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Pignut - Conopodium majus
Conopodium majus or the Pignut - Has an edible 'nut shaped' tuber, which has a dry texture and a sweet fresh taste kind of like hazelnut and sweet chestnut mixed with a bit of celery. Some people find it has a hot aftertaste not unsimiliar to radish.
Culinary use
Pignuts are excellent roasted or boiled and buttered or raw chopped into salads.
Finding and identifying Conopodium majus has a feathery foliage like carrot or fennel but is much more sparse in growth. In May to June the flower heads roll upwards slighlty and unfurl themselves at the tip of their growth, in a similiar fashion to a fern. This is when it is easiest to find. The plants usually reach just below knee height when in flower, but can continue up to 1 metre. You will tend to find them in meadows and hedgerows rather than shady woods.
Harvesting
The 'nut' itself resembles a large nobbly chestnut and is attached to the stem of the plant via a single thin and delicate white thread like root. This makes harvesting them quite tricky. There are two useful methods of doing this. One is to gently trace the root through the earth by digging away with a knife until you reach the pignut, this is quite tricky and time consuming. The other method is to simply dig up a swathe about two foot wide and a foot deep, then turn the swathe upside down and root around for the pignut. The swathe can then be returned leaving the site relatively undisturbed.
Potential crop
The pignut has been mentioned as an underutilised crop. It has not been developed through cultivation the same way as the carrot or the potato. One possible reason for it's lack of cultivation is the difficulty in harvesting the nut and the poor results it is said to have had in early attemps to grow it on ploughed soil.
Cultivation from seed
Pignuts like acid to neutral soils. They're quite easy to grow but they don't like alkaline soils so head for the ericaceous compost at the garden centre.
Wildlife
Red soldier beetle, hoverflies.
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