Remember this post from last spring?
Well, the pee wees eventually finished their renovation project and went on to raising their family. And that meant my water chestnuts were allowed to grow without being uprooted every day. Today I harvested this nice little stash of them. In kitchen sink quantities, they’re not going to be a survival food, but they’re sweet and creamy and crunchy, extremely good for you, and they’ll make a very delightful addition to stir fries, dumpling fillings, braises and noodles for the next month or so.
And they took virtually no effort at all to grow. Their sink did double duty as a water source for lizards and birds and frogs – I posted a photo a while ago about the striped marsh frog tadpoles happily ridding my water chestnut pond of any mosquito larvae. They like marsh conditions, but anything from wet soil to 75mm or so of water covering them is fine, and for most of the summer and autumn the rain was enough to keep their sink topped up.
To harvest, I simply lifted the entire root mass out of the pond and felt through it for chestnuts. I left any tiny ones for the chooks – too fiddly to peel – refilled the sink with a bucket of fresh, chook made compost, and replanted the nine biggest chestnuts in it. I’ve learned that less is more. Planting too many just results in more of the tiny chestnuts that are a pain to peel.
And that’s it. The pee wees may come back – they know where their perfect source of nest material is now. I hope so. They did excellent duty as cabbage moth caterpillar eaters over summer. But this harvest shows we can share. It’s the permaculture principle that every design element serving multiple purposes in action.
