A new crop for 2022

This weekend we decided, pretty much on the spur of the moment, to add a new crop to our 2022 garden. And it all started with a batch of sushi.

Brian and I seldom go out for sushi these days. Instead, Brian makes his own, which is still not cheap, but significantly cheaper. He's learned to make sushi rice using plain old white rice, and he buys the nori sheets and chunks of sushi-grade salmon at the local H-Mart. (All the sushi-grade fish used to be stored in a case with the amusing label "Roll Your Own," but I guess corporate decided that joke wasn't funny.) However, H-mart doesn't sell the little tubs of wasabi paste that normally come with the sushi; you can only get those if you're buying your sushi ready-made. So, as a substitute, he bought a little tin of wasabi powder that he could mix up with water to make his own wasabi paste. 

This time, however, when he mixed the wasabi, he found that it completely lost its bite. Even I, a complete spice wimp, could lick the powder right off my finger with no ill effects. A quick search on Still Tasty revealed that wasabi powder, properly stored, should last three to four years — but on reflection, we realized that we'd probably had this tin for about that long. We just didn't eat sushi often enough to use it up. So the remaining powder went into the compost bin (or, since it was a somewhat windy day, the area immediately around it).

This got me wondering about whether there might be some way to acquire wasabi (or horseradish, which is what most sushi restaurants actually serve) in smaller quantities, so that we wouldn't waste so much of it. The way we usually do this with herbs, such as rosemary or oregano, is to grow our own and snip off a bit as needed. So I got to wondering: would it be possible to do the same thing with horseradish root?

A quick search revealed that horseradish is, in fact, easy to grow. Almost too easy, in fact, as it has a tendency to take over any area of the garden where it's planted. Good Housekeeping warns against tilling the ground where you've planted it or putting any bit of the root in your compost bin, as that's a good way to spread it all over the yard. Fortunately, it's easy to grow in containers as well, provided they have good drainage and a sunny spot to sit in. And we just happened to have several large buckets that we'd used for our largely unsuccessful potato experiment. Since we never actually got around to putting in a potato crop last year, we decided to repurpose the buckets and see, just for a lark, if we could manage to grow some horseradish.

The first challenge was to find horseradish root. That was easy; a quick call to the Belle Mead Co-Op, where we'd bought our seed potatoes, confirmed that they had some in stock. And since we needed to go there at some point anyway to buy more copper fungicide for our plum trees and some netting to replace the worn-out sections on our garden trellises, it wouldn't even cost us an extra trip. The price was a little steeper than we expected — $12 for a bag of three roots packed in wood shavings — but if the experiment works, this could supply us with all the horseradish we need for a lifetime to come, so what the hey. We decided to start two of the three roots, even though one horseradish plant would probably be plenty to meet our needs, since that would give us a backup in case one of them didn't grow well.

Fortunately, we didn't need to buy anything else. We already had the buckets and a supply of small rocks to create a drainage layer on the bottom. On top of that, we added some ordinary garden soil, amended with a scoop each of compost from our bin and rotted manure from Home Depot (which we've already tested for safety). Then we planted the roots (a few inches deep and at a forty-five degree angle, according to the instructions) and covered them with some wood mulch, which we scavenged from the area around our honeyberries. (We'll need to buy a load of mulch for them this year anyway, so replacing a little bit more won't matter much.)

Our new plants are now tucked into the sunniest corner of the garden, and by all accounts, they'll pretty much take care of themselves from here on out. All we'll need to do is give them a little water during dry spells and prune off any stray suckers. By the end of the year, we should be able to dig out the roots, cut off as much as we need, and replant the rest. The harvested portion should keep for up to three months in the fridge, up to six months if grated and frozen, or up to a year if we can figure out a way to dehydrate it. Storing the root in damp sand in a cold, dark cellar, apparently, is also an option. Or perhaps we could harvest one plant in late fall and the other in early spring to keep us going throughout the summer.

Of course, we'll have to be extra careful when preparing the horseradish, because the chemicals in this stuff are an incredibly potent irritant. Recommendations range from "prepare in a well-ventilated area" to "prepare outdoors" to "wear a ventilator mask and safety goggles." But I guess that's a problem we'll worry about when the time comes. No use counting our radishes before they're dug.