Horseradish—Edible Plant of the Year

Just over two feet long. I should have left the runners in the ground; they become new plants and aren’t as tasty. Oh well, at least 4 more to go!

My five years of outdoor gardening have proven a crapshoot. Indoors, I ran a hydroponic sprouter big enough to provide at least 40% of my food, grew medicinal plants from the world over and raised habanero bushes 3’ tall and bearing 30-40 peppers per. I naively thought the same results could be obtained outside with the same effort.

Squirrels, shade from a centenarian oak, extreme rain, high nighttime temperatures, and countless other complications have made it difficult to get consistent results. There have been just enough surprises to keep me going.

I thought when I planted 3 horseradish plants in spring of 2011 that I would have some roots to experiment with, but when I harvested my first one I learned a lot that I could have read somewhere—but it wouldn’t have been as fun:

The major (right, one leaf), the minor (note that tiny root needs to grow), and the poor sage that got between them.

1. Plants whose taproots are frustrated from direct downward progress will reroute as possible, which makes them a lot easier to harvest—but probably smaller. This took me an hour to dig up with minimum damage or disturbance to nearby plants, like this poor Dalmation Sage whose root bundle was cleft by the detoured taproot.
2. Horseradish plants spread by runners. As you can see from this photo, this 18 mo. plant sent out a runner that became another plant just 18 inches away, probably in spring or summer. I left that one in to harvest next year. I’ve found five plants but that may not be all.
3. I lamented tearing off the leaves to dig up the plant; they were the greenest and biggest thing in my garden this year. Against my better judgement, I nibbled on a young one, and found that it exploded with horseradish zest. Research yielded the consensus that the leaves are edible, with a small minority claiming they are poisonous—but a more credentialed majority saying they can be eaten young in salads and steamed or sauteed like collard greens when older. One post even claimed Hungarians stuff them like cabbage leaves. I can’t imagine that a member of the Brassica family (which includes broccoli, cabbage, radishes, mustard), widely sprouted and cultivated for vegetables, could have a dangerous leaf. Young ones taste like horseradishy young spinach, cooked adult ones have broccoli rabe’s bitterness with the toothsomeness of mustard greens. Yum! (May 2013 addendum: There is no horseradish taste to the leaves in spring.)
   

   Worms bloom. The trespassed-upon sage is at right.

4. The earthworms in my yard congregate around horseradish roots. As soon as I pitchforked the soil to loosen it, they emerged. I pulled five of the largest worms I’ve seen outside of the compost from the area immediately around the taproot.
5. Eating raw juvenile leaves made both a Guinness and a single malt scotch—three hours apart—taste like sandalwood smells.
6. The root is delicious grated into vodka. A Microplane works best. Friends came over for brunch the day after the harvest, and naturally we spiked our Bloody Marys with fresh horseradish by infusing it grated into the vodka for a couple of minutes. I tasted sandalwood again, but was alone in that. It was so exciting we took a shot-bottle of it to an Oktoberfest party later, where it was again marveled at.

Not many plants reproduce themselves, have edible young and old leaves of totally different characters, and provide a root that can be eaten raw as a condiment, in cocktails or – though it seems a waste – cooked as a parsnip substitute. As I eat sauteed adult horseradish leaves with golden tofu and sprouted black lentils in black bean sauce, I’m grateful for both the bounty of nature and the networked information that saved my 4 meals’ worth of leaves from the compost heap. Sorry, worms.

Billbored

What's that logo suffocating under that comm truck?

I’m finished with promotional materials masquerading as useful objects. Even donating your time you’re bound to accumulate some as “thanks”; a friend worked for a food donation project hosted by Barilla, and got a branded bag and a T-shirt that somehow ended up in my drawer. (These things are like bad pennies.) A bank gives you a T-shirt advertising the bank for giving them your personal info on a credit-card application: a twofer!

We save these items until they crowd out wearable clothes, then trash-bag them for “charity.” This guarantees that whenever we drive through an area replete with government housing, we see children frolicking in oversize shirts hawking sodas or airlines or discount sporting goods. Wearing this crap enables their parents to spend money on food or medicine. When they in turn give it away, threadbare and faded, it ends up in the Global South through the “rag trade” of clothing-by-the-pound, where it is beamed back into the Occident via late-night commercials promising help for harelip children or starving displaced peasants.

The final irony may be the garment’s retirement in its hometown. Production of promotional garments uses the cheapest of cut-rate textile labor—just check the labels of anything wearable and free, then look up the country of origin+sweatshop or +exploit or +”child labor.” So a shirt produced in a Honduras sweatshop may return to finish its days on a child in Talanga. Has so much value ever been wrung from an advertising farthing?

Among my idle fancies of usefulness: If I were to teach welding in the hood, I would teach young adults how to make bookcases out of kitchen sinks. This assumes good enough schooling and parenting that they would care about reading, and that they wouldn’t be too proud to use bookcases made out of scrap metal, itself an aesthetic of privilege—so never mind.

Oh, that's who. Note the T-shirt elastic at top.

