On growing quinoa, and the long road to actually eating it

I think somebody should do a study on the political ecology of quinoa production. About a year ago, prices for (organic) quinoa in supermarkets here suddenly doubled, from about SEK 80 to an exorbitant SEK 150 (about EUR 17) per kg, and they haven't really come down since. Undoubtedly this is partly a reflection of the tiny grain's transition from obscure superfood to mainstream hipsterdom. I could imagine that farmers in Peru and Bolivia, where 95% of quinoa is grown, are struggling to keep up with the soaring demand created by the quinoa-devouring populations of Berlin, Stockholm and New York. Undoubtedly also, this has set in motion a host of transformations for traditional quinoa growers that have left them more exposed to the wits of global commodity markets and the health-food fads of prosperous Westerners (yes, I am including myself here). Certainly, there's boundless other factors waiting to be explored as well. A timely and interesting subject, if I say so myself. Any takers? I'll throw out a potential research question: How will Andean producers be affected once global quinoa prices drop, as they are likely to do when production in the US, Europe and elsewhere picks up?

I wished that my motivation for growing quinoa during the past year was entirely given in by lofty moral considerations such as these, some kind of Marcusian Great Refusal on my side, an attempt to one-up the global quinoa market by actively disengaging from it. More mundanely though, I just kind of liked the idea of trying to grow my own quinoa. Surely nothing that I could buy in the supermarket could taste as great as what I had grown with my own hands? I had read somewhere that apart from maize, quinoa is probably the only grain worth growing on a backyard scale, since per-plant yields can be quite respectable. As I'm not the greatest quinoa consumer (I confess to a weakness for Fagopyrum esculentum [buckwheat] instead), I figured a few plants would go a long way and decided to give it a go. So on the 10th of May last year, I filled three rows with the tiny seed, perhaps 15m in total, and waited for them to come up. I now think I could probably have sowed quite a bit earlier as well, quinoa seems to germinate at fairly low temperatures. I sowed three out of the four different varieties that I had acquired from Real Seeds in the UK, and Nichols Garden Nursery in the US, and one of them ('temuco') didn't come up at all.

The fun thing about growing quinoa is that, as the plants emerge, you will have no idea if you're actually growing quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) or just lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), the common garden weed that is a close relative and that looks identical in the early stages of growth. In my case, a lot of the quinoa didn't come up, but quite a bit of quinoa look-a-likes sprouted in between the rows. I don't have that much weeds in this part of my allotment, but I imagine things could become quite messy in places where there's a lot of lambsquarter seeds in the soil. Bemused, I just let all of it grow for a few months. Quinoa gets quite a bit taller than lambsquarters and is less bushy in its growth habit, so after a while it becomes easier to distinguish the two. Apart from that, this is a crop that really grows as easily as its weedy relative. I gave it a bit of compost and seaweed extract and then basically ignored it until autumn. There weren't really any real pest or disease problems to speak of, and I didn't have to water the plants at all (though we did have an unusually wet summer).

One of the Real Seeds varieties is called 'Rainbow' and gives you a spectular display of colours in autumn as the plants and the seed heads start drying. They're highly ornamental, ranging from green over brown and yellow to different shades of red, orange and pink. I finally cut off all the seedheads - perhaps 20-30 in total - during a dry spell in the beginning of October and hung them indoors to dry down further. This is basically where things become a little bit complicated. In order to get from a bushel of dried quinoa seed stalks to a neat pile of edible quinoa seed, you will need to thresh, sift, and clean the seed. This is not necessarily difficult but without the advantages of appropriate equipment or previous quinoa-threshing experience, it's a very time-consuming process. Together with a friend I ended up threshing each seed head by hand, then sifting the debris through canvases of different mesh sizes, and then winnowing what was left in small batches to get rid of dust and the smallest debris. Without wanting to claim that the results yielded by my primitive methods are generalizable in any way, it took several evenings to get a grand total of 1200g of quinoa. Let's just say I gained a lot of respect for the machineless quinoa-, sorghum-, amaranth-, millet-, etc- producers of the world. 

My authentic African winnow, finished with cow dung!

