Today I watched my husband putting all his muscle into digging up horseradish roots--stabbing the ground with a potato fork, loosening the roots from one side and then another, straining to tug the long, gnarly roots from the ground without breaking them in bits--and I thought, not for the first time, "I hope those people don't still hate us."
By "those people" I refer to whoever now lives in a house we moved out of nearly 20 years ago, a spacious house in a pleasant housing development built over a swath of what was once known as the Great Black Swamp in northwest Ohio. The swamp had long ago been drained, but in rainy seasons the land remembered its origins and in any season it provided a nourishing environment for root crops. We planted a big garden in the yard, but before anyone knew what he was up to my husband planted horseradish all along one side of the house. "I thought it would look pretty," he said.
Anyone familiar with the growth habits of horseradish has already figured out the two major flaws in this plan. First, horseradish isn't exactly ornamental; at its best it looks wild and weedy. And second, the rule is that you should plant horseradish only where you'd like to see it forever, because once it gets started, there's no getting rid of it.
Horseradish thrives on neglect; you can't starve it out or drown it out, and any poison strong enough to kill it will also kill anything else nearby. Yes, you can dig up horseradish by the roots, but the roots are long and stubborn, growing deep and holding on, and if even one little sliver of root remains in the soil, the horseradish will return.
Out here in the woods we have plenty of room to grow horseradish where it blends in with the garden and won't interfere with other crops, but it's a plant not well suited for the manicured lawns of suburbia. We haven't been back to the horseradish house in years so I don't know whether anyone ever managed to remove those pesky plants or whether they've simply accepted them as an essential feature of the landscape. Maybe they curse us every spring when those long, weedy-looking leaves start poking out of the ground--or maybe, like us, they cherish the pungent bite of freshly-ground horseradish and applaud whoever had the good sense to give it a foothold in the rich soil of home.
2 comments:
Bev,
Any chance you can post a picture of this horseraddish plant? I fear, greatly fear, that's one of the many indestructible plants I've been trying to weed out in my very suburban house for the last few years (that in what smells like onions and mint).
I can't take pictures of our plants right now because we dug them up before the leaves could fully develop (which is supposed to make the flavor more pungent). But Google images has some pretty good pix.
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