Covering ads on free clothing would be a more fun and realistic thing to do, with a younger group, maybe as part of a larger arts workshop. I think explaining why endorsements should be covered would be most of the point, perhaps taking the angle that if Serena Williams and Kobe are getting paid so much to appear with those logos, why should you only get a XXL T-shirt big enough for a fort?

I recently discovered I could use Earth Safe Finishes’ gel medium to adhere patches to work clothes, and thought to re-message some hats and tees that I’d wear if they didn’t carry ads. ESF gel medium, intended as a paint base, actually works better as a fabric glue than anything I’ve used intended for that purpose.  I burn, cut through and dissolve a lot of fabric in my work, and have been able to join fabrics as inapposite as canvas duck to denim, or sheer polyester to wool/cotton blend. I’m happy that I can do this without VOCs or solvents, for what good is preservation if it requires further destruction?

You need only smear the covering fabric patch liberally with gel medium and press it over the logo or slogan, then wait about 10 minutes for it to dry. Then a few passes with a dry iron at 70% heat will fix the adhesive and secure it against wear, tear, washing & drying. It remains flexible enough for knees and soft enough for the inside of hats, but stronger than store-bought patches. An environmentally responsible product that’s more effective and versatile than comparable substitutes—this really is the 21st century.

Look at these nice soldiers helping some farmer with his cactus silo!

DIY Drycleaning

FDR's CCC, a New Deal program, at work building infrastructure. (Remember that?) My hat is the rightmost.

The approaching winter stirs memories of the prior one’s harshness, and has occasioned a breakthrough in vintage/surplus clothing rehabilitation.

I was trying to get several woolen items into wearable condition without spending hundreds of dollars. In an earlier post I investigated the merits of hydrocarbon cleaning for delicate old items, but I don’t have $50 USD every time headgear is too stinky to touch, let alone wear. And if headgear is $50 to clean, imagine what a coat would cost! I read a bit about various home cleaning solvents, and discovered bleach and ammonia are most effective at destroying mildew.

Years ago, I had used a 1:4 solution of ammonia and water in a clothes steamer to rescue a suit jacket too dirty to dryclean. A drycleaner would not have accepted it before my ammonia-steam-and-pat-dry process, so I thought of ammonia again because it doesn’t harm wool or, it seems, leather. But steam makes the wool smelly and slows the cleaning process.

I have a canvas & wool hat (above) from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a much-loved New Deal program that conserved and developed natural resources nationwide until 1942. Though unused, it smells like it’s been in damp subterranean storage since the Philadelphia quartermaster’s tag says: 1940. I sprayed it with undiluted ammonia, sandwiched it between two white terry-cloth towels, and pressed it piecemeal with an iron on 100% heat, no steam. I turned it inside out and did the inside as well. The towels absorbed the dirt, mildew and most of the fumes—ventilate as much as possible—and the hat emerged smelling entirely like ammonia and nothing else. After it had aired on a stick for a few hours, I could find no trace of funk or solvent on it.

In a short time I had similarly restored a 1942 jacket that would otherwise be unwearable. Both items not only smelled mildew-free, but clean, and of course did not shrink or deform. Both had become softer as well, probably having been stiff with dirt and/or tacky with mildew. This process works as well as drycleaning, evaluating strictly on odor and hand—but how else can you tell how clean your items are?

Olive Green: An Introduction

Gentle Reader, don’t flee this camo. These colors are, after all, used together to make the wearer one with the earth. This palette’s purposes (killing, control) are secondary. The flowers and peace sign of the ‘60s are freighted symbols too…don’t touch that logo, you don’t know where it’s been. Pacifist earthtones are just commodified camouflage.

Olive Green jubilantly evicts the postcolonial marionette from the acronym O.G. Gangsters are too collegial to be original. Olive Green deserves the acronym more anyway because it’s an anagram for GO.

OG is a worldview embracing environmentalism, but without any of its clichés or dogmas: carbon offsets as secular indulgences, the word “natural” used as “new and improved” once was, driving electric cars to be preachy in ignorance of how their batteries are charged because celebrities are doing it.

Olive Green is vegetarian for efficiency, but would kill and dress its own deer to face carnage with courage if it were to eat meat. OG was furious when the bulk bins disappeared from the co-ops shortly before Whole Foods bought them. OG remembers DIY as common sense: “economic” has its roots in the Greek oikonomikos, “practiced in the management of a household or family.”

OG is accountable. A personal example: I first started working with metal in assemblage sculpture, drilling holes in pieces of metal and bolting them together. I am a self-taught artist and knew my work was mere exercise. Admitting to the electricity I had consumed to produce valueless objects, I engraved the total drilling time into the base of each piece.

Olive Green embraces idealistic doubt and skepticism. Was the ‘60s a victim of its own innocence? The iconic peace sign, an inverted Elhaz (“protection”) rune, could mean vulnerability when overturned – we can’t let that happen again!

Most importantly, OG knows we are here, and together. History has shown we have every faculty and spirit needed to avert disaster; it also suggests that we probably won’t. The only struggle worth waging is for this earth and our unity, and its improbability doesn’t make it any less worthy. Anything less is desertion.