Swedish quinoa

Next, you need to carefully wash the quinoa in order to get rid of the bitter-tasting saponins that coat the seeds. Again, there's probably more sophisticated, energy-efficient and altogether smarter ways of going about this, but I just washed the seed a few times and then boiled it in plenty of water. It was still quite bitter at this point so I had to change the cooking water four or five times before the bitterness had more or less disappeared. Apparently there's some saponin-free varieties out there, so anyone seriously thinking about taking up quinoa-growing could probably save herself quite a bit of effort by tracking down these varieties.

Now to get my head around the apparent resurgent interest for sorghum and teff. Actually, for anyone falling in love with sorghum, I understand it should be quite possible to grow in more northern climates...  I myself, though, have decided to abandon my (pseudo)grain-growing ambitions for the time being. While the result, in the end, was a quite delicious and very satisfying quinoa, I'm not convinced it's really worth all the effort. If I could grow quinoa on a slightly larger scale, I could probably be persuaded to invent/invest in some proper quinoa-adapted treshing equipment. Within the limits of my dangerously overcrowded suburban allotment however, it feels slightly more sensible to focus my botanical pursuits on less labour-intensive crops. More skirret, anyone?

Inconspicious failures and lesser successes

Ah, winter, my favourite retrospective season, a perfect time to mourn the stillborn projects of past year and draw some candid conclusions for the next. Though I have a tendency in these pages to enthuse about the garden's most great and glorious crops, I should probably highlight that not everything conforms as willingly to my gardening dictates, or my taste buds for that matter. For balance, and in the spirit of horticultural transparency, here's three projects that turned out to be rather underwhelming in 2015:


1. Mashua

Mashua

That's tropaeolum tuberosum, a family member of the garden nasturtium and part of my booming Andean root vegetable collection. It's quite ornamental, grows like a weed, is supposed to yield amazingly, and it has an enticing exotic background to boot. What's not to like? In fact, it didn't yield very well for me at all, which in all likelihood is because, much like my oca, the plants succumbed to the first frost at the end of October. Also like oca, it is daylight sensitive so I assume yields would have been significantly higher had I been able to keep the plants alive a few weeks more. A number of plants also mysteriously succumbed halfway through the growing season, probably due to some critter enthusiastically chewing through the root system.

Mashua tubers

As it turns out, I'm not too sad that my mashua yields turned out as modest as they did, since my biggest beef with this plant is not with its gowth habit but with its taste. I had read quite a bit about mashua before I decided to plant some, and certainly the descriptions I found were mixed to say the least. From "the tuber with the taste that torments" to descriptions that compare its flavor to that of turnip, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Since I actually quite like turnip, I figured it couldn't be all that bad. Having tried mashua a number of times now, and trying very hard to like it at least a little bit, I can however attest that the taste is something else entirely. It gives a very intense, spicy yet simultanously very perfume-y flavour that completely overwhelms your taste buds (or mine at least). In fact, after eating just half a small, cooked mashua the taste went straight to my stomach and I started feeling slightly uncomfortable. I'm quite sure I would have retched had I continued eating it. There are bound to be ways around this rather unpleasant experience. William Whitson for example recommends submitting the roots to a long, slow cooking process with a good amount of fat and liquid in order to neutralize the taste. Sensible as that might be, it's just a bit more effort than I'm willing to spend on making something palatable. Call me a kitchen conservative, but with only 300 square meters of garden soil to my disposal and an endless list of projects waiting for their fair share, the least I expect of my plants is that they taste good. I'm sorry mashua, but I think I'm just not that into you.




2. Ulluco

Ulluco

I suppose I could try it as a condiment...

