Got me a mangel wurzel!

My dad used to grow them to feed to the sheep! He always had piles of them stored in clamps on the yard. At Hallowe'en we would pinch a few to carve into lanterns, seeing as the Welsh climate was not conducive to the growing of pumpkins.

Never occurred to us to eat them. Are they related to rutabaga? (An essential ingredient in Branston Pickle.)

 

2 years ago I suggested a GC Mangold Wurzel tossing competition

 

Winner of Gardeners Corner Word of the Week

Rutabaga

 

I believe the only reason more people don't eat them is because they're not on the EU's list of things we're allowed to call food. I've never tried them but I've read plenty about them, and they sound alright to me.

 

French for swede

 

Dammit, has the rude filter stumped me from winning a prize yet again?

 

After extensive research (5 mins on Wikipedia) I now realise that a rutabaga is a swede, a member of the brassica family. Turnip crossed with cabbage, apparently. However, a mangold wurzel is a sub species of beetroot i.e. beta vulgaris. What I haven't found out is, are beetroots also brassicas?

Someone, somewhere, must know........

 

No, they're in the Amaranthaceae family.

 

Aha. I guess they have those floppy flowerheads, rather than a branched broccoli type flower head, so that figures.

 

Yep, used to be Chenopodiacea, Fat Hen family, but thats now been put into the Amaranth family.

 

I saw this 85.5lb Rutabaga at Shepton Mallet Show in 2011

 

You could make a lifetime's supply of Branston Pickle out of that!

However, looks more like a mangold wurzel than a swede to me.

Is it true that a portion of BP counts as one of your 5 a Day?