Doing dishes based on The Hunger Games, it can be easy to forget the thing that stares you in the face every time you hear the name Katniss: the root she’s named after. During one of her flashbacks, she mentions a time when she’s washing up in a pond when she notices the arrow shaped leaves around her growing in the pond. The root is “katniss”, the plant she is named after.
After doing some research, I found out that the plant is called Sagittaria or “arrowhead” and used to be a common starch staple for natives of the Americas. It’s even native to Hawaii! This, of course, blew my mind. I tried emailing some people at the college I work at since I work for the tropical agriculture department, but never got a response. It’s probably because I was basically asking if anyone knew where I could get some swamp weed. And yet it’s not like I’m going to go driving out into the jungle to see if I can randomly find some!
I ended up settling on buying seeds online. There are many different types of arrowhead, but the one that I settled upon was Sagittaria latifolia, mostly because it’s described as having a purplish skin and Katniss describes her roots as being “bluish”. I bought a packet from Prairie Moon Nursery last year but never did succeed in getting it to grow in our growbed. I decided to start again, this time trying to start them in Jiffy pellets in lots of water.
It’s been four days and nothing’s happened. I threw the extra seeds into the water to see if that ended up working too, but perhaps my seeds are just too old. If they eventually sprout, I’ll move them to a large pot outside.
Just a suggestion 🙂 –
You could try filling a large pot with high quality potting soil, and just let them grow up in the pot (most “tuber” plants don’t transplant well).
Maybe plant the seeds 1/2 to 1″ deep, spaced 4-5″ apart. make sure keep the soil moist, but not to wet. In your picture, the seeds and dirt look really pretty soaked, and the seeds may drown. Make sure to place the pot outside during the day, in direct sunlight, but inside during the night if the temperature drops much below 40 degrees.
Also, many things don’t come up for a couple weeks, so something may happen yet 🙂 We just planted a large raised be garden with almost 70 different kinds of things, so my source is experience!
😀
Well, it’s soaked on purpose. Katniss is a pond/bog plant, so it’s supposed to grow in heavily soaked water or a pot submerged in water.
Yes – Katniss does need to be in water. I dug some up (we live near the river and some ponds where they are abundant) then potted them to bring to school; they died pretty quickly. I wish I could send you some of the plants. I will see if I can find some better seeds for you, though–those would be easy to mail.
try (if you have a pond or have a friend with a backyard pond ) put the seeds in a pot with some soil and put it in the pond and see if that works