In contrast to mashua, I can't really fault ulluco for its taste, since I haven't actually gotten around to eating it. I reported earlier on how I found ulluco to be really slow growing, but it seems I hadn't quite appreciated just what this meant for my intention of eating it at some point. When I pulled up the 8 or so ulluco plants I had, at about the same time as the oca, I was forced to comb through the soil carefully in order to locate my harvest. More cynical people than me would say that growing ulluco the way I did is a novel and rather elaborate way of growing peas, since peas is surely what the 'tubers' I found resembled most. One monster was about the size of a pingpong ball. They're certainly very beautiful though, and apart from their apparent attractiveness to slugs and their slothlike growth habit, they seemed quite happy in the climate here. Having consulted with some of the real ulluco experts out there, I now think I will need to pre-plant these babies indoors in spring if I want to get some actual tubers out of them. Oh yes, and then there's the whole daylight thing of course... Somehow all this doesn't quite fall in with my hands-off gardening philosophy. The choice that will haunt me the following months, therefore, is whether I want to pamper these tiny ulluco through another growing season in order to give them a proper trial, or if I should put this project on hold for a while. There's some interesting developments in ulluco breeding taking place in gardens far more organised than mine, which I anticipate might ultimately yield varieties more amenable to my growing conditions. I suppose I could just sit back and wait for those to materialize. Since I'm not known for my patience however, I have this slight suspicion I will be taking the pampering approach...

The entire ulluco harvest

3. Achocha

I don't believe I've actually mentioned achocha before, but this is another of the Andean crops I tried out in 2015. It is a member of the cucurbit family and a close relative of such fascinating plants like the exploding cucumber (cyclanthera explodens). Achocha grows a spiny, hollow fruit with big black seeds that can be eaten either immature like a cucumber, or mature like a green pepper, whose tastes it is supposed to resemble in those stages. I obtained two varieties from Real Seeds, 'Fat Baby' and 'Giant Bolivian Achocha' (a.k.a. caigua). The two seem to belong to distinct species, respectively cyclanthera brachystachya and cyclanthera pedata, and certainly the true leaves turned out to be rather different. Leaves of the Giant Bolivian somewhat resemble that of cannabis indica, which I imagine might provoke concerned looks from the neighbours. I sowed two plants of each indoors in late April and planted all of them out in May. Both germinated easily enough and grew quite vigourously. Unfortunately the slugs seemed to be extremely fond of the Giant Bolivian. The two plants never had a chance; they were decimated almost the moment they were planted and never recovered. The Fat Baby fared much better and grew well despite the cold and wet summer. It was slow to flower but once it started, sometime in August, it produced masses of tiny yellow flowers that yielded an abundance of small, green spiny fruits - the spines are soft so you can easily eat them like that. Unlike cucumbers, which can be quite challenging to grow outdoors here, Fat Baby just took off and never looked back, which is why some people have been promoting it as a good temperate-season cucumber alternative. Having said that, I find the taste decisively less interesting than cucumber. Achocha does taste faintly similar, but it lacks the former's refreshing juiciness. I would also have to be a bit skeptical of the claim that the mature fruit, when cooked, tastes like a green pepper. Again, it has a hint of that flavor, but it's much less pronounced and more bland. Quite frankly, I don't think it tastes like all that much at all. That's a definite improvement over mashua, but not exactly something that gets me wildly excited. I've since read that achocha is nicest when picked rather young (I've mostly been eating it when it was very mature), and I have 3 more Giant Bolivian seeds to try out as well, so I might just give them another go. Maybe I'll unexpectedly become an achocha lover yet, but at the moment I'm not terribly impressed.

In terms of next year's gardening shortlist, that's a definite no-no for mashua and a half-hearted maybe for ulluco and achocha. Now to start dreaming about next year's new projects!

Oh! You pretty things

Winter has arrived also for the Andean crops in my garden, so it's high time for some updates. 2015 was my first year growing oca (oxalis tuberosa), a major root crop in many Andean countries and probably one of the better-known unusual tubers from that region. In total I planted 14 known varieties and 7 varieties that I tested for the Guild of Oca Breeders (GOB). Due to a bit of self-induced force majeure however, the former got thoroughly mixed up, so from now on they're all going through life completely anonymous (at least in my garden). I'm not one to judge a tuber by its name, and at a very practical level it really doesn't matter.

The oca patch in the middle of October

Ideally, the oca growing manual clarifies, one keeps her/his plants alive until the beginning of December if one is to benefit from a fully matured crop. This is because oca plants get slightly confused in the long-daylight hours outside of their native Andean range and respond by refusing to produce tubers until after the autumn equinox. Here on the west coast of Skåne, which you could think of as the California of Sweden, we usually have the first frost sometime in November, or even, as in 2014, the beginning of December, which is pretty good in oca-growing terms. Not so this year though, when a forecasted 4°C one night at the end of October turned into an ominous -0.6°C and caught me completely off guard, therefore pretty much decimating the oca patch. Highly unfortunate considering the 3 weeks of mild and frost-free autumn weather that followed... The GOB plants got completely killed, while the other plants got frosted about 3/4 of the way, probably because they were spaced closer together and had much more foliage. Again according to prevailing oca-growing dictates, one is supposed to leave the tubers in the ground for some two weeks after the plants are killed by frost, since the tubers continue to bulk up quite a bit during this time. Which I duly did, albeit impatiently so.

