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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Asafoetida
Ferula assa-foetida
Asafoetida is a giant desert umbellifer grown for the pungent gum-resin tapped from its root - sulphurous and sharp raw, but mild and onion-like once cooked, and used across Indian cooking as a garlic substitute and as an ingredient of Worcester sauce. The plant itself is edible too: leaves and young shoots lose their strong smell when boiled, the cabbage-like heads are eaten raw, and the roots are cooked after steeping out their bitterness. It grows for years on a single thick taproot before flowering once and dying, so a resin harvest depends on raising overlapping batches rather than one planting. It needs full sun, deep well-drained soil, and resents any root disturbance, so it is grown from seed sown directly where it will stay.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 7–10
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained
Vertical layer
Herbaceous- Soil pH
- 6–8
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 6.6 ft
- Mature spread
- 4.9 ft
- Plant spacing
- 2.7–3.3 ft
- Root type
- Tap
- Spread pattern
- None
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
- Locked ecological function
Behind the record
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