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 I recommend that you skip straight to it instead of reading this post, which is now a little out of date.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 […]
One of the unique features of oca is the frequency with which clones manifest phenotypic changes. The most obvious of these changes is to skin color. I haven’t done any careful analysis, but simply dividing the total number of tubers harvested by the number of changes that we have seen, changes to skin color may […]
It has been a busy couple of weeks, so I am behind in posting photos of our ulluco harvest. It turned out to be a pretty good year for ulluco. There were low points; some of the varieties that I got in long distance trades produced very little (the white one with pink spots disappeared […]
Our oca seedlings, sown from this year’s seeds, continue to grow at their own paces. These 53 seedlings (9 have disappeared, probably down a slug’s gullet, since the last update) all resulted from two August sowings and were all grown under the same conditions. Some are still tiny plants with only two or three sets […]
The oca flowering season came to an end this week. All of the plants are still growing strong, but they dropped the last of their flowers. That seems like another bit of evidence that oca have a limited flowering period that is not necessarily related to weather. The weather, other than the wind, which is […]
Fresh camas bulbs(I know that they don’t look that appetizing, but the outer layer is easy to peel once they are steamed.) If you like your food not just slow, but really slow, you should look into camas (Camassia quamash is the most common variety, but there are also Camassia leichtlinii and others). Camas is […]
This was a pretty normal year on the coast of Washington. We had a cool winter, a cool spring, a cool summer, and so far, we’re having a cool fall. We’re close enough to the ocean that the temperature of the Pacific just off shore is a much better predictor of our temperatures than anything […]
Skirret (Sium sisarum) is a plant that is very flexible about harvest. It is a perennial, so you can harvest it at any time of year, after any number of years of growth. It also doesn’t keep very well out of the ground, so it is a plant best harvested whenever you want to eat […]
