This last year I’ve taken a lot of produce stubs from the supermarket or farmer’s market and stuck them in the ground. Basically, I use everything we’re going to eat and get down to what we would compost instead, and rather than use it for stock (which we could also do) or compost it, I lick the root(s) and stick it in the ground. I’ve done this with lettuces, cabbages, leek, celery, carrot, and more. I have a high failure rate, both immediate and delayed, but I have also had good or otherwise noteworthy results with lettuce, cabbage, and rutabaga. One of the best results I have had so far was unwrapping a savoy until it was a teeny tiny whole cabbage, rather than a cabbage base, before planting it. It has grown back significantly.
Setting aside the potentially murky genetics of cabbages of unknown provenance, this has me thinking about selecting for regeneration. While I’m guessing few people would go out to the garden, cut an entire kale plant off at the stalk, and expect it to do much more that season, I bet plenty of us extend our harvests by spreading out the burden of harvest among many plants where possible. I think we’d be quite happy if our plants recovered more quickly from damage, or if we could move the needle on the speed or quality of their recovery from catastrophic damage.
Is this something you’ve worked on before, or is it interesting to you? Is there anything in particular you might be inclined to try?
This is something I would find invaluable with root crops. I want to be able to pull them out of the soil, eat most of the root, put them back, and have them flower. It’s a challenge when you have to choose between eating the crop or getting the seeds – then you have no way to taste the crop to see if you WANT it to make seeds!
I would also find this valuable with kohlrabi. Mainly because it would be sweet to have cut-and-come-again kohlrabi, but also because – again – I could eat the yummy part, decide which plants taste the yummiest and should go to seed, and then let those grow back and flower and make seeds.
This is a great point! I bet you could use different cuts on your root crops to stagger your odds. And if you got enough that survived and ideally stress-bolted from the deep cuts, now you have an way to eat your breeding stock. If very little survives the deep cuts, you’ve got other lengthed cuts
Yeah. And if you’re selecting for shape with root crops (for instance, if you prefer long and skinny or short and fat), you’d need to be able to pull them out anyway, to determine which you want as the parents in your landrace’s next generation.
I like the idea of breeding for root crops that grow back vigorously after having most of their roots eaten, especially if they do so in order to immediately bolt and make seeds.
If you have a sufficiently long season, many kohlrabi (most? all? All that we’ve grown) suckers back with a cluster of 3-6 smaller bulbs (tennis ball sized) in about half the initial growing time if you harvest the first one leaving a thin flat disk (about what you’d trim from the bottom in the kitchen) behind.