Oca: Mini tubers from 2013 seedlings

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.

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This will be just a quick post to give you a peek at some tubers from 2013 August-sown oca seedlings.  These plants, for whatever reason (ahem… neglect), died over the winter and I just got around to digging them.  The tubers will be replanted shortly (very shortly in the cases of those that are already sprouting).

It is hard to draw any conclusions from mini tubers about the ultimate size and yield of an adult plant, but they do give a preview of the tuber colors at least.  These were all out of the Hopin x Sunset cross and their parentage is obvious in some cases; the top right and top left look a lot like Sunset, while the second from top right looks a lot like Hopin.  White tubers seem common and I imagine this is probably the color of the tubers of oca’s ancestors; a lot of tuber-forming Oxalis appear to have white tubers.

Some mini tubers from 2013 oca seedlings