Growing land cress - AVOID! AVOID! AVOID! (Cress)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Cress
Date:	04/08/09 (75 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Grows in light shade, can be sown direct in the ground & seems resistant to garden pests

Disadvantages: There is no point in growing it.

Please note this review refers to the edible garden plant land cress, and not to watercress, the spindly type of cress you get in an egg-and-cress sandwich, or any other type of cress.

I picked up a package of land cress seeds at the local nursery as an impulse buy - the blurb written on the packet made it sound great as an easy-to-grow crop for the garden as it's apparently an alternative to watercress (which I love eating in soup) but doesn't need to be immersed in water in order to grow properly. Land cress will also tolerate shade, which seemed quite an advantage given the aspect of our veg plot, it can be sown direct into the prepared beds, and when ours came up it also seemed relatively robust to garden pests. It only took approx two to three months from us sowing the seeds till we harvested the first of our land cress crop. Everything looked great until we started trying to eat it.

The problem is that the stuff is nigh-on inedible. The cress didn't take long to germinate, and massed together looks all nice and lush, but the individual plants are quite small, so that by the time ours had grown large enough to seem worth picking, the stems had become incredibly woody. Not realizing this I cooked some up in a batch of soup and wondered why the blender kept jamming - and later found this was on account of the stems! The soup tasted really good - I've no complaints there - but it was full of fibrous, splinter-like bits of tough stem, which the blender blade rather than pureeing, had simply shredded. It was like trying to eat soup that had little splinters of boiled wood in it.

On my next attempt I tried to get roud the woody stems problem by stripping the (surprisingly small) land-cress leaves off from the stems, which took a long time but produced very little edible material for a great deal of effort. The soup I made from that batch pureed up well and looked green all right, but I wasn't able in this - and bear in mind it was only my second cropping of the seemingly lush land cress land cress row we'd planted - to gather enough edible material, so the green soup didn't taste of cress at all.

On occasion in the past I've eaten quite a variety of 'food for free' wild plants and I can categorically state that if land cress grew in the wild here, I would definitely cross it off my list of potential free foods as being not worthwhile. It takes far too long to process, and you don't get much in return. In the garden it is a total waste of space.

Summary: Not pretty enough to be ornamental, and too tough to be edible. Pointless in the garden.