Oca: Flowering good fortune

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) 'OE Orange' flowering

Flowering OE Orange oca plant in an embarrassingly weedy patch This has been a particularly exciting week for my little oca (Oxalis tuberosa) experiment, which is nice because I am working on a project that is burning out my brain.  Almost every time I head outside for a quick break, I am greeted with some new […]

Oca: Hopin for flowers

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) variety 'Hopin' flowering

First flower on a Hopin oca plant Yesterday, I wrote of my surprise at finding June flower buds on some of our oca (Oxalis tuberosa) plants.  Today’s events were not quite as surprising, but still unexpected.  We have our first oca flower.  It opened on a plant of the Hopin variety sometime between 10AM and […]

Oca: A budding interest soon to bear fruit?

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) with 5 leaflets

Five-leafed oca While performing my morning walk through the oca (Oxalis tuberosa) and potato rows, vigilant for signs of pests and disease while blinking the sleep from my eyes, I spotted an unusual oca leaf that tuned my senses.  Is a five-leafed oca as lucky as a four-leafed clover?  While I haven’t studied the matter […]

Maca: Puny Plant from the Puna

As I have written previously, last year’s maca (Lepidium meyenii) was a disappointment, but this year is turning out better, at least so far.  I credit that largely to discarding much of what I know about maca. Maca plant with bonus weeds In its normal habitat, high in the Andes, maca stands largely alone.  It […]

Potatoes: Growing from Seed (Part 2)

Well, it took me a while to get back to this topic; that is how it goes in spring.  We’ve been busy planting potatoes instead of writing about it. In the first part of this post, I talked about growing potatoes from true seed and the biological facts of potato sexual reproduction.  In this part, […]

Potatoes: New varieties coming up

As I have written previously, I have expanded my interest in potato breeding significantly over the past couple of years.  This year, I had the opportunity to buy a number of uncommon varieties, many of which originated in Tom Wagner‘s breeding program, or as seed bank accessions. These were planted more than a month after […]

Nutrition facts for oca, ulluco, and mashua

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) nutrition facts

I’ve had a few customers ask about the nutrition data for oca, which set me on a search.  I was surprised that it is not all that easy to come by, as it seems like a fairly popular crop in New Zealand, but I didn’t turn up much.  The main source that I found was […]