The story began when friends in Indiana shared some of their poha harvest with us. “What the heck is poha!” It looked like a ground cherry. A ground cherry, if you’ve never had one, looks like a tomatillo. and if you haven’t had a tomatillo, well, I’m terribly sorry. This was the largest and sweetest ground cherry I’ve tried. Most ground cherries have a not-so-ripe strawberry flavor, but this one had a juicier pineapple taste. Boy, was I going to make some good treats out of this, I thought. Flash forward to the next summer. I was now living in Boston, and just planted some new plants on the balcony. a few weeks later, I had a bunch of these mysterious seedlings popping up all over the place. I thought they were eggplants, so I chose to save them. Even the flower kind of resembled the eggplant, but I knew something was up. BAM! All of a sudden all these POHA were everywhere. OHHH! It all came back in a flood. I did not end up making that poha culinary masterpiece. Whatever we couldn’t snack on, went into the worm composting bin. the bin and the worms traveled with us, and I had used the castings in the soil. It’s been called poha from folks hailing from KY, but is one of many ground cherry species. Physalis peruviana is the latin name for this particular plant, and more commonly called Cape Gooseberry. It is related to the tomatillo, but not related to any gooseberries or currants in the Ribes genera. These are rowdy little plants that love the hot sun, and hardly need to be watered everyday. They make great snacks when we relax on the balcony. Last year they would fall from the edge and land by front door. Then they made good snacks for coming and going. You don’t have to eat them all at once, they can linger in the hot sun for days and still taste good. This year, yet again, I had poha sprouting up and I knew instantly what they were.
Hello again.