White variety, 540g

I can testify that, because of its colorful nature, oca is a highly satisfying crop to harvest. I would say it's a bit like gathering easter eggs. Except of course that oca is so much more exciting than easter eggs! I mean, aren't they incredibly pretty? So euhm... yes, I dug everything up, bagged all the tubers per plant, washed them, weighed them, and then selected the ones I want to continue with next year. Considering the earlier-than-ideal harvest, I was pretty happy with the results (but then again, I have never grown these before so I have nothing to compare to and probably would have been happy with nearly anything). Most plants produced somewhere around 200-300g of small to medium-sized tubers, with the best one being a completely white variety that yielded 540g. According to the information over at Cultivariable, oca can yield up to 1kg per plant. Clearly, I'm pretty far away from that, but it's a pretty decent start nonetheless. I'm saving all but the poorest performing varieties for next year, since I want to ensure that I continue to have the diversity required to produce seed. Oca is namely a bit picky when it comes to pollinating partners.

Oh! You pretty things! These are the discards,
the tubers from plants that yielded less than 200g

GOB14178 - This from two plants

Seed!

Speaking of seed, quite a few of my oca flowered, and some produced seed in late summer and early autumn. With some 25 seeds in total, this can hardly be called a gigantic harvest, but it's enough to do a little bit of excited experimenting next year. For the more substantial work of breeding that elusive daylength-neutral oca variety, I'll be relying on the likes of the GOB. Sadly though, this year's GOB varieties didn't do well at all in my garden. The only one that produced something worth mentioning was GOB14178. While the yield of seed-grown oca is bound to be very variable, the main reasons for the substantial difference between the GOB and non-GOB varieties in my garden are probably environmental. I planted the GOB varieties in a new plot of land, that I acquired just this year, and which turned out to have very low soil fertility and a pretty severe wireworm infestation. Basically, the GOB plants never looked happy and remained stunted throughout the season. In other words, I'm blaming mismanagement by the previous owner. Objective #1 for next year: Nurture the soil, and provide better conditions for GOB trials.

Other oca objectives for 2016: Regrow all but the worst of this year's varieties, keep them alive longer than this year, and produce more seed. Oh, and grow out this year's seeds. Ultimately, as I source more varieties, I also want to start selecting for taste and texture. So far I've only tasted a few varieties, but all have been very good, and some were outstanding. The texture seems to range from quite watery to potato-ish, and the taste from quite sour to starchy, to fairly sweet. Very interesting tastes, actually. I think I would like to select for varieties with a higher dry matter, and for less oxalic acid (i.e. a more neutral or slightly sweet tasting).

Oca's here to stay!

Ipomoea batatas vs the Swedish weather: 1 - 0

Buds and more buds, but no seeds

Time for results! On 3 October I decided that summer was irrevocably over hence that it was time to find out what the sweet potatoes had been up to this paltry summer. Let's start with the bad news. Despite some pretty eager hand pollinating from my side and profuse flowering in at least 8 sweet potato varieties by the beginning of September, my plants failed to set a single seed. Not one seed. I'm not quite sure why this is, though I have some ideas. Sweet potatoes are self-incompatible, but with 8 quite genetically distinct parents that should not have been an issue. Lack of pollinators is a possible factor, and I did indeed see very little insect activity around the flowers at the time, even though bumblebees are generally quite abundant in my garden. Perhaps I have a species of bumblebee with a very finicky taste in pollen, or perhaps there were simply more exciting flowers around at the time. The most likely saboteurs in the grand sweet potato breeding scheme though, are environmental conditions. I need to look into this in more detail, but given the failure of hand pollinations it seems possible that succesful seed set was inhibited by low temperatures (something we've had plenty of this summer) and/or inadvantagous daylength. Just today I was reading Ottawa Gardener's post on how she managed to get a few seed from Georgia Jet and a purple variety in her Canadian garden, so I'm convinced that it should be possible to produce seed here in Sweden as well, provided I can create the right conditions for it. I'll be putting some more thought and effort in this for next year, perhaps growing a few particularly floriferous varieties on clear plastic to expose them to higher temperatures. Last year at least I had some plants flowering as early as July, which seems like it might be a more sensible time to produce seeds here.

