Jan–MarApr–JunJul–SepOct–Dec
Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-261
Skirret
Sium sisarum
Skirret's edible root cluster tastes like a cross between carrot and parsnip with a nutty note - eaten raw, cooked, or roasted as a coffee substitute - but it only thrives with abundant moisture through the growing season, so it belongs at a permanently damp spot like a pond margin or the tail of a swale rather than in an ordinary irrigated bed. It looks enough like its poisonous relatives to be genuinely dangerous: the same wet ground that suits it also suits water hemlock, one of the most lethal plants in North America, so it needs a clearly defined, labeled bed and nobody should ever forage a white-flowered root from open water anywhere nearby. Otherwise it is an easy, pest-resistant clumping perennial that dies back each winter and returns, propagated by dividing the crown rather than spreading on its own.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 4–9
- Soil
- Sand · Loam
- Moisture
- Moderate · Wet
Vertical layer
Rhizosphere- Soil pH
- 6–8
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 3–3.2 ft
- Mature spread
- 16 in
- Plant spacing
- 16 in
- Root type
- Rhizome
- Spread pattern
- None
Keep exploring
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Burdock Root
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Celeriac
Apium graveolens var rapaceum
Celeriac is a better companion plant than it is a headline vegetable: growing plants repel the cabbage white butterfly, which makes it worth…
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Chinese Artichoke
Stachys affinis
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Daikon
Raphanus sativus var longipinnatus
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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