Today I collected the first of my second generation crosses. These are the first seeds produced by plants that we grew from seed. Hopefully the first of many, although I won’t inflict you with any more pictures of seeds in bags. Since I don’t know the characteristics of many of the parent plants at this […]
At one point while chewing on a piece of oca stem, it occurred to me that it tasted quite a bit like gooseberry. As a lover of gooseberry pie, my next thought was to wonder whether oca stems could be used to make a pie. Today, we put it to the test. You might call […]
Several people have asked how I do hand pollinations with oca (Oxalis tuberosa). It is hard to show in pictures, so we did a brief video demonstration. The video will make more sense if you read these posts first: Maximizing seed yield of crosses Seeds from cuttings A few points to clarify: * All mentions […]
Sea kale has a rather remarkable ability to re-sprout from its roots. One of the popular ways of propagating sea kale relies on this tendency. Sea kale root cuttings, or “thongs” as they are commonly described, provide a fast-growing clone of the parent plant without all the fuss of starting from seed. Until recently, I […]
A side note to start with: Northwest Edible Life invited me to do an introduction to Andean root vegetables, which has gone up today: http://www.nwedible.com/2014/03/andean-root-vegetables.html I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Northwest Edible Life is a great blog and definitely worth checking out if you’re reading here. —– This will be just a […]
We overwintered quite a few seedling oca plants this year. These plants were started from seed in August and only a few produced tubers before the end of the season. I wasn’t sure what to expect – if the plants would form tubers indoors, if they would grow through the winter, or if they would […]
Sea Kale (Crambe maritima) is an excellent vegetable for the perennial garden. All parts are edible, but some are tastier and require more work than others. For my palate, there is a tie for best tasting part between the flower buds (like broccoli) and the blanched shoots. Shoots come early in the year, anywhere between […]
This blog post was an early version of our ulluco growing guide, which has since grown to include all of the information in this post and much more. I recommend that you skip straight to it instead of reading this post, which is now a little out of date. …there are a few things that […]
Mostly, this post is just an excuse to show you a staged picture. But, I’ll pad it out a bit with some stats, because, who doesn’t like stats? We grew 364 oca plants this year. About half were grown from small tubers and cuttings in our upper garden, where I focused on seed production. These […]
Winter is coming and that forces hard decisions. We have more ocas to winter over than I had planned for, particularly since I didn’t expect to be able to both produce and germinate seed this year. So, our 58 sown and volunteer seedlings have been living outside, coming in to the porch only on nights […]