Oca harvest 2019

Oca flowers – end September

This is only the second year of growing oca, and the first year with more than a token amount.  Mostly I grew oca saved last year from those sent to me from Frances at Island threads, but I also had a selection of tubers from real seeds.  They had been planted direct in the pallet garden with no additional soil improvement and no attention after planting.  The oca from Frances grew pretty well and flowered in early autumn (you can see them at the front of the first photo in this previous post),  the multicoloured oca got a bit swamped by adjacent kale plants, so I wasn’t expecting too much from those.

First two plants

I harvested two of Frances’ oca plants just before xmas.  One plant did pretty well with a total of 14 ounces, the other only had one ounce.  The first had several elongated tubers with fleshy stems, but top growth was very soggy and dead.  Some of the tubers showed regrowth at ends, some had side tubers.

Oca crisps

I roasted several large tubers with veg for dinner.  They did not crisp up (our oven tends to keep things a bit moist), giving a rather soft texture but pleasant lemony-potato taste.  I tried them thinly sliced and fried to crisp up, they had a very nice salt and vinegar crisps flavour.   When just thinly sliced and dried in lower oven they taste quite bland but a bit crunchy and hard in texture.  It would be difficult to cut them more thinly sliced which may help the texture.  Thinly sliced, rubbed in oil and roasted in a tray at the top of the oven, they again turned out like nice crisps, even though they were slightly burnt.

Dried Oca

I dug up the rest of Frances’ tubers early in the new year.  There was still quite a bit of life in the upper growth, with some leaves still apparent.  December and early January has been very mild compared to November, and the oca plants were still hanging on!  I weighed the total weight of tubers, and counted them, then weighed the larger tubers (above about 1 inch) and counted those separately.  Of the total 10 plants subsequently dug up, the average total weight was 8 ounces, with a maximum of 16 ounces and a minimum of half an ounce (!).  There were an average of 17.3 tubers per plant (maximum 25, minumum 1).  When the larger tubers were separated out they accounted for very much the majority of the weight (average 6.2 ounces) despite only having a count of 8 and a half tubers.  This means that it probably isn’t worth fussing over the little tubers, most of the eating is in the easier to handle ones.

Sorting and weighing

Most of the tubers were clean even shaped and waxy red, however there were one or two that were flattened and distorted (fasciated), one that was bifurcated, and one plant that had several tubers with tiny side tubers (not counted as part of large tubers).  There was very little slug or insect damage.

Fasciated tuber (on left, normal on right)

As expected, the harvest of the assorted coloured tubers was rather poorer.  I only found 11 out of the 12 tubers planted, one plant also only had two tiny pea sized tubers.  There was an average of 1.59 ounces total weight (5.45 count) and there were fewer tubers of a reasonable size.  I combined the tubers of similar colour and will try and grow them all again next year, and try and give them a bit more sunshine.  I think it was daylight rather than root competition that was the problem, since one of the better cropping plants had a lot of grass weed competition, but may have had more sunshine, since it was at the end of the row, so more exposed to the evening light.

Assorted Oca harvest

One of the pink tubered plants had a couple of tubers that were half one colour and half another.  I think this is a spontaneous mutation – I may be able to get plants of different colours by propagating the shoots of each half separately.

Chimaera

Another experiment to try is to select and grow larger tubers from one set of plants and smaller tubers from another set of plants.  I should be able to see how many years it takes for selection of plants which grow smaller or larger tubers.  I will only be able to do this with Frances’ pink tubers, since I do not have enough of the other colours to try that with yet (numbers 6 and 8 I’ll be lucky to grow at all I fear).