[Scpg] Perennial vegetable list wanted - Moringa stenopetala

[Dan Hemenway]

While M. stenopetala is claimed to be more frost sensitive than M. oleifera, this has not been my experience with plants grown from seed that I purchased from ECHO.  (I mention the source because the provenance may be more important than the species for frost sensitivity, if the difference between species is indeed small.)  Our M. stenopetala has made it through several winters, freezing back to the ground but returning vigorously.  The M. oleifera, which growing in the same conditions (they are interplanted), has lost a few trees each winter.  M. stenopetala is much more vigorous than M. stenopetala, at our site, and produces much more food for us.  M.oleifera sometimes recover from winter as frail plants, also, and these do not recover during the growing season.  However, it tastes better, though each is quite good. 
We feed the stemmy material (remaining after stripping off the leaflets) to our rabbits, and when we expect a hard frost, we cut the plants and save the leaves for ourselves, and feed all the stems and wood to the rabbits.  (They need to gnaw on wood anyway, to some extent)  They love it, though not as much as kudzu. I had put a crude fence around the moringa patch to keep chickens out, but they don't seem to eat the leaflets, and their scratching keeps weeds down.  So now I let them in after the plants have resprouted in spring and the stems have become too woody to be broken off by scratching.  


A major benefit of moringa in our climate is that it fills a gap for greens in August and September.  We have chaya, but we don't eat it much as it is not that tasty.  It grows itself, however, without irrigation or fertilizer. We start cutting at about 2 feet of height, so that the plants branch and make many shoots at a convenient height for harvest.  I've not done much interplanting, and the few efforts (Malabar spinach on the fence, another of our favorites) did not do well.  A seedling papaya, however, is thriving with the moringa, no doubt coming in with the chicken litter we put down as fertilizer and mulch.  


BTW, papaya leaves are cooked as a vegetable, though I've not tried it, and green papaya is used as a vegetable also.  That said, I was not impressed with cooked green papaya.  It was OK, but we had much tastier options.  We get a papaya crop here about one year out of three, with cold killing all the plants ever 5 to 7 years.  This has diminished as we warmed from zone 8 to zone 9.  


Dan Hemenway
Barking Frogs Permaculture
 
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