One of My favorite perennial vegetables is the all-round, productive and long-lived spinach cousin Good King-Henry (Blitum bonus-henricus).
The species is already well-adapted to my garden and one population has been growing with minimal care (around 15 min weeding every spring) for around 5-6 years. I basically don’t have to garden and can just harvest. This is the gold standard for low-maintenance gardening.
My goals are:
Improved taste. Leaves and shoots have to be cooked and are otherwise too strong-tasting, bitter. There can sometimes be a soapy after-taste, I’d like to get rid of. Otherwise good, confident mineral-rich spinach-flavor. The largest genetic difference are in the vegetative parts (compared to generative parts like flowers and seed), so there is potential here.
Larger flower stalks. Flower stalks are one of the better crops on this plant at the flower bud stage (brocolli-ish), but still relatively small.
The seeds can be used as a quinoa substitute, are pretty easy to harvest, but could be even more productive.
Possibly more seedy, so it also self-seeds in the garden
Possibly inter-generic crosses (same tribus as Spinacia and many Chenopodium species are closely related too, e.g. Chenopodium quinoa for seed, Chenopodium album for raw leaves or color variations)
Balkan has the largest genetic diversity of this species and the native range extends into the Caucasus and Eastern Mediterranean. I will look for seed from especially this place. @Soeren has mentioned old monasteries as a source of improved genetics too.
Carol Deppe has done some breeding attempts on this species and many of her thoughts inform my approach.
I will just use this thread as a way to document my project and as a placeholder for thoughts and questions along the way. If anyone else is working on this plant, I’d love to hear and exchange of course!
Interesting Malte, I’ve tried for quite some years now, out of interest to grow it and only this year managed to squeeze out some survivors, They reluctantly grow in the hoophouse, i keep them away from snails. Could just be that it doesn’t like my poor granite soils, i remember reading somewhere that it prefers limey clay soils.
Do snails attack yours in spring? Or is it one of those plants that because of their big perennial rootsystem easily outgrow even the worst attacks?
I cannot say that I am working on this plant, but years ago I have planted it, lured by permaculture stories on how excellent it is. Unfortunately, its taste turned out to be discouraging but about a decade later this plant still grows in my garden, self seeding. If you want some seeds, I can try to collect them this year.
By the way, since my plants grow in dry, very sandy soil, they look like a poor cousins of the plant on your photo Less lush and even way less green.
My soil is limey clay, so that follows well what you’ve heard @Hugo. I find that humid soil is much better too and that it is not very drought tolerant. My soil tends to be very humid, so it is very well-adapted to my growing conditions. Leaves on the plant are pretty large and it easily outgrows grazing from the large slug population here. Growing-wise, it’s super easy for me here.
@WojciechG - how did you you prepare this plant: Which part did you eat, when and how did you cook it? (You have to cook it, irregardless of the permaculture milieu advice to eat it raw, I can’t understand why anyone would want to do that).
Then it’s probably a matter of what I’m talking about here - improving flavor. I do find it very useful already as you would use cooking spinach in dishes. But I always pair it with strong flavors (and fat, salt, acid). It would be nice to have a variety that could be used with less strong flavors.
All such leafy crops, with spinach being the most popular, we steam with garlic, salt, pepper, a little of sour cream and sometimes lemon juice. Kids add ketchup
I’m very interested in this crop. It was slow to establish but each little colony in my garden (Z5 NY) has been getting stronger every year. I love to sautee the flowering stems when premature as you would with broccolini. Yes, garlic and lemon juice! I don’t love the leaves. I have also collected the dry seeds to cook like quinoa but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Will report. Happy to swap seeds in the interest of improving leaf taste.
Have you made any progress? I was searching about lambquarters (of which I thought about opening another thread) and this came up. I had heard the name good king-henry, but didn’t really know anything more about it. It seems that it’s growing wild here (at least I think it’s the same) and is really hard to supress. Every year I miss some that grow big before I get to cutting them. Never tried them and I’m mostly interested about seed crops, but will try some leaves this year. With lambquarters I was thinking about pooling seeds from all over EU to make as wide mix as possible. Could be same with good king henry also. Maybe at first there could be couple of central hubs to make a hybrid swarm and then share from that to all who are interested. People could also just collect seeds even if they aren’t right now interested in growing them.
I haven’t worked much on this plant other than introducing new genetics more or less every year and noting down possible new places to source seed. I’ve planted a population at the chef school’s Participatory breeding field for culinary school I’m working on. So eventually we should be able to do selections for taste there. I’ve also brought it into the kitchen for chefs to learn about it.
I’m happy to hear you might want to work on this crop @JesseI and I’d be willing to collaborate if you will
Have you seen any clear differences, visual or in taste? How many and what kinda sources you got your seeds? When I googled about lambquarters, I found a paper about it in India where they discribed dozens of varieties and they looked very different from one another. Not sure if there has been already a lot of worked to breed those or if they were varieties that had already possibly centuries of selection. It’s still encouraging that so big changes are possible. Similarly as native american were able to increase the size of the seeds considerably.
I would say I’m sligtly curios and apprehensive at the same time. As they grow as weed, that makes it little hard to select when you have volunteers popping up from those that were discarded from selection. But the options for new seedcrops are limited here. I have been thinking about amaranth and quinoa, but those need longer season so starting from species that already does well makes it in one way easier. Also quinoa looks so similar to lambquarters that it would be impossible to weed unless first had selected for colour to distinguish them from lambquarters.
Also I find it interesting goiung from wild and making a completely “novel” (at least almost) crop. Trying to tease out those small differences, like going through the seeds with sieve and trying to find that needle in a haystack little bigger seeds. As the other plot in my survivor plot is going to mostly not in use, I would have a lot of space to use for it as well.
I haven’t gotten to selecting anything else than ability to grow well were I am. They are certainly not weedy here the species I am talking about - Blitum bonus-henricus. Note that what is called lambs quarters is a different genus from a different tribe (Atripliceae). Blitum is more closely related to spinach (Spinacia) as far as we know today.
Weedy I mean that they volunteer and take up space from crops that I want to grow. Have to consider that my plot is tilled every year so all the seeds and the seedbank is evenly spread out every season. So maybe they don’t spread as much with no till.
I certainly don’t know the species well to identify it well, but all the pictures that I have looked make me think that it’s just that. I have to look into it more during this season. I could also look through old pictures to see if some are clearly visible there.
This is what I could find from pictures. Google search gives some that look very similar and some that look less similar, but I wonder if the latter is because they are from domesticated populations? Most look similar to what is growing on my plot. At times they are a lot bigger if they have had good conditions.
That doesn’t look like Blitum bonus-henricus. Are these perennial plants?
Chenopodium species are very weedy here too. I like to eat them, so I am not bothered much by them. But very different growth habits from Good king henry.
Those look like in the link below. In my picture they might not be as lush or tall, but at places they can get to meter tall and are a lot more lush. The google search pretty much gives 2 phenotypes, which is why I was thinking that one is domesticeted type and other more wild type, or both are different forms of domesticated. I don’t know what could be possible lookalikes. I’ll get better pictures during summer and let some grow to full size.
Now that I looked at the observation map for finland, there were some at the area although not right where I’am. I do doubt that all observations are marked. This has area has been cultivated for decades so it might be from there.
I found that atriplex is supposed to be easily confused to good king henry and atriplex prostrata does look similar, but I still couldn’t say that it is that. There also might be several species in my plot that I think are the same and so my memory might be mix of several species.
Sounds like it would be better that you come back when summer comes with better images. Until then, I assume the plants you’re talking about are more likely Chenopodium species and not Good king henry.
Less lush and even way less green.