I bumped into an unfamiliar flower on a familiar walking route the other day and I wanted to make a quick note about it.
It’s Tragopogon pratensis, or possibly T. minor, but either way it’s in the delightfully named goatsbeard (salsifiy) family. The Wikipedia article has this casual throwaway sentence in it:
The roots can be boiled and eaten like potatoes.
I mean, you just can’t drop that kind of sentence and not talk about the implications. Goatsbeard just grows out in the meadows. What about the potential for domestication? How about we have a polyculture of Silverweed and Goatsbeard, then we just take a shovel and harvest spadeful after spadeful of excellent food?
Has anyone tried this plant?
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