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Fennel
Foeniculum vulgare
Also known as sweet fennel
In stock
Description
Fennel is a fun, delicious, beautiful perennial to include in any garden. While often grown as an annual for the first year bulb, our family prefers to grow fennel as a perennial.
Instead of harvesting fennel in the first season for the delicious bulb, we help it get established in year one. After its first winter in the ground, fennel rewards us with delicious spring shoots, abundant beauty and delicious and nutritious seeds.
Fennel shoots, or the young stalks, are just as delicious as the bulb. While they are not as fat as a fennel bulb, a mature fennel plant has multiple stalks and will add up to the same amount or more vegg as one bulb. And then he flowers.
The whispy “frond” like leaves are also edible and delicious. They have a texture that is like fine hairs that may be an acquired texture for some tongues, but turning them into a fennel pesto solves that problem! Fennel leaves can also be dried and used as a tea or ground into a powder as a flavoring agent.
Fennel flowers are so attractive in the garden as they shoot skyward, 4, 5, 6 even up to 8 feet tall in the right conditions. The numerous yellow clusters of flowers a single plant will send skyward bloom at different times and are a symphony of bright constellations dancing skyward delighting humans and insects alike.
Indeed fennel is a great insectiary and pollinator plant. Fennel’s delicious aroma is a sensory delight and also helps confuse the insects that may harm our other plants.
While the entire fennel plant can be used as a digestive aid, fennel seeds may be most well known as a carminative, helping aid digestion when eaten before, during or after a meal. Fennel seeds can be drunk as tea, cooked into a meal or chewed by themselves.
You may have found fennel seed offered by the door of an Indian restaurant on the way out to help their patrons digest their food. I find fennel seed flavor so delicious that I am nibbling flowers and seeds just about every time I pass by a fennel plant in the summer or fall.
After collecting seeds from several plants we have enough seed to cook and drink tea with throughout the year, and we no longer need to buy fennel seed from the store. With access to more fresh fennel seed, I found myself using more and more fennel seed in my cooking of curries, chilis and soups. It’s delicious!
When you allow your fennel plants to go to seed you will likely find volunteer fennel popping up here and there, as fennel is eager to readily reseed and naturalize itself in most gardens.
Because of it’s strong aroma and its flavor, fennel is also gopher and deer resistant. I have not noticed deer bites on our unprotected fennel plants. If they did try some the damage was minimal enough to go unnoticed.
We grow our fennel plants exclusively as perennials and so we are selecting seeds from fennel plants that thrive as perennials in our conditions. While some seedlings will make bulbs in their first year we are not selecting primarily for that trait so some plants won’t bulb up as big as other varieties bred specifically for bulbs.
Instead we transitioning our fennel population to be wild tended and we scatter seeds and encourage volunteers in our garden where they want to grow. In this way we are selecting seeds from stronger individuals that prefer to be wild tended. In future seasons I hope to also select for drought tolerance.
We are excited to share our perennial fennel seed with you and your garden!
Details
Lifecycle: Perennial
Lifespan: 3-5+ years
Hardiness zones: 3-10 (USDA)
Habitats: Mediterranean coast
Plant size: 3 ft wide x 8 ft tall
Light: Full sun to part shade
Soil: All soils, well draining
Water: Moist soil preferred, drought tolerant
Seeds per packet: 100 seeds
Seed Starting
Plant seeds about 1/8″ deep in the spring and don’t allow top of soil to dry out until seedlings emerge. Fennel can easily be direct sowed in a well prepared bed. Alternatively sow in pots or flats and plant into their final position when the plants are big enough to handle.
Cultivation
Fennel will grow in a wide range of garden settings. They like moist, fertile soil but will do pretty well in less than ideal conditions. They enjoy growing with rocks. We’ve had fennel plants sprout between rocks in a pile of rocks on the side of the garden where little else will grow. This is a hint to fennel’s native habitat in rocky seaside shores.
Fennel is very easy to grow as a perennial because it needs little maintenance. We typically cut the flowering stalks close to the ground sometime in the winter and the plants will create new shoots in the spring until their lifecycle is complete. You could also cut the stalks a bit higher up if you want it to branch more.
Harvest
Grown as a perennial, we harvest succulent spring shoots from year 2+ plants in early spring and cook them as vegetables in the same way you may cook a fennel bulb. Typically I harvest above the lower part of the stem that is becoming more fibrous.
Toward late summer or early fall we are harvesting green or mature brown seed as spices to use in cooking or as a delicious tea. The flowers and immature seeds are also delicious raw or cooked.
Propagation
Fennel is usually propagated by seed but division of 2+ year old plants in the spring is also possible. First year fennel seedlings transplant very easily.
Seed Saving
Wait until the seeds and their stems are brown. Then simply pluck the seeds from the seed head. For larger amounts, such as for food, thresh the dry seed heads, screen the seeds from stems and winnow away the dust and small bits. One of my favorite way to collect fennel seed is to bang the whole seed stalk in a bucket, releasing the seeds.
Additional information
Weight | 0.007 lbs |
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Dimensions | 4.5 × 3.25 × .05 in |
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