Chinese artichoke / crosne

Photo: Unknown — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

Survives zone 5 through 9

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Crosne — crisp, nutty, water-chestnut-like.

Hardiness

Zone 5–9

Habit

Herb

Edible part

Root

Ripens

Autumn (tubers)

Mature size

Low herbaceous perennial 30–45 cm; good in containers

Light

Full sun to partial

Soil pH

6.0–7.0

Environment

Temperate

Native range

Northern and central China, long cultivated there and in Japan; it reached France in the 1880s at Crosne, the village near Paris that gave it the name it now carries in Europe.

Status

Cultivated

Years to fruit

1 yr

Growth speed

Moderate — a full season is needed to swell the tubers

Spacing

30 cm (12 in) apart — about 11 per m² (10 per 10 sq ft)

Leaf shape

Opposite, ovate, wrinkled and softly hairy 4–8 cm, coarsely toothed, on the square stems that mark out the mint family — the plant looks like a nettle-leaved mint and smells faintly of one.

Root system

Shallow and fibrous, with thin rhizomes ending in the small white spiral tubers that are the crop, nearly all of it in the top 20 cm. Any tuber missed at harvest regrows, so a bed self-perpetuates whether or not you meant it to.

Fruit description

Not a fruit crop; it rarely even flowers usefully in cool summers. The crop is the tuber — small, pearly-white, ringed and corkscrew-shaped, 3–7 cm, crisp and nutty like a water chestnut and best eaten within days, since the thin skin shrivels fast.

Propagation

Plant tubers 5–8 cm deep in early spring and lift the whole crop the following autumn or winter; keep a few tubers back rather than storing them dry, which they resent.

Pollination

Self-fertile

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.