Discover how to grow gluten-free carbs at home with our guide on fruit and veggie gardening in Australia. Perfect for healthy eating!
Discover Easy-to-Grow Gluten-Free Carbohydrates for Your Home Garden!
Low-GI foods are not only beneficial for maintaining stable blood sugar levels, but many of them are also easy to grow at home and are gluten-free. Among these, the banana (Musa cv.), arrowroot (Canna indica cv.), and cocoyam (Xanthosoma sagittifolium) stand out as excellent options for gardeners looking to cultivate nutritious staples. Each of these plants offers unique culinary possibilities, enriching meals with their distinct flavors and textures.
Bananas, for example, can be used in a variety of dishes, from smoothies to baked goods, providing natural sweetness and essential nutrients. Arrowroot, known for its thickening properties, is a versatile starch that can be incorporated into soups and sauces. Cocoyam, often used in tropical cuisines, serves as a hearty base for stews and side dishes. These plants not only support a healthy diet but also contribute to a sustainable gardening practice.
Harvesting Health: Your Guide to Homegrown Gluten-Free Delights!
JERRY: If you like growing food, good on you, but you’ll find that salads only go so far. If you want to increase the amount of food you produce, you’ll soon realise that starchy staples are vital. They’re essential for filling your belly, and they provide the carbohydrate, which your body needs to convert into energy. If you think of starchy staples, start with things like bread, rice, beans and potatoes.
But not all starchy staples are created equal, and science is now understanding how different carbohydrates can have different impacts on our bodies. The glycaemic index, or GI, is a scientific tool that assesses the speed which certain carbohydrates affect the blood sugar level. It then ranks the quality of the carbohydrates according to their scores. High GI foods like confectionery, pineapples, potatoes,.
White bread and short-grain rice cause blood sugar levels to spike and then crash. Whereas low GI examples like beans, oats, dairy, apples and leafy greens break down and are digested and absorbed more slowly. If I know I’m going to have an active morning of gardening, I’ll start it by having a couple of cobs of heritage low GI corn, ’cause I know that slow release of energy will sustain me through the morning, avoiding any hunger pangs.
Apart from being handy, low GI starch is good for managing issues like weight, diabetes, and a range of other health problems. There’s many food plants that are simple to grow, healthy, nutritious, and they have low GI starch. And as a bonus, they’re gluten free. Here’s a few of my favourites. You already know bananas as a sweet treat.
Depending on their ripeness, they can be low to medium GI. They’re Australia’s most popular fruit, and we eat more than five million of them every day. But you’re only getting half the story. Plantains and green, unripe sweet bananas are a staple food in tropical regions of the world. Green bananas are starchy and they’re low GI. They can be used in exactly the same way as potato. Unripe fruit can be boiled, fried, steamed, or baked.
I’ve been using green bananas to make tostones, a fried plantain dish, mash and pizza bases. For the pizza base, I use gluten-free flour, oil, egg, salt, and cooled mashed green banana. Over the past week, I’ve been making fufu from bananas of varying degrees of ripeness. Fufu is a traditional African ball of starchy dough,.
Which is served to accompany meals. Mashed green bananas have a lovely earthy flavour, which goes really well with wasabi, horseradish or even gravy. Boiled green banana slices can replace rice in curries. I’ve been eating mangelwurzel and sugar beet – both have earthy flavours – and chickpeas in a coconut-milk-based curry. My top banana-growing tips are, firstly, feed every month with poultry manure.
One scoop per stem, per month, is a good guide. Water at least twice a week during the dry season, and do so generously or your fruit will stop growing. This works out at about 60 litres per plant, per week. And I restrict their growth to three suckers per plant. Canna indica, or arrowroot, is a plant from South America. I grow this both for its edible rhizome, which yields about 80% starch, and because it’s a valuable biomass crop.
To fuel the compost heaps in my garden. Arrowroot is frost-sensitive, and it enjoys a fertile soil, a warm climate, plenty of moisture and lots of sunshine. Arrowroot is a multi-purpose plant, and while these are looking less than impressive, it’s because it’s the end of the season. In the warm seasons, when they’re up and growing, I use them for shade and shelter,.
And they help to reduce evaporation, moisture loss from sensitive crops. And because they don’t need much water to get a lot of growth, I can use these for cut-and-come-again mulching and compost making. The tips of the shoots and the leaves are 10% protein, which makes them great feed for pigs, goats and chickens. The individual leaves can be used as plates when you’re having a picnic,.
And it can also be used to create screens from the neighbours. Comfrey is popular for producing large amounts of organic matter for composting. And arrowroot often misses out, which is a shame because in a warm climate, comfrey is incredibly thirsty, it produces a paltry amount of organic matter, whereas this plant shines. It’s productive and it’s drought tolerant.
Old, congested clumps benefit from being lifted and divided periodically, and this is the best way to propagate them. What you look for is a nice, plump rhizome with some active growth eyes, like these. So, this one can be broken off. This one… There’s a nice one there with two eye buds. So that comes off.
You see, that’s got a little one. That’s still coming along. So, we’ve got three new plants from the one rhizome. It takes about six months to produce a crop, but propagate them any time during spring or summer. Harvest the rhizomes in autumn. The best are shiny, purple and plump. The best way to prepare them is to peel them, slice them very thinly, soak them in water overnight,.
And this removes some of the arrowroot starch, and it improves their flavour. Then, you slow-cook them, so they’re ideal for a casserole or for baking. This 10 square metre garden bed is a real workhorse in my garden. I made an early decision to grow cocoyam instead of taro. They’re both elephant ears. They’re members of the Araceae family, but cocoyam is quite drought tolerant.
In fact, I can get eight times the yield for a 10th of the water compared with taro. These plants are popular in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. Every year, in August and September, I lift the plants to harvest the starchy cormlets underneath. This is the equivalent of old potato, and this is the equivalent of new potato.
Both have different cooking times. These make a delicious creamy mash, crisp fries, and they can be turned into flour. I use the leaves like spinach, and the stems can be prepared to taste like green beans. It’s a low-input, low-water-use reliable crop, which I can harvest all year round, and it’s versatile in the kitchen. This, in a warm climate,.
Is far superior to potato. Growing your own food involves understanding your diet better, and if you’re already putting the effort in, why not grow things that provide sustaining energy, address any health concerns and keep you feeling fuller longer.
