, this incredible plant has the potential to banish malnutrition abroad and bolster food security at home. And yet, I bet you’ve never heard of it.

The plant I’m talking about is Moringa Oleifera, commonly just referred to simply as “moringa.”

This plant boasts an impressive list of nutrition facts. According to the USDA 100 g of raw moringa leaves contain almost twice the protein of yogurt, more vitamin C than oranges, and about as much potassium as bananas! That’s just the tip of the iceberg — they’re bursting with lots of other vitamin and nutrients. Dried and powdered, the leaves can be stored long term as a powerful dietary supplement.

It’s not just about the leaves, though! Every part of the Moringa oleifera tree is edible.

It’s known by a ton of other names like Ben tree, Horseradish tree, Drumstick tree, and “The Miracle tree.” It has names in other languages as well, but the one you’re most likely to see in the U.S. is “malunggay,” –its name in the Philippines.

“Wow, Ted, this plant really does sound like a miracle tree! Where do I find it?” you might say.

Sadly, the fresh leaves of this plant are not easy to find in a grocery store. I’ve seen it occasionally at Asian markets, but it’s not very common. Here at Viridian, we sell fresh shoots, leaves, and “beans”, when in season and and seeds and powdered leaves all year ’round in the San Antonio area.

If you got yourself some seeds and you’re interested in growing this miracle plant, check out the next section!

Grow it

I advise starting from seed, rather than trying to take cuttings. Moringa seeds germinate easily if you soak them overnight before planting.

Make sure that temperature is warm enough before you plant your seeds –this is a tropical plant so it needs plenty of heat to grow. If the seeds are planted in cool, damp soil they will just rot.

Like I said before, I soak the seeds in water for one up to to three days. They are large seeds and have a tough seed coat, so it takes the water a little while to make it through. This is an optional step, but I like to do it because it speeds up the process. They can take quite a long time to sprout if you skip doing this.

At this point you can directly plant the seed into soil or plant the seed into a small container. If you start in a container, it’s up to you how long you keep it there. You can plant it as soon as it has two pairs of leaves, or you can continue to put it in larger and larger pots and keep it in a container for life.

I plant these when they’re fairly young into my native soil with a heavy layer of mulch on top. In Central Texas, you can get these guys started and still get a leaf harvest if you plant any time from late March to July or August.

These plants grow fast! They can go from this size:

To this size — in just a few weeks!

This tree grows so fast, it can easily grow taller than you can harvest. Once the tree is making leaves higher up than I can reach, I cut it down to a more convenient height, like so:

Another advantage of this is that it produces lots of side shoots, which are the tastiest part, in my opinion.

However, for you container growers, keeping Moringa in a container has a big advantage: you can bring it in for the winter. Moringa will die if it freezes. If you live in Central Texas, we get frosts here but the ground doesn’t freeze. If you cover the plants with a thick layer of mulch over the winter, they usually will sprout from the roots again the following spring.

Here’s a photo of a three year old tree that’s resprouting after the winter. You can see last year’s dead trunk in the bottom left

If you live in a colder climate than Texas, Moringa may still be worth growing as an annual for its leaves. You will have to plant more of it, and you’ll have to order new seed every year if the ground freezes and because the growing season isn’t long enough to allow the tree to make seeds.

Eat it

Like I said, just about every part of the Moringa tree is edible.

The tender young shoots can be eaten as a green vegetable — saute them with garlic and oil, grill, steam, chop and saute, etc. They’re similar to asparagus.

Young leaves can be used as a substitute for spinach (although they have a decidedly stronger flavor) sauteed, added to soups, stews, sauces, etc.

As the leaves get older, they get tougher and more strongly flavored. I think the best thing to do with the old leaves is to dry them. Strip the leaves and lay them on a dehydrator or on screens in the sun. Once dry, you can store them dry and whole, or crush into powder

Enough about leaves, what about the more exciting parts? Like… the flowers! The flowers are white with yellow stamens, and have a subtle kind of beauty.

The internet says that the flowers mushroom-like flavor. I don’t know about that, but they’re certainly tasty. Maybe I just haven’t had enough of them to saute at once.

The thin, young seed pods can be picked and used like green beans. They’re on the top of this picture (the leaves are on left.)

The roots taste are supposed to taste like horseradish, but I have yet to try this! Perhaps I’ll do a recipe for 100% homegrown cocktail sauce. Who knows!

Oh, and one more thing. the large seeds of the mature pods can be harvested, and pressed for a oil called Ben oil, used culinarily and cosmetically. This plant has so many uses that it’s hard to fit them all in!

Ok, ok, last thing. I promise! The ground seeds have been found to be effective at purifying water. The implications for this are pretty incredible.

This little tree seems too good to be true — fast growing, drought tolerant, and a provider of nutrients, protein, oil, and clean water. Invest in your garden and future food security and grow this miracle tree!

