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Starting A Ground Nut Garden
Purchase Books, Ground Nut Pamphlets,
Ground Nut Plants, Ground Nut Note Cards, etc.
What
is a Ground Nut?
The Ground Nut, first of all, is a plant. It's a climbing vine, a member of the pea family and distantly related to the soybean. It gets its name from the bulb-like tubers that grow on it's slender roots. These can be as small as the size of the nail on your little finger to as big as a lime or even larger. These are the so-called Ground Nuts. They were a major food source for the Native Americans and served essentially as their potato. Like the potatoes we know today, once peeled, they are white and firm inside. They can be eaten raw but are best cooked either by boiling or roasting. They have a very mild flavor and were often added to soups and stews. According to the USDA they contain about three times the protein of the potatoes in common use today. The Native Americans taught the early colonists how to utilize the Ground Nut as a food source and they were undoubtably a part of the first Thanksgiving. The early settlers considered the Ground Nut so important that one town passed a law prohibiting Native Americans from digging them on lands owned by the colonists. They were so popular in Eastern Long Island that much of that area is still named for this plant.
The plant is a climbing vine that develops pinkish-lavender and maroon flowers which form in clusters that appear in mid to late August. It can also produce pea pods just below the flowers which are also edible. These peas can be dried to produce seeds. Most Ground Nut plants though are propagated by replanting the Ground Nut tubers. Each tuber, even very small ones, will produce a new plant. The maturity of the plant can be roughly determined by the number of leaves on a leaflet. Young first year plants will have 3-5 leaves on a stem. Very mature plants may have up to nine leaves on a stem. The mature, well established plants will also have much thicker vines and larger leaves. Ground Nut leaves will open up to catch the sun and close up if there is too much sun. During a heavy rain the leaves may droop down to offer less resistance. The plant is also very photo-tropic, and when newly sprouted it will use this feature to search it's immediate area to find something to climb on such as a branch of another plant or a pole it can wind around.
The Ground Nut is an aboriginal plant to the United States and it's remnants have been found in archaeological digs of Native American campsites in southern New England that go back 9,000 years. It's habitat ranges from northern New England to Florida and even Texas, and from the east coast to across the Mississippi. It does not seem to be native to the west coast of the US. If you do a search on the Internet for the Ground Nut you will find many references that are actually talking about the peanut which apparently is also known as a Ground Nut in much of the world. This is an entirely different plant and not at all related to the apios tuberosa. The Ground Nut is also known as apios americana due to it's aboriginal American origin but this renaming is a fairly modern appellation.
I first encountered the existence of the Ground Nut in Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative but she doesn't explain what she means by a Ground Nut. She says the Indians gave her some Ground Nuts to eat but what did that mean? Were they nuts they found on the ground? Ground up nuts? It was a few years before I discovered in another old book that it was a plant and the book fortunately gave the latin name as apios tuberosa so I could look it up. As it turns out, the plant has it's own fascinating history apart from Mary Rowlandson. You can read about that in either my book "The Mary Rowlandson Story", which includes her captivity narrative, or in a separate pamphlet completely devoted to the Ground Nut. The book or pamphlet cover essentially everything you need to know about the Ground Nut: where to look for it, how and when to harvest them, how to cook them and how to grow them.
If you like you can even contact me to purchase some organic Ground Nuts which you can grow. This way you can create your own Ground Nut garden without having to go out in the woods and risk getting poison ivy. This is a real possibility since Ground Nuts and poison ivy tend to grow together in the same area. Before the Ground Nut tubers sprout is the best time to harvest them for a spring planting. Unfortunately poison ivy roots are purported to be a thousand times more powerful than the leaves and if you come in contact with them you can end up in the emergency room with a systemic poisen ivy reaction. This actually happened to my artist-illustrator Terrie, but that's another story. Her illustration of the Ground Nut plant is now part of a permanent exhibit at the Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum at the very eastern tip of Long Island, New York.
We are now taking orders for organically grown Ground Nut tubers produced by the garden shown in the photo at the top of the page. This is the first year we have done this and the number of tubers for sale will be limited. So it's best to reserve yours as soon as possible. Tubers will be sprouted and shipped as young plants this spring of 2008 as soon as they reach approximately 6 inches in height. Each new plant will produce about 10 new bulb-like tubers depending on how it develops over the course of it's growing season. For food purposes, it may be best to allow the plant to mature for a couple of years to develop larger tubers. For planting, harvest the tubers in the early spring as soon as the ground can be worked, for eating purposes harvest the tubers in the fall after the first frost has killed off the plant above the ground. For further information on all aspects of growing Ground Nuts successfully we recommend our inexpensive pamphlet.
Return to Mary Rowlandson Home Page
Purchase Books, Ground Nut Pamphlets, Ground Nut Plants, Ground Nut Note Cards, etc.
