Alright!
This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we have another exciting episode for
you.
Coming at you from my front yard garden, and as you guys can see, it’s December time,
end of December, and my garden is still raging now yes, I did have to pull out things like
the peppers and some of the other crops I have, but one of the things I like to grow
as a perennial vegetable is right up front, I planted it in the second bed probably about
a year ago or so now, and in the front bed maybe just like six months ago.
So what I’m going to do in today’s episode is actually harvest the Ashitaba seed, the
plant has fully matured and has gone to seed in about one year, and I want to show you
also the understory growth of the young ones, and also what I’m growing underneath the
Ashitaba that is going to seed so I can produce more food in the same amount of space, so
let’s head up to the raised bed and I’ll show you guys what’s going on.
All right, so what we’re looking at now is my Ashitaba greens or the plants that are
growing.
These were planted probably beginning of summer, and in this bed I planted them when they were
young, but I also planted some crane melons that produced quite well, but the crane melons
kind of like, all the leaf matter overtook the Ashitaba, so until I cut out the crane
melons, this Ashitaba really did not start to take off.
Now that the crane melons are gone and have been eaten, these guys are coming back full
force, so you know these guys I plant about every one foot, that’s really tight planting
I would probably recommend more like 18 inches to give them some space to spread out a little
bit but I wanted to try to fit as many as I could in there and these guys tend to overlap
a lot and really shade out the ground when planted this closely.
Now, these are all the greens and I want to stop there for a second, I mean many of you
guys may have never heard of Ashitaba you’re thinking “Ashiwhata?”.
Ashitaba.
Ashitaba is known as Angelica keiskei, it’s from the Hashigo Islands in Japan, so it’s
a rare version of Angelica, and actually I have another cool variety it’s like New
Zealand variety of angelica.
Tastes like crap though man, seriously.
They look cool.
It’ s also edible but this one is my favorite, literally I could just pick leaves like this,
take them and eat them like a salad.
Now to me, and your guys’ taste buds might be different, I mean I’m really used to
eating a lot of greens, like I just had straight dinosaur kale juice with cucumber juice this
morning, and it was mostly like dinosaur kale juice.
This kind of tastes like lettuce to me with like celery leaf overtone, so it’s like
lettuce with celery leaf overtones.
For me this is a really mild green although I did have a friend about several months ago
in the garden.
She tasted this and she’s like “That tastes bitter.”
I don’t get that at all, and of course your taste buds may vary.
But the greens, I like to just eat them young and tender, of course I also like to harvest
out the young little shoots as they’re coming up, that is actually my favorite part of the
Ashitaba to eat.
In addition you can also juice these nice long celery-like stems here through the juicer
to basically get all the nutrients out of the Ashitaba, so there has been a lot of study
on Ashitaba and it’s like really antioxidant rich, they have a lot of studies showing that
it can be helpful against may different common diseases of today, and I want to encourage
you guys to always, not to look at any one particularly healing plant whether it’s
Ashitaba or cannabis or gynura procumbens, or Okinawan spinach, which they say is good
for lowering your cholesterol, as like “the cure” right, to heal you from certain diseases
in the body, like I have a more holistic approach.
Instead of figuring out what’s going to heal you, why not figure out why you got the
problem in the first place and stop doing what you’re doing that caused the problem
in the first place and that’s where I think eating the foods out of your garden primarily,
fruits and vegetables are the best thing on the planet to eat, and in my opinion other
things that you may be eating, especially processed foods, junk foods, too much of animal
products may clog you up and cause health challenges.
So that’s why I advocate the greens, and to me, the Ashitaba is definitely one of my
top five healing greens in the whole wide world based on the research, based on how
it tastes, and of course in the stems you also have these things called chalcones.
Let me go ahead and rip a stem off here for you guys to show you guys what I’m talking
about.
So I just ripped a stem off and we’re going to go ahead and wait a few minutes, because
in a few minutes we’re going to see this really predominantly.
And what we’re looking at, you guys can maybe see that close up on the video camera.
If you guys look real close at that, it’s actually bleeding like a yellow sap.
We bleed red, the Ashitaba bleeds this yellow sap.