Look out Pumpkin Spice! Sweet Potatoes are here to steal the show this holiday season.

Know it:

Sweet potatoes are a native of South America, where they’ve been cultivated for around 3000 years, maybe even longer. But this plant was destined to make its way across the globe, with some help from its human allies.

There’s actually some interesting evidence that sweet potatoes were taken to Polynesia before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Here’s the theory: people from as far away as New Zealand and Easter island sailed all the way to the west coast of South America. That’s a long journey! Historians think that they made the trip in large double canoes, kind of like catamarans. They then brought sweet potatoes back with them! (along with some other things — but that’s an article for another day.)

But even if Polynesians were munching on them, sweet potatoes didn’t hit the big time until Europeans came to the New World. Columbus brought them back with him to Spain, and these plants started making their way across European gardens. In the years that followed, sweet potatoes traveled as far east as the Philippines and China. And they continue to be an important food source in tropical countries where their storage roots provide carbohydrates and their edible leaves supply nutrition.

Now let’s talk about commonly confused plants. There’s more than one plant that’s called potato. So how do sweet potatoes and true potatoes differ?

To start off, they’re not even related.

Well, not closely anyway. If you want to be technically correct (which is the best kind of correct) all plants are related. Heck, even you share more than 60% of your DNA with the overripe banana sitting on your kitchen counter!)

So what’s in a name?

Our word “potato” actually comes from the spanish word “patata”. If you’ve ever been to Spain, you know that that’s what they call potatoes over there. The word “Patata” came from “batata” a word that Caribbean people used to refer to sweet potatoes!

So it turns out that sweet potatoes had the name first! The Peruvian name for true potatoes was originally “papa,” which has passed directly into Latin American Spanish.

Sweet potato’s proper Latin name is Ipomoea batatas. Of course, there’s a whole laundry list of common names for it too: sweet potato, yam, batata, camote, boniato, just to name a few.

The one you may be familiar hearing is “yam”, especially if you’ve spent any time in the southern United States. This might leave you wondering if there’s a difference between yams and sweet potatoes.

As it turns out there actually is a big difference between the two, but in the United States both names are used to refer to the same thing! Confused yet?

WARNING: Soapbox alert

The correct name for these guys is in fact “sweet potato.” Not “yam”! You can, of course, call them whatever you want, but it will be a whole lot less confusing to the rest of us if we all get on board with calling them sweet potatoes. Why? Because as it turns out, the word “yam” actually refers to a totally different plant.

Yup. Even more distantly related than true potatoes are! True Yams are actually related to grasses and lillies, making them monocots. Sweet potatoes are dicots. (What’s the difference?) The roots do look a little sweet potatoes, but they are starchier and not sweet, and can get massive! They also have a more bark-like skin.

True yams belong to the genus Dioscorea, and there are actually many species of them. They’re distributed throughout the old world, although they are especially concentrated in Africa.

You almost never see yams in american supermarkets, though. This name mix up began when Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves. Having never seen sweet potatoes (How could they? They were an ocean away) the Africans started to refer to them as yams, which is understandable — they look pretty similar. The name ended up sticking and that unsavory piece of history is how we wound up with with all this sweet potato naming confusion.

So at this point you might be wondering, if sweet potatoes aren’t related to Irish potatoes, and they’re not related to yams, what the heck are they related to?

Morning glories! These guys are actually in the same genus, Ipomoea. You can see how similar their flowers look:

Meet It:

So, this article is about the most common plant I’ve written about thus far. Unlike more esoteric veggies I’ve featured, like Nopalitos or Malabar Spinach, US grocery stores carry sweet potatoes fresh, canned, and probably even frozen too. Fresh is the way to go, in my not so humble opinion. My thinking is that the closer a food is to its natural state the better.

I would venture to say that most people probably already know what a sweet potato is.

What you might not know, though, is that sweet potato leaves are completely edible, and are an important source of leafy greens in tropical areas. Some areas of the world actually grow sweet potatoes specifically for the leaves!

Some varieties are supposed to have better tasting leaves than others, which would make sense. I must confess, however that I have yet to try the leaves for myself. I know, I know, I gotta get on that.

Another thing you might not know is the wide range of beautiful colors sweet potatoes offer! More than just boring old orange, there are sweet potatoes for every color pallete, including yellow, red, white, and even purple! (which is the color that I grew this year)

These colors are a result of various plant pigments. Orange sweet potatoes contain beta carotene and the purples contain anthocyanins. I’m no doctor, but these chemicals that plants naturally produce are assigned a host of benefits, from providing vitamin A to neutralizing free radicals that can damage DNA and cause cancers. I’ve included some sources at the bottom of the article if you’d like to know more!

Grow it:

Sweet potatoes make an excellent groundcover, which has the added bonus of being completely edible!

