When less is more, do more with less

Versatility is king for small operators.  “It slices, it dices, it juliennes!”  Every tool on a half-acre homestead has to do more than one thing, including the plants.  Our grape vines, for example, produce grapes, but they also provide shade in summer, cutting our cooling costs by soaking up the sun before it has a chance to hit our western exposures.  Our blackberry vines provide copious quantities of fruit, and also provide a thorny border demarcating our property line – an important consideration in a neighborhood which used to treat our property as a pedestrian highway.

There are all sorts of other multi-functional plants, many of which we have in our garden.  Legumes (beans and peas) provided tasty meals, but also bind nitrogen to the soil for following crops in future seasons; amaranth provides grain, but it also chokes out the grass which is the natural enemy of our anti-turf family.  Sunflowers provide seeds, and they also feed our native bee population; we are putting in bees this year, which will provide us with honey, and will also pollinate many of our plants.

January means seed-catalog time, and we have spent our fair share of time going over heirloom seed catalogs with a fine-toothed comb, looking for just the right combination of productivity, versatility, health and vitality on the part of those things we are going to add to our garden this year.

The major addition, of course, will be several varieties of amaranth, which we have spoken about at length for many months now.  A couple of other interesting new crops, however, we have only mentioned in passing, and we did not find either in our catalogs.  We have had to special order mucuna pruriens, better known as velvet beans, or cow itch.  We are also planting cyclanthera pedata, better known as caigua in Peru, or lady’s slipper in Britain.

Neither of these delectable veggies is a mainstream crop in this country yet, but we hope to change that one seed at a time.

Velvet beans will serve several important functions in our garden.  First and foremost, this plant has historically been a significant ground-cover in the Florida tomato industry, only having lost favor in the last several decades as a caterpillar specifically attracted to the mucuna vine gained prominence, and then began attacking several other cash crops in Florida.  Having reviewed the literature, we believe the risk of pests was overstated, exaggerated by the tendency to monocrop, rely on pesticides, and just generally mess with Mother Nature.

On the other hand, using a vigorous leguminous vine like mucuna not only adds nitrogen to the soil, it chokes out unwanted weeds, provides groundcover to hold topsoil in place, regulates soil temperature, nourishes beneficial soil microbes, chokes out harmful soil microbes, and gives shade to tender leafy vegetables during the harshest times of day during the hottest parts of the growing season.

In addition to all of these agricultural benefits, mucuna has the advantage of being a tasty source of protein and several essential nutrients, in addition to being useful as a medicinal herb.  Mucuna seeds contain from 20-35% crude protein.  The ‘itch’ from ‘cow itch’ comes from the hairy seedpods (which are also where the ‘velvet’ in ‘velvet bean’ comes from).  These hairy seedpods are high in serotonin and mucanain, which, in addition to being neurologically significant, also cause a mild allergic reaction – in fact, itching powder used to be manufactured with velvet bean seed pods.

The beans themselves also contain high concentrations of levodopa (L-DOPA), a direct precursor of the neurotransmitter dopamine.  This makes velvet beans a potentially important part of the diet for anyone battling depression, parkinson’s disease, erectile dysfunction, low libido, or anxiety disorders.  Lucid dreamers have also recently taken a fancy to mucuna, which complicated our search for seeds greatly – most of the mucuna for sale on the market is not in seed form, it is in herbal supplement form, which does a gardener no good whatsoever.

Caigua is another vine we will be growing this year, and it has a lot to offer, as well.  Curcurbits do very well in southeast Texas, and Caigua is essentially just another cucumber, so we expect it to flourish.  What makes caigua special, however, is its potent blend of phytochemicals – peptin, galacturonic acid, dihydroxitriptamine, pierine, resins, phosphorous, thiamine, ascorbic acid, lipoproteins, systosterol and 3 beta D glucoside, low density lipoproteins, and God only knows what all else.

Inca-period pottery and artwork often depicts caigua; it has been an important vegetable for a long, long time.  Taken in conjunction with the herbal supplement Hercampuri, caigua reduces blood cholesterol levels, rejuvenates skin, and reduces cellulite.

What makes caigua less popular outside of Latin America is uncertain, although it is a little unusual as a cucumber – the closer it gets to being ripe, the more “hollowed-out” the fruit becomes.  The seeds end up clinging to an internal membrane that looks suspiciously like that of a bell pepper.  And by a remarkable coincidence, that is basically what caigua tastes like.  In fact, one of the more popular ways of serving this vegetable is in the form of a caigua rellena – similar to the tex-mex dish chili rellenos.

We think there will probably be a lot of other things we can do with it, however, limited only by our imaginations.  After all, vegetable gardeners in England have recently fallen all over themselves acquiring cyclanthera pedata seeds, and if an English cook can think of something to do with it, surely anyone can do so.  Finding seed, in fact, was fairly easy because even though caigua has not yet hit the market in the U.S. in any major way, enough growers worldwide are interested in this vegetable that we found a variety of sources to order from.

We will be curious how it grows, though, because scouring the web for samples, we encountered several distinct varieties.  Some look benign enough, like small squash leaves on a trellised vine.  Some, however, have sharp multi-folate leaves that look… um…. well… a little ‘irie’, if Jah know what we mean…

Which brings us to the plant we will not be growing in our garden any time soon, though it has many multifunctional qualities which leave every other plant we have ever heard about completely in the dust.  In our collective shortsightedness, our society has demonized this plant, which has the potential to singlehandedly resolve our national debt crisis, close the trade deficit, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sequester many tons of carbon, improve nutrition, save forests by providing a cheap new source of paper, give new life to the domestic textile industry, and a whole host of other beneficial things.

We are talking, of course, about cannabis.  There are actually three different species of plants which could be called ‘marijuana’ – cannabis sativa, cannabis indica, and cannabis ruderalis.  All three contain some amount of the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol, or “THC”.  However, while this has become the focal point for how this plant is utilized by humans, it is really the tip of the iceberg.

By attempting to legislate the plant out of existence, though, most nations of the world have instead merely incentivized the breeding of plants with higher and higher concentrations of the very substance which they were attempting to outlaw.  Even so, as the graph you see here shows, there are plenty of substances both more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana – many of them are legal.  Can you say “hypocrisy”?

In colonial America, virtually every significant farming operation involved the production of massive quantities of cannabis, typically just called “hemp”, for industrial use.  Highly adaptable as a material to make rope, cloth, and even bricks, pressboard, and other construction materials, cannabis was in part quite literally responsible for the making of our nation.  Thomas Jefferson’s plantation owed much of its profitability to this plant, as did the farms of many of our other founding fathers.

We wonder, in addition to the many industrial and pharmacological uses of this plant, what might be done with it in the kitchen, if only it weren’t illegal and therefore too expensive to use.

Cannabis sativa has both sweet and savory overtones which, we think, would make it great in salads, in addition to being a pretty good seasoning.  It would unquestionably provide good silage for livestock.  It grows densely, but without being too demanding on the soil.  It is not a water hog; it provides plenty of shade, and is an excellent groundcover.

And legalizing it would turn a lot of criminals into gardeners.  We can’t think of any single measure that would be more beneficial to our society than removing pot from the category of ‘gateway to violent criminal school’ into ‘introduction to the wonderful world of backyard farming’.

Ah, well.

We’ll stick to the weird plants you don’t get in trouble for growing.

Happy farming!