This yellow sap is known as chalcones, and this is one of the main reasons why I believe
the Ashitaba is so healing, it’s these chalcones that are not present in any other plant.
And I think it’s also important to grow your Ashitaba in the most nutrient rich soil,
so that the genes of the Ashitaba plant can fully express themselves.
I mean it was grown in an island in Japan, volcanic island with really rich minerals,
and it is said that Ashitaba grown in other places did not have the properties that it
does in where it was originally found and grown in.
And while climactic conditions may be one factor, I believe strongly another factor
is simply the nutrition that you’re dumping in the soil.
If you’re just putting MPK, or some cow manure, you’re not going to have the full
range of phytochemicals and phytonutrients that the Ashitaba could have because it’s
not getting everything it needs from the soil.
So what I like to do is I like to put in 70 to 90 different trace minerals in the form
of sea solution, or ocean minerals and also in the form of the rock dust.
All right yeah, so this is getting a little bit more yellow there as you guys can see,
and this is reason why I like it, I’ll just take the stems, break it off, mmmm, and chew
it.
To me this tastes kind of like sweet, kind of like celery, but like sweeter.
Mmmm, I could just eat this stuff all day long.
Kind of has like a, I don’t want to say minty but it’s kind of like a minty celery
flavor.
It’s quite good growing in this climate now, I am sampling these now in the winter
time, and many plants in the winter time tend to produce more sugars, which the sugars protect
them from the frost.
So they may be sweeter at this time.
These guys are probably going to grow maybe another six to eight months before they go
to seed, and as you guys can see this is the immature flower pods, let me go ahead and
do a close-up for you guys to show you guys what the immature flower pods, and as they
develop and then I’ll show you guys fully mature flowers that have turned into seeds.
All right so as you guys can see here’s basically the flowers, they’re starting
to bloom, I think they’re going to open up very soon.
And once they bloom, then actually the next step is they’re going to turn into these
little seed pod things that are green.
And it’s very important you know, Ernest and Julio Gallo said “I would drink no fine
wine before it’s time,” and I like to say I don’t want you guys to harvest any
of your seeds before they’re fully mature.
Especially if you’ve not grown this before you might think “Oh man these are ready.”
And “Oh it’s going to frost soon,” and we need to leave these guys on the plant to
fully mature and develop and dry on their own before harvesting.
Of course some of these guys are going to have some challenges, like if the plant’s
stressed out, like right over here in this bunch basically these seed pods, there’s
a few maturing on here, but it looks like many of these guys are just not going to mature
properly.
So next I want to show you guys a plant that actually probably not going to mature and
make proper seed pods and why.
So here’s an Ashitaba that I planted about six months ago, and it’s already going to
flower, setting seeds.
It’s pretty much stopped making any edible leaf matter for me to eat.
I’m going to leave it in to see what happens.
Now, if the plants are stressed out, and maybe they don’t get enough water or whatever
the reason is, then they’re going to want to try to reproduce as quickly as they can,
even though they might not be fully mature, it’s kind of like a ten-year-old having
a baby, right?
I think that really happens these days unfortunately.
They’re just not ready to have a baby, although their bodies physically can, and I believe
that’s due to maybe improper dieting, too many hormones and processed foods and junk
foods.
The plants while they’re younger may reproduce and make seeds, it may turn out or it may
not.
We’re going to just let this guy grow and see what happens.
It looks like it might turn into fully developed seeds and some may not.
And this guy is probably two and a half feet tall, and the ones right behind as you guys
can see are towering six feet, and they’re all in different stages of growth, so it’s
easy for me to come out and see “Oh these seeds are ready and these are not.”
I’m going to harvest only the seeds that are fully mature and ready, and just keep
letting the other ones hang out on the plants and grow and develop at their own pace.
Next I want to show you guys some fully developed and ready seeds to harvest and more importantly,
the reason I know why.
All right so as you guys can see I’m sitting underneath some of my Ashitaba plants right
here, and we’ve got some seeds that are ready to be harvested.
How do I know?
Well there’s one bunch that actually dropped off the plant, and check it out.
We’re going to show you guys these carefully, check it out.
You guys can see that?