You could try your luck with growing them vertically, which I’m usually a fan of, but I think that this plant is one case where it’s better to grow them on the ground. The stems produce adventitious roots which will end up making even more sweet potatoes for you!

You’ll need a long growing season, at least 120 days without frost. Sweet potatoes love sun and heat and take over during the summer when there isn’t much else that wants to grow. Just make sure they have enough water!

There are tons of different varieties of sweet potatoes to try growing. You can find the little plants, called slips, at nurseries, online, or you can do what I did this year: grow them from the grocery store!

Little slips are super easy to grow from store bought sweet potatoes! Just stick 3-5 tooth picks around and suspend it in a jar of water nearby a sunny window.

A word of caution though: pay attention to what side is up! You can usually find the side that the potato was cut on — that side goes up.

Here’s a great example of what NOT to do…

If you put the potato in the water upside down your potato will rot, which is not a pleasant experience for you, your guests, or your potato. You should also change the water every couple days or so to discourage rotting.

Soon you’ll have little vines growing out of the potato. These are the slips. Once your slips are about 6 inches long you can gently break them off and put them in their own jar of water so they make their own roots.

Voila! Now you’ve got tons of sweet potato plants to put in your garden!

I just went down to my nearest fancy market where they had several different types of sweet potatoes and picked the most expensive one — might as well grow the pricey ones! It was also purple which I thought was neat.

Sweet potatoes do produce seeds, but only in climates that are very warm. It’s just easier to propagate this plant is usually vegetatively through slips or cuttings. This also ensures that the potatoes stay exactly the same, genetically speaking.

Oh, by the way, even if you don’t like the taste of sweet potatoes, lots of them are grown as ornamental ground covers! There are a wide range of sweet potatoes with beautifully colored foliage.

Be careful if you live in a place where deer like to hang out. Deer LOVE sweet potato leaves and will eat every single one as soon as your back is turned. Try and grow them somewhere inside a fence

Your sweet potatoes are ready to harvest as soon as you get a frost! The leaves will die back and look terrible, this this:

You’ve gotta act quickly once this happens, do some digging and see what you can find!

Eat it

Sweet potatoes, as the name suggests, are sweet. This is because the starch is broken down by an enzyme which turns it into a sugar called maltose.

There are some varieties of sweet potatoes that actually turn up to 75% of their starch into maltose! This gives them a very moist texture and they’re so sweet it almost seems like they’ve been doused in syrup. There are also varieties of sweet potatoes that stay starchy, making them taste more like true potatoes.

Freshly harvested roots are also less sweet, because the enzymes haven’t started to get busy yet. Most of the sweet potatoes you can get in the stored have been allowed to cure, which helps with their sugar development and helps them heal any wounds they might have gotten during harvesting and shipping so they don’t go bad.

The curing process requires high humidity and temperatures around 80 degrees F for about two weeks, and then lower temperatures for about 6 weeks. It’s rather scientific sounding, and sounds like a great experiment for future Ted to mess around with… next year.

This year, I just put them in a paper grocery bag and put them on top of the fridge. I’ll give them a couple weeks up there and I’ll let you know how it goes.

The way you cook them also has a big impact on how sweet they are. Long, slow cooking times with moist heat gives the enzyme more time to work. If you want them starchier, cook them faster and hotter.

This is the first year I’ve harvested ones I grew myself! My plan is to use some immediately in starchier recipes, and let the others cure so that I can use them in some desserts.

Speaking of desserts, sweet potato pie is a delicious alternative to pumpkin pie. Lots of people even swear that it’s better than pumpkin! I don’t want to get into that debate, I’ll just say that there are strong opinions on both sides and leave it at that.

Now that we’ve talked about purple ones I’m going to end with one more plant that sweet potato is often confused with.

What?? another one!

I know, I know. This poor plant sure gets mixed up with a lot of other species.

“Ube” (pronounced ooh bay) experienced a explosion of popularity in the foodie scene a little while ago. It’s been used in ice cream, in dessert sauce, in smoothies, in drink, in waffles, in cakes, you name it and somebody has probably tried making an Ube version of it.

But is ube just another name for purple sweet potato?

Turns out… no.

Ube is a species of yam called Dioscorea alata. Like other true yams, fresh ube is rarely available in the U.S. It has bark-like skin and purple to lilac colored flesh.

See the difference? Now you know! So stop calling purple sweet potatoes ube!

I hope you’ve learned a little something about sweet potatoes! Join me next time for a new recipe! Purple sweet potato gnocchi!

References:

https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/CropFactSheets/sweetpotato.html

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/01/22/169980441/how-the-sweet-potato-crossed-the-pacific-before-columbus

https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2010/11/a-sweet-potato-history/

Perennial Vegetables by Eric T

On food and Cooking by