Showing posts with label oca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oca. Show all posts

Sunday 17 April 2022

Magic Oca Tubers

At the back end of 2020 I purchased some oca tubers.

Oca is a South American tuber crop. They look a bit like small potatoes, but they are in a totally different family. Whereas potatoes are in the same family as tomatoes (hence the susceptibility of both to blight), oca grow like an oxalis.

I'm not going to pretend oca is a perfect crop to grow. Firstly the tubers are stupidly overpriced, often around £1 each for tubers an inch round if you're lucky. Who is going to eat something worth that much? No, I'd rather grow them on and sell them for 50p each! But come the day when I end up with too many to sell and everybody else has had the same idea, then I will start to treat them more as a crop to be eaten.

Those first tubers I purchased could not have been more of a disappointment. They had been either harvested too late or not stored frost-free after harvesting, causing at least half of them to just wither and rot away. The rest I tried to store over winter but by the spring they were just empty shells of decomposing skins.

And therein lies one problem with oca. It doesn't form tubers until late in the year but they do not survive a heavy frost, so it's a tuber on the edge of its range. But as with wild birds, insects and plants, that range is creeping ever further north as our climate changes.
In fact it is this climate change which drives the need to rethink some of our crops. It's an unusual year now when my potatoes aren't hit by blight due to our warm, wet summers.

Anyway, back to the point. Not to be put off, I found some reasonably priced oca tubers on ebay. I am still experimenting with how to store such tubers overwinter. Since oca are so small, I don't want them drying out. My standard storage for potatoes is in a wardrobe in the garage. This keeps them cool and dark without exposing them to frost. The wardrobe offers protection from rodents too. I just store my potatoes in thick paper bags. I decided to store the oca in a mix of coir, perlite and sharp sand. For an insurance policy, I also stored some in a tub of peat-free compost in the fridge. I occasionally had a rummage around during the winter just to check their progress - all was fine.

I don't want to wait till May, when we are frost-free, to start my oca tubers growing, so instead my plan was to pot them up indoors to give them a head start. Besides, it would be difficult to stop them sprouting of their own accord if I waited too long into the spring.

So in mid-March I released my stored tubers from their hibernation. They had all stored really well. No softening of the tubers and no rot. The ones in the fridge were more ready to go, probably because there is more humidity in there, even if the temperature is more controlled.

What amazes me about tubers is how such a tiny, insignificant ball of plant material can throw up so much growth and replicate itself so efficiently over a year. Just take a look at the emergent growth from these tiny little tubers!

Coming up for mid-April now and oca plants seem really strong. A couple have shot away but most are throwing up really strong young shoots. They are in an unheated conservatory so that I can check their growth until they can go into the ground outside. That way we get sturdy plants.

The original plan was to grow the oca in with the perennials on the edge of the forest garden. However, the soil is still a bit too clayey in there which makes for difficult harvesting. So instead they are going into some of the conventional vegetable beds - these are more and more becoming a mix of annual crops and perennials anyway. 

Hopefully by November I'll be pulling handfuls out of the ground a bit like this hill farmer I witnessed harvesting his Oca recently in Mexico.

Maybe I'll even have enough to eat a small plate full.

I'll keep you updated.


Saturday 26 February 2022

From Sombreros to Pigeon and Potatoes

I've just got back from Mexico! It was a birdwatching trip with friends, well timed to avoid all the storms. The smallholding was left in the capable hands of my wonderful wife.

The only sombreros I actually saw in Mexico were the cheap ones in the airport. I did however take a great interest in the plants of the volcanic highlands. Many were familiar to me, either as garden flowers or forest garden plants. There were tree lupins, Mexican tagetes, salvias and lobelias.

This gave me a new idea for livestock
on the smallholding!


Esculenta, Taro, Dasheen, Eddoe, whatever you want to call it,
growing wild along a stream


Of even more interest were what appeared to be yacon plants growing wild - I never got round to digging up the roots to check. There were small-scale farmers growing very much in the style of a forest garden, melons draped over flowering bushes visited by the hummingbirds I was really there to see.

I even got to watch a farmer harvesting his oca, which was obviously unaffected by early morning light frosts in the highlands.

A farmer harvesting his oca

Back to Icy Blighty

Now I'm back I need to get back into the swing of things PDQ as blossoms are starting to appear, bulbs are shooting up and seeds need to be sown, among many other jobs.

Waste Not Want Not
Today we headed off to a friend to pick up 50 pigeons shot by a farmer in the morning. We'll prep some for ourselves and the dogs will enjoy them too. Waste not want not.

Spudulicious plans for 2022
I also went to pick up this year's seed potatoes. 1kg each of ten varieties. I was going to try one new variety this year, Homeguard, but it was not available, so I am sticking with familiar old favourites. These pretty much select themselves. Primarily they need to cope reasonably well with blight (though the resistant varietis I find disappointing in taste). Next, they need to be relatively unattractive to slugs.

Some do better in wet years, others can cope with drier conditions. That's unpredictable and one reason why I grow so many varieties.

Going back to blight, this year I plan to grow my spuds in smaller patches as I have sort of abandoned the strict rotation system. Hopefully this might help to control the spread, Secondly, I intend to use a milk-based spray. Even if you wanted to use them, there are no sprays available to the small-scale grower now, so hopefully this harmless solution will help. (Large-scale potato farmers spray up to 30 times during the lifetime of a potato plant. I'm not sure I'd want to eat that! I know they can't risk blight destroying the nation's crop and people don't want scabby potatoes full of bugs and tunnels, but there must be another way.)

For now I'll be planting a few early potatoes straight into the polytunnel and rest rest will be set to chit on a windowsill, the process whereby you encourage them to form strong young shoots without exposing them to potential frosts and cold, wet soil outside.

To finish, here's the list of potatoes I'm growing this year.

FIRST EARLY: 
Casablanca, Duke of York, Home Guard, Red Duke of York. 
SECOND EARLY: 
Charlotte, Kestrel, Blue Kestrel
MAIN CROP: 
Cara, Desiree, Kerrs Pink, King Edward, Pink Fir Apple and Valor.

Actually, that's 12!

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