Sick Wasabi

The hardest part of my project to explore ways of producing home-grown Wasabi has actually been getting hold of plants to grow. One supplier I found wanted $98/plant and another wanted me to sign a contract and set up a full-scale commercial production unit.

At last, I found a source of plants at a reasonable price ($8.80 AUD). The drawback is that I could only order one plant (apparently the last of their stock for the moment) and I made the mistake of doing this just before Christmas. The plant got caught up in the post and was in rather poor condition when it arrived.

The good news is that it appears to be making a slow recovery. However, I will be ordering another as soon as they have more in stock and hopefully this will arrive in better condition.

If you are looking for a good source of plants for a wide variety of herbs and food plants, here is a link to the site I found.

Wild Food Plants for the Garden

On a recent trip to visit my brothers in Queensland, we needed to make a quick stop and found a small park on the banks of the Richmond River at Casino in Northern NSW.

I had been reading about "Australian Wild Rice" for some years and had long been intruigued by the prospect of growing this unutilised food plant. Apparently this species (Potamophila parviflora) is genetically related to American Wild Rice (Zizania spp.), but is restricted to just a few river systems half a World away from its Yankee cousin.

I had thought of looking for this plant, which could easily become threatened by things like climate change and habitat loss, but was quite surprised to find anything even vaguely resembling it on our little rest stop. But that is what happened! I went for a quick stroll down to the river and literally walked straight into a plant seemed to have all the charateristics I had read about. (The photo above is the only reconisable one of this species on the Net - previously I could only find botanical descriptions).

To see if I had really found what I thought I had, I collected a piece and some seed. The available descriptions were not completely helpful, so I have had to spend many hours eliminating every other possiblility to be confident that this is actually Australian Wild Rice. I will have more about this plant on my website as soon as I have finished putting together more information.