Purchase Books, Ground Nut Pamphlets,
Ground Nut Plants, Ground Nut Note Cards, etc.
What
is a Ground Nut?The Ground Nut, first of all, is a plant. It's a climbing vine, a member of the pea family and distantly related to the soybean. It gets its name from the bulb-like tubers that grow on it's slender roots. These can be as small as the size of the nail on your little finger to as big as a lime or even larger. These are the so-called Ground Nuts. They were a major food source for the Native Americans and served essentially as their potato. Like the potatoes we know today, once peeled, they are white and firm inside. They can be eaten raw but are best cooked either by boiling or roasting. They have a very mild flavor and were often added to soups and stews. According to the USDA they contain about three times the protein of the potatoes in common use today. The Native Americans taught the early colonists how to utilize the Ground Nut as a food source and they were undoubtably a part of the first Thanksgiving. The early settlers considered the Ground Nut so important that one town passed a law prohibiting Native Americans from digging them on lands owned by the colonists. They were so popular in Eastern Long Island that much of that area is still named for this plant.
The plant is a climbing vine that develops pinkish-lavender and maroon flowers which form in clusters that appear in mid to late August. It can also produce pea pods just below the flowers which are also edible. These peas can be dried to produce seeds. Most Ground Nut plants though are propagated by replanting the Ground Nut tubers. Each tuber, even very small ones, will produce a new plant. The maturity of the plant can be roughly determined by the number of leaves on a leaflet. Young first year plants will have 3-5 leaves on a stem. Very mature plants may have up to nine leaves on a stem. The mature, well established plants will also have much thicker vines and larger leaves. Ground Nut leaves will open up to catch the sun and close up if there is too much sun. During a heavy rain the leaves may droop down to offer less resistance. The plant is also very photo-tropic, and when newly sprouted it will use this feature to search it's immediate area to find something to climb on such as a branch of another plant or a pole it can wind around.
The Ground Nut is an aboriginal plant to the United States and it's remnants have been found in archaeological digs of Native American campsites in southern New England that go back 9,000 years. It's habitat ranges from northern New England to Florida and even Texas, and from the east coast to across the Mississippi. It does not seem to be native to the west coast of the US. If you do a search on the Internet for the Ground Nut you will find many references that are actually talking about the peanut which apparently is also known as a Ground Nut in much of the world. This is an entirely different plant and not at all related to the apios tuberosa. The Ground Nut is also known as apios americana due to it's aboriginal American origin but this renaming is a fairly modern appellation.
I first encountered the existence of the Ground Nut in Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative but she doesn't explain what she means by a Ground Nut. She says the Indians gave her some Ground Nuts to eat but what did that mean? Were they nuts they found on the ground? Ground up nuts? It was a few years before I discovered in another old book that it was a plant and the book fortunately gave the latin name as apios tuberosa so I could look it up. As it turns out, the plant has it's own fascinating history apart from Mary Rowlandson. You can read about that in either my book "The Mary Rowlandson Story", which includes her captivity narrative, or in a separate pamphlet completely devoted to the Ground Nut. The book or pamphlet cover essentially everything you need to know about the Ground Nut: where to look for it, how and when to harvest them, how to cook them and how to grow them.
If you like you can even contact me to purchase some organic Ground Nuts which you can grow. This way you can create your own Ground Nut garden without having to go out in the woods and risk getting poison ivy. This is a real possibility since Ground Nuts and poison ivy tend to grow together in the same area. Before the Ground Nut tubers sprout is the best time to harvest them for a spring planting. Unfortunately poison ivy roots are purported to be a thousand times more powerful than the leaves and if you come in contact with them you can end up in the emergency room with a systemic poisen ivy reaction. This actually happened to my artist-illustrator Terrie, but that's another story. Her illustration of the Ground Nut plant is now part of a permanent exhibit at the Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum at the very eastern tip of Long Island, New York.
We are now taking orders for organically grown Ground Nut tubers produced by the garden shown in the photo at the top of the page. This is the first year we have done this and the number of tubers for sale will be limited. So it's best to reserve yours as soon as possible. Tubers will be sprouted and shipped as young plants this spring of 2008 as soon as they reach approximately 6 inches in height. Each new plant will produce about 10 new bulb-like tubers depending on how it develops over the course of it's growing season. For food purposes, it may be best to allow the plant to mature for a couple of years to develop larger tubers. For planting, harvest the tubers in the early spring as soon as the ground can be worked, for eating purposes harvest the tubers in the fall after the first frost has killed off the plant above the ground. For further information on all aspects of growing Ground Nuts successfully we recommend our inexpensive pamphlet.
Return to Mary Rowlandson Home Page
Purchase Books, Ground Nut Pamphlets, Ground Nut Plants, Ground Nut Note Cards, etc.