What are these thingies please?

[Miggimeggi]

I fancy a little veggie garden and so we are clearing another patch of the field that passes for the garden of our rented house. It includes a heap of what looks like old turves where someone before us has perhaps started to do the same job but got bored/tired, whatever. When we started to remove and shake off the soil from these turves I noticed that the roots were very similar to something I have seen in the veggie dept. at Carrefour. They are a bit like the corms of some flowers which grow a new corm above the old one each year but the whole thing is fresh looking and there are on average six or so of the slightly flattened balls on each one. They are quite small, a length of not more than two & a half inches and about half an inch in diameter and whilst they are not spiral they give that effect. The plants growing from them are grasslike but mostly dead or dying so difficult to identify. I expect I am making a complete idiot of myself and that they are simply just a variety of grass..... except that they look so very similar to the things I saw on sale in Carrefour.

Has anybody any idea what either or both of these things could be?

Anne

[chris pp]

Errrr, both.

There is a type of grass that grows like that and a type of wild onion family plant that doesn't flower.

Do the leaves smell when you crush them?

Chris

 

[Miggimeggi]

Then I think perhaps it must be the grass. There was not enough leaf left to crush, only to define the shape but brown and dead, however, when I scraped the bulb/corm/root thing it has a quite strong earthy smell like potatoes when you first dig them and not at all like onions.

Now I do definitely feel a bit of a twit but I have never seen that kind of grass root.

Thank you very much

Anne

[SaligoBay]

Anne, could they be topinambour?   A Google search will give you all sorts of recipes for them.

[Cassis]

You had me scratching my head over that one till I looked in the dictionary - you mean Jerusalem Artichoke?  Doesn't sound big enough unless they are exceptionally weedy specimens.

Here are some pics of JA roots.

[img]http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:ZvnjcYrDvOiwgM:www.uga.edu/rootandtubercrops/photos/jerusalemartichoketuber.jpg[/img]

But I don't know what it might be, either!

Phil

[Miggimeggi]

No, SB, not topinambour, I get those sometimes and they make scrummy soup. I have only seen them once, and I cannot remember what they were called, only that they were rather expensive. The skin on them looks like that of baby new potatoes, sort of translucent. I did wonder at the time if they were an exotic type of potato. I will look out for them again and if they turn up, will let you all know. I do think that the ones in our prospective potager are, as Chris suggested, and to my embarrassment, just a type of grass.

Anne

[JayJay]

Hi Anne,

I think it could be couch grass. I'm having a battle with that at the mo.[:(] If you don't want it to grow again, watch that you don't leave any of the rhizome/s behind.

[chris pp]

Have a look at this:

http://www.bayercropscience.co.uk/whiskycomp.aspx?sec=1039&con=1097&type=2&fn=output

I not sure if this is actually the one that I have come across, this is called "onion couch"

Chris

 

 

[Miggimeggi]

Oh dear Chris and Jayjay,that looks like the one although ours have more of the nodules than shown on the Bayer illustration. Most of them, 5 or 6. I am now fighting down the impulse to go with the attitude of "not our house, not our problem". What the hell? We are retired, what else do we have to do? Perhaps if we turn the garden into a showpiece the landlady will reduce the rent - giggle.

Now there just remains the question of the items we saw for sale at Carrefour, Libourne.

Anne

[Loiseau]

I am sure it's some beastly, tough grass.  I have often found those roots beneath extremely tough clumps of grass when trying to weed over-run patches of ground in the Vendee.  I too was very surprised when I first saw them.  We never had them on our London allotment - and we were specialists in most types of weed there!

Angela