Root Crops
The roots grown on the Dwarven valley terraces below the Ironspine holds and dug from the canopy gardens and forest floors of the Elves: turnips, carrots, parsnips, and the edible roots of the wild weald.
Overview
Root crops are what grows where grain is unsure and what keeps where grain would spoil. In the Ironspine the Dwarven farmsteads below the holds grow barley and roots on the valley terraces, and the roots go up to the gate in sacks to be stored in the cool of the stone. In the Elven forests roots are tended in the canopy gardens and planted understorey of the Crownboughs and dug from the forest floor of the Elderweald. No one sings of them. They are what a hold eats at the end of a long winter.
Appearance
Turnips
The hardiest root of the terraces: a round, white-fleshed root as big as a fist or two, purple-flushed at the shoulder where it pushes out of the soil, under a rosette of rough, bristly, bright green leaves. Turnips grow fast, stand cold, and taste sharp and peppery raw and sweet when boiled.
Carrots and parsnips
Long tapering roots under feathery leaves: carrots pale yellow to deep purple-red and thin as a finger to a thumb, parsnips thick, cream-white, and sweetened by frost. Both flower in their second year in flat white umbrellas of tiny flowers on a stalk as high as a Dwarf.
Forest roots
In the Elderweald the Wood Elves gather tubers and fleshy roots from clearings and stream-banks: knobbly, earth-brown, white or yellow inside, some sweet and starchy, some bitter until they are soaked and boiled. In the Crownboughs the same kinds are planted in beds in the understorey and on the low terraces.
Habitat and Range
Dwarven terraces lie in the sheltered valleys of the hold country, where the mountains allow anything to grow. Barleystep, a cluster of four Dwarven farmsteads below a hold, is typical: barley and roots on the terraces, herds driven to summer pasture, and everything it grows sent up to the gate it belongs to. In the lower levels of the holds the fungal beds take over, and roots and fungus between them feed the gate.
Behaviour and Temperament
Roots ask for deep, stone-free soil, which on a mountain terrace is the work of generations of picking. They stand frost better than any grain and can be left in the ground through early winter and dug as needed. Wet years rot them, and burrowing animals take them from below.
Life Cycle
Most are sown in spring and lifted in autumn. Carrots and parsnips are left to flower only where seed is wanted, in their second summer; turnips seed in one.
Uses and Dangers
Roots are boiled, roasted, stewed with barley and meat, and fed to the beasts in a hard winter. Clamped in straw and earth, or stored in dark, cool chambers in the rock, they last until spring, which is why the holds value them. A poor root and barley year at the valley farmsteads is felt a long way down, and the holds then buy more from Human farmers on the Headwater side. Elves of both forests eat roots fresh in season and dry or store the rest.
Wild roots carry their own danger: several roots of the deep weald look much like edible ones and are poisonous, and no one gathers there without having been taught by someone who has.
Lore and Belief
Dwarves say a root is "held food": it grows downward, keeps in stone, and asks for patience, all things the Held Covenant honours. Wood Elves of the Rootcrown Concord take only some of the roots in any patch and leave the rest to grow on, holding that what the forest gives must still be there to give next year.