 Hello again. Well, I posted a quite a long video last week about forest garden books and I got a question back almost immediately, which was asking about good plants for forest gardens for warmer climates. So this person was in middle of Portugal, so kind of mild and more arid and dry than where I live here in Britain. So I recommended a book called Permaculture Plants. Now this book is an Australian book and it looks at tropical and subtropical plants. So not really for where I live in Britain, but a good recommendation really for somebody who lives in a drier, warmer climate. Another good question back saying, so what is your favorite permaculture plant? And that's an interesting question because of course like books, there cannot be one favorite plant, but there are certainly plants that are things that we very much love at particular times of year. So I'm going to talk in a moment about this particular plant, which at the moment doesn't look like very much, but has a wonderful secret below ground. But I'd like to return to the idea of a permaculture plant because of course as we've discussed before when I talked about what is permaculture? Permaculture is very much about where you are. So this book is called Permaculture Plants, but for me, if I tried to grow these things, most of them wouldn't really be permaculture in Britain because I need a lot more heat and humidity and put a lot of energy into growing them. So I would say plants that might fit into a permaculture system where you live and for many of us, that probably means more perennial plants. So maybe I could talk about some of my favorite perennials as Robin flying around at the moment, waiting for me to do something interesting where you can come on forage. So this particular plant here, Yakon, I came across a good few years ago. It was this particular one was gifted to me by friends. I went to teach in Germany at an eco village called Siebenlinden and they were harvesting at the time and they gave me some root to bring home and I've been growing it ever since. And it's, for those of us who live in kind of slightly cooler climates, this is an excellent book. Taste of the Unexpected, very interesting, lots of interesting plants by Mark Diakono. You can't see his name very well on there. And Yakon is one of the plants that is in that book. So let's have a look. So basically it's quite a big plant. It grows up to a couple of meters tall. We grow it in pots here. We have a small cottage garden at the moment. So we don't have a lot of space. And also if you have any kind of underground burrowing rodents that like to nibble at tubers, this is a good way to protect them. We found that initially some of the crops were particularly those we were growing in the shared garden up the lane. We're getting quite heavily eaten and because they form their tubers late in the autumn, it's good to leave them in as long as possible, really, before, you know, until the top growth starts to die down like this. We haven't had a proper frost here, but basically when it gets cold, Yakon being South American plant starts going. And it puts its energy into the tubers. And that's the magic bit that we're going to be harvesting. So there's several stems here. This is the remains of last year's stem. So what we do in Britain, because this isn't frost hardy, really, and in the south of England, it's milder than some parts of Britain, but it's also, you know, we can get pretty cold here. So we bring this out every year. So we pull them up, we take off the tubers, and we store what's left of the crown. And that's the remains of last years. Don't need that now. And so what I'm going to do is to just start to lift this. There's some perennial onions in here as well. So I shall be a bit careful. You can see it's quite solid. Let's loosen this up a bit. Probably what I need to do is give it a good shifty. It's got good roots this year. Well, that went well. So there's part of the tuba that's broken off there. I think what I'm going to need to do is to get something a bit more hefty to get these out this time. Okay, so going for a different method. I've got the drug and let's see if I can just basically empty it. The trowel and truly in there. Okay, let's start to open it up a bit. There's one of our tubers. This has gone into a fairly clay soil, but it's very interesting that the acorn cleans up really beautifully. That's very nice. I would show you another one, but of course we've eaten the last batch. The stone. So what you'll find is that it will start to see what you plant in any given year will start to divide up into or produce several stems, which you can then basically take up and store. So in Britain we store these over winter in a cool fairly, well a dry cool place. Ideally dark. I'll show you in a moment what happens if they're not in a particularly cool place. But so we'll be saving that for next year. These are kind of propagation routes rather than storage tubers or I prefer to eat those. They're an investment in next year rather than something to eat this year, if that makes sense. So I'll keep going on here. Another tuber there. They're a pretty good year really. And let's see what we've got left. But we can start to split this down and break it up into smaller pieces for use next year. There's another one there, which has a hitchhiker along as well. It was a warm summer and it looks like we've had a pretty good year. I'm not quite sure that. Let's do that. Is that really an entire? Never seen anything quite like that before. But that seems to be a combination of propagation route and storage tuber. That is enormous. Anyway, we've had a good year. So let's take that. And we like to eat these. They wash up very easily and see they're very smooth and clean. They have a prebiotic. They have I think inulin in here, which is indigestible sugar, but it's really good for your gut bacteria. And they're really nice. We have these in salad. We basically wash them down, just chop a little bit off. Slice that, put it into salad over the winter. It's a really nice crunchy texture, but also a kind of melt-in-the-mouth texture. It has a flavor of kind of subtle pairs. Very, very nice. One of my favorites. Hence, doing this little video. So highly recommended, but in our climate they do need a bit of caring attention over the winter. We have a look at ones that we already put into store earlier. We normally would keep these in the garage. Previously, we've been keeping this in the garage, but we don't have the garage anymore. So essentially, we tried. This was the first lot that we lifted. We put them indoors in the corner, but it's just trying to grow because it's too warm. So what we've done now is we kind of double insulated bucket, and we're putting it into the porch. So somewhere cool but frost-free, essentially, for the winter. And it will reward you with some fantastic, tasty tubers. Unusual, very easy to grow. They don't really flower. We did have a flower this year, which was surprisingly small and sad looking on the ACON, but the plants themselves get quite big. The top growth, they're very easy. They don't really suffer from diseases in Britain. And that's my first recommended plant, permaculture plant for Britain and places where you can keep them nice and frost-free.