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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I know from reading that oca (Oxalis tuberosa) begins to form tubers around the time of the fall equinox and I know from experience that it forms tubers of good eating size about ten weeks later, but what happens in between? Is the rate of growth of the tubers relatively constant, or does more of […]
