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Cultivating Wasabi - it's easier than you think! · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hi, welcome back to Hydroponics Daily. Today we're going to be talking about
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  wasabi cultivation and it's renowned as being the most difficult plant in the world to grow.
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  If you look on a BBC article it'll say this, people who grow wasabi say this,
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  but it's not actually true.
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  It's quite an easy plant to grow and it's a brassica, so it's in the brassica
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  family or the crucifer family, so cabbages, broccoli,
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  things like that it's related to and its nutrition
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  will be similar to that so it loves things like calcium and sulfur so
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  that's a top tip add extra calcium and sulfur to get
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  a really unique and
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  extreme taste of the wasabi other things
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  about brassica being a brassica cabbage white butterflies will
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  attack it flea beetles will attack it and one
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  of my top tips is grow it in a greenhouse grow in a polytunnel keep
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  those flea beetles and those cabbages away and it'll grow really well
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  it's obviously grown for its its
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  swollen rhizome here under the
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  ground and that takes many years to grow and that can fetch many hundreds of
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  dollars per kilo if it's good quality you can eat the leaves but they and you
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  can sell the leaves but they are not as valuable as the swollen rhizome it will
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  produce a inflorescence a bit like.
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  Thalecress, if you know that, Arabidopsis, very thin.
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  The seeds are very small and they're very difficult to propagate from seeds.
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  The best way to propagate it is just division. So get a sharp scalpel or knife
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  and cut it in two, making sure that you get some of the apical meristem and
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  leaves tissue from both plants and just keep it going again and again and again.
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  And eventually, within a year or so, you'll have hundreds of wasabi plants.
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  So why is it notorious as the most difficult plant to grow then?
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  Well, the first thing is it does not like to dry out the soil.
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  It's described as a riparian species, which means it grows in rivers and flowing streams.
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  But people think they get that information and they go, right,
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  I'm going to put it in a waterlogged conditions. And that's not true.
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  It needs to have oxygenated moisture around it at all times.
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  If it's stagnant it will die just like any other plants that isn't specially
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  adapted to grow in bogs or swamps it's not a swamp plant it's a river plant
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  so it likes oxygenated water and so,
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  what you won't realize is you don't need to have a
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  inundated grow media with water it will grow perfectly
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  well in adequately moist grow media
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  as long as you never ever let
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  the grow media dry out if you do the plant
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  will die if you allow it to get into
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  full sun in the summer it will also die it
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  does it will tolerate high temperatures it will tolerate good levels of light
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  but it really in the in the extremes of the summer you need to shade it and
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  make sure that it never ever dries out so if i were growing in a soil-based
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  medium in pots i would use something that's called an ephod bed.
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  These were beds that were developed in ephod in Hampshire, and it's also where
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  they grow giant pumpkins, but that's by the by.
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  Ephod beds always, they're like, you know, like they have a cistern,
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  like on a toilet, and it always refills the bed, so it's always supplying water to the plants.
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  That's the sort of cistern that I would use if I was growing wasabi.
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  Or I'd use rockwool as well, that's another option. They use rockwool in New
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  Zealand for growing wasabi, but making sure that never, ever dries out, that's the key point.
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  And propagation by division what else can we say about wasabi its
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  scientific name is utrema japonica i i
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  like this name so much i named my company after it so my my
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  main company is called utrema and i've grown
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  a lot of wasabi thousands and thousands of plants of wasabi and
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  if i can do it it's definitely not the most difficult plant to grow because i've grown
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  plenty of struggle to grow plenty of other different types of plants and
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  it forms a rosette habit so just like what
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  the plants grow like a lettuce or spinach and it
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  bolts what is called flowering or bolting rosette plants
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  when they flower we call it bolting and it does this once
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  a year you can't prevent this it's going to happen anyway
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  15 to 20 of the resources will go towards
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  flowering unfortunately but you can eat all parts of the flower it's got that
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  distinct mustardy type horseradish type taste but more extreme if you buy wasabi
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  from the supermarket in a tube it's just horseradish with some green dye and
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  then maybe some wasabi roots or fibrous roots,
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  wasabi leaves or fibrous roots included to say that it contains,
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  inverted commas, wasabi.
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  But if you go to a Japanese restaurant, then they will get the actual root.
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  They will crush it in front of you. And that is the true wasabi.
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  True wasabi only releases, it's got a very short window to release the temperature,
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  the active chemical, the taste flavour from the roots. It needs to be ground.
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  On a special type of grater, and then it won't taste extreme to begin with.
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  And then after a couple of minutes, it will. And then that only lasts,
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  has to be eaten within 20 minutes, otherwise it completely breaks down.
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  And so that's not great for supermarket-type products, but it is good for gourmet restaurants.
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  They use, in Japan, traditionally a shark's fin-type grater,
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  because you know let's have some cruelty in there i'd advise not using a shark spin,
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  grater in there i would use just a normal grater it's
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  not going to add to the taste by coming from from a
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  shark let's think what else can we talk about
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  wasabi it's it's a really cool plant if you've tried to grow
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  it before let me know in the comments and yeah it grows really well if you use
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  liquid gold in the uk or if you're in america gold leaf i've grown thousands
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  of plants with it and oh yeah top tip here we go so if the grow media to choose i would use normal cocoa.
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  With a bit of grit in there i would not use perlite
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  i just thought perlite would be great for this because it's sort of you know
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  mimicking that riverbed but wasabi plants hated perlite and i think it's something
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  to do with the aluminium in the perlite everyone thinks perlite as being this
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  innocuous inert media with no nutrients but it actually contains a lot of Aluminium, Aluminium,
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  Silicate, and I think the aluminium is toxic to the plants,
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  and it's toxic to a lot of plants, but particularly wasabi, so don't use perlite,
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  use cocoa with a bit of grit in there, natural stone.
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  Okay, so Hydroponics Daily for today, wasabi!