One of the crop plants I had the pleasure of working with was chufa or tiger nut. I had heard about this plant from a food website describing the use of the crop and how it is cultvated. I ordered a pound of them and found them very delicious like minature coconuts with a chewy texture. I ate them like a snack food while driving to my farm in the morning. Chufa is considered a beverage plant. A drink called horchata can be made using the tubers. Chufas 25% oil content makes a rich drink with the addition of cinnamon and sugar. Much of the world wide production of chufa is in Spain. This is where most of the U.S. imports them from for specialty food products. A cooking oil is made from them. As a secondary use they are also put in turkey and duck seed mixes for planting for wildlife use. The smallest tubers are used for this purpose. It is the same sub-species as the chufa only graded for this purpose. The plant does not produce seed like normal perennial sedges so it is difficult to breed and is only grown from tubers. There are no seeds available. So the diversity you see today is all clonal yet they are not normally listed as varieties instead they are listed by their geographic location of where you might buy them. Each country has its own selections.

I was not aware of anyone growing it in the U.S. at the time but I did find one seed company, J.L. Hudson that offered them. I knew this was a tropical grass and might have some problems in Michigan. The first plantings were done outdoors on a warm sunny hillside under irrigation. The plants grew wonderfully up to three foot tall but when harvest came, it became abundantly clear that every small mammal within olfactory range completely eliminated the crop to the point, there was just enough to replant. It was weird because when I went to dig them, they came out like pancakes with few roots and none of the delicious tubers. They shredded the roots. Only near the densest part of the root near the root collar were some tubers they could not get to. In a fresh state, the tubers were even more delicious than the dried packaged ones I purchased from the Spanish food store. I did notice the turkeys found them too. They used their feet to unearth the tubers. Everyone was very happy but me.

In future growing conditions, I doubled down and began growing them in poly bags in my greenhouse. This allowed me to extend the season and control the mice and voles to a greater degree. Like a vole magnet they found them there too but eventually I put a stop on the pillfering and got a crop from them to the point I could see a trend of some sort. The length of time needed to finish the crop was an issue even in the polyhouse. It was from here I moved some of the planting outside and began to measure tuber size and length of time to finish the crop and the real life yield of the plants. This explained why previous attempts to commercialize the crop was done in the southern or southeastern U.S. You need heat units big time. There was an issue with yields too. They were not the most productive tuber crop.

After thirty years of experimentation, I finally did manage to squeak out a couple of forms from the original J.L. Hudson Seedsman company as well as others. I was at a point of giving up until I visited a Detroit permaculture group with a few clumps of my chufa grass with tubers attached. I washed them thoroughly and removed all the stones. People kept eating them and saying over and over how delicious they were like minature coconuts. Gosh darn it, people love the chufa sedge. Inspired by the delicious fresh tubers, I continued my chufa quest. My early ripening strains with larger tubers where doing okay. This year I tried several in polybags which true to form brought in a lot of mice. They were digging down and yanking out the plants. Eventually I put a stop to that and saved the remainder using pelletized animal off and increasing the depth of the planting so it was more difficult to get to. So far so good, but I check them a few times a week for damage.

Not A Nutsedge

This chufa is a tropical annual grass which does not flower, produce seed or is winter hardy in Michigan whether the soils freezes or not. At this time the taxonomy has it as a subspecies called ‘sativa’ but some scientists want to classify as a separate species. It is not a serious weed or any weed of any magnitude and cannot spread on its own. This information is frequently copied by writers who have never grown chufa and likely have never seen the plant in real life. It has to be replanted like any annual. The images on line are often wrong and do not reflect actual chufa because once again it is thought of as a nutsedge. Instead the flowering is the perennial yellow nutsedge not chufa. For a while, there were a few laws put in place which led to the removal of the chufa from store shelves and on line sales in some states in the wildlife sector. People are unjustifiably paranoid about chufa. Chufa is not nutsedge in the way the herbicide companies advertise it but it is the same species and that is the source of the confusion. This leads us directly on the path of good intentions which then becomes the path to Hell. In the process it eliminates a great crop plant by spreading false information. The wildlife industry followed the regulation to a certain extent but when I checked, it wasn’t enforced as far as I could tell. I still found it for sale locally during this time. It is possible this is still an issue in some states for those still going down the path of good intentions.

Gardening With the Chufa

Its a easy plant to cultivate and I enjoy growing it and sharing it with others. Every time people consume it, they always love it. But trying to use the space for this versus some other tuber crop, it will be a tough sell. It is getting a second life from my early ripening types to a very limited degree. I can see where the yields could be improved by using the forms with larger tubers and clumpier forming grass. This whole thing is my ‘path to heavenly enlightenment’ thinking in terms of its acceptance by the public and widespread use by the gardening public. This is better than the path of good intentions. We all know where that leads. There does come a point that makes you wonder what sort of potential it has as an oil producing crop plant on a larger scale. The drought and heat tolerance is significant and I think in this new age of climate fluctuations will make us think of the chufa in Spain, how it grows in the arid climates of the world, its calorie per acre yield and health benefits to humans around the world. A grass species cultivated for thousands of years sounds enlightening to me.

The Nutsedge Returns

In one of the parts of my farm, I have a small colony of nutsedge. It is the type that sells herbicide for corn and soybean fields. This is the perennial species which produces long rhizomes in all directions. My colony is on one of the sites I never tilled but did mow from time to time. When I decided to investigate, I found only one actual tuber on the rhizomes after ten minutes of digging. It is not a very productive plant tuber wise but it has a large numbers of rhizomes. It could be possible to take what is considered the worst weed in the history of mankind and make it a savior by selecting it for heavy yields and ease of cultivation. But like all saviors would anyone recognize the value of it or would it just be another weed and shunned for generations. The chufa was that weedy nutsedge at some point. It is a crop plant that was cultivated 4000 years ago. It originated in Egypt as a source of food on the flood plains of the Nile. I am sure it flowered and had great diversity of progeny too. It is entirely possible that the forms in East India or West Africa could provide us with a view of this crop and how it would be possible to grow it in North America again. But for now, it is the miniature coconut tuber that grows on a sterile grass found in Spain introduced by the Moors in the 11th century. Thats a good start.

Many good ideas start here. Knowledge. Education. Action. Dispersal.