These guys basically dropped off on this little ledge here, it’s been raining a lot so it
basically got wet.
And these guys sprouted and are starting to grow into new plants.
So I’m probably going to take these and transplant them into a bed to allow them to
grow up.
I think I’m going to dig them out and transplant them later to little pots or to where I want
them.
They do tend to transplant very easy, and I want to let you guys know that the Ashitaba
are very resilient plants.
I had some friends watering when I was away, and they forgot to water a little bit, and
most of my plants lost their lives except for the Ashitaba, it even went bone dry and
of course I have good soil and water holding capabilities with things like coconut koyer[?]
in there.
The Ashitaba lived.
This is one strong plant, it can handle some light freezes, it doesn’t like a super heavy
freeze, and more importantly it can handle 114 degree weather in the desert without a
problem.
So this is a very useful and important food crop, but more importantly than food crop,
also medicinal crop.
Next I want to show you guys a close up on these seed pods that have actually dried on,
and a more close-up of what one of the Ashitaba seeds look like.
All right so as you guys can see, we got all these Ashitaba going to setting the seed here,
and a lot of these seed pods are not yet ready, and in addition some actually are just starting
to produce some new flowers.
But here’s a bunch that’s ready, and I want to give you three indicators that they
are ready to be harvested.
Number one, it looks to me like the stem basically turns brown and dries out when it’s ready.
That lets you know that the seed is dried.
Another thing I like to do is just flick it.
Whoa did you see that?
When I flicked it I lost a lot of seeds man.
That’s value right there.
But yeah if you flick it, and the seeds come off readily, that means the plant’s ready
to spread those seeds, so I’m going to take these guys and spread it.
I love spreading seeds, especially the ones I make myself.
And these are some of those, so we’re just going to go ahead and take this and clip this
off, oops we lost a couple more seeds.
I think I just heard two indicators that the seeds may be ready, number one, the stem turns
brown, obviously the seeds are also brown, two you flick it they come off easy.
Another indicator that I’ve noticed just by observation because I’ve never harvested
these guys before, is that they’re going to get droopy.
So instead of being erect, it’s kind of like you after a night with your girlfriend.
And they kind of get droopy, and that’s when you know they’re droopy and they’re
ready to be taken out.
So these guys instead of standing erect they’re drooping down, and that’s another sign that
your Ashitaba seeds are probably ready to harvest.
All right so now I want to share with you guys what these Ashitaba seeds look like up
close.
Basically, I was looking at these, if you guys look at them really closely they’re
really a trip.
I don’t know if you guys can see that on the camera there, but to me these guys look
like little miniature sunflower seeds.
Kind of like how sunflower seeds look, and there’s a little coating on there, and you
remove this coating and the seed is attached to the inside.
I have heard that these can be hard to germinate.
You know simply they’re sitting on the ledge there, it got wet, and they germinated for
me, so I’m going to go ahead and try to germinate some of these guys so I’ll have
a second generation rock dust grown high nutrient content Ashitaba for me to eat and enjoy,
and more importantly to spread out these seeds to people.
Now I want you guys to be aware, this is one of those things like lettuce, right?
Lettuce has been hybridized a lot by man to have traits that we want, whether that is
an iceberg lettuce which will store for weeks, which in some cases is good because I like
to enjoy some iceberg lettuce that’s nice and crunchy.
But this is more of a wild food that’s grown and not hybridized as much as some domesticated
everyday vegetables you eat, and I want to encourage you guys to eat foods like the Ashitaba
and other wild foods, especially when they taste good like the Ashitaba to better your
health, and also, this is one of the most resilient plants that I’m growing in my
garden, and it also happens to be the healthiest.
So this is definitely one of the ones you will want to grow if you’re considering
it.
Be sure to check my other videos for other episodes on Ashitaba, and be sure to give
me a thumbs up if you liked this video.
Also be sure to subscribe to me if you’re not already.
And be sure to check my past episodes.
I have over a thousand episodes now covering all ranges of edible fruits and vegetables
and things that you guys can eat and more importantly grow at your home so that you
can increase the health of you and your family to live a more healthy, happy and vibrant
life.
Once again my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, until next time, remember keep on growing.