Unfortuntately, vine growth is not a good indicator for
tuber formation

On to the good news then. As my pitchfork and me made their way through the first sweet potato row that sunny Saturday at the beginning of October, I became increasingly jubilant. I won't be winning any yield contests anytime soon, but my expectations, admittedly quite low, have certainly been exceeded. As could be expected, the majority of varieties failed to produce any roots at all. Sadly, this includes some particularly promising, and tasty, varieties like Orphan and Mukekuru tarya bibiri, both of which produced very vigourous vines but had roots that were no thicker than a pencil. Nothing worth saving there. The Euro/American varieties overall did quite ok, though Georgia Jet was, again, a disappointment. This is a mystery to me, though I only had two plants and both came from cuttings that I was forced to keep alive throughout the winter, so they might not have gotten the best of starts. I'll be looking for a new source of Georgia Jet next year, ideas and donations are warmly welcomed.

As last year, Nordic Purple produced very long but fairly thin roots that are hardly worth eating, but since it is the most prolificly flowering variety I have I will hold on to it. Burgundy produced some good-size tubers, as did Bonita, Nordic White and (somewhat less so) Nordic Orange, so I will be saving some of those for next year, particularly since all of them flowered as well. By far the best variety was T65. This is the variety I had expected most of and it didn't disappoint, generally producing two or three supermarket-standard tubers per plant. Sadly enough, it doesn't seem to produce flowers, not in my garden during the last two years, and not in Frank Van Keirsbilck's for quite a bit longer. T65 is a Taiwanese variety that came out of a breeding project there, so perhaps any fellow sweet potato devotee knows of an interesting, flower-producing sibling out there?



Though the success rate amongst the African varieties was considerably lower, there were some pleasant surprises as well. Burundi and Bunduguza both bulked up enough to make me slightly excited. Bunduguza gave a fair amount of smallish roots, while the three Burundi plants actually produced roots that nearly rivalled those of Euro/American varieties like Nordic White. Others that I thought were worth saving for the moment were Kitekyeru, Alira, Kwezi Kume, Mushemeza, Kipapari and Rwabafurugi. By any standards, these are still very small sweet potatoes, but I think there might be something here to work with. With their high dry matter content, the African varieties are very different from the ones you would normally find in Europe, so it seems worth hanging on to as many of them as possible.



Since the objective this year was to find the most suitable varieties for my climate rather than to maximize yield, I'm judging the harvest by the thickness of the roots rather than overall productivity. This criteria roughly gives the following classification, from thickest (about 3 fingers wide) to thinnest (somewhat wider than a thumb):

And the winner is...

1. T65
2. Nordic White
3. Burgundy
4. Bonita
5. Nordic Orange
6. Burundi
7. Bunduguza
8. Kipapari
9. Alira
10. Mushemeza
11. Nordic Purple
12. Kitekyeru
13. Rwabafurugi
14. Asian Yam 2
15. Kwezi Kume

15 varieties is considerably more than I have place to continue working with, so I will probably make a further selection later. A lot of the tubers are damaged by wireworm, which might provide problems with storage and cause additional casualties later in winter. For the moment, though, I'm very happy with this year's results. With an average mean temperature of 15.86 °C we had a fairly cold summer this year, particularly during June and July, which make me optimistic that this year's results can be replicated under most summers here. For anyone looking to grow sweet potatoes under similar climatic conditions, I'm convinced it's possible to get fairly respectable yields, consistently, provided one grows a variety like T65. I also grew the plants on ridges, which might have had a positive influence on soil temperatures as well. You could certainly increase your chances by using a plastic mulch, as advocated by Ken Allan, which is bound to boost yields considerably. Personally, I'm going to continue searching for varieties that do well also without plastic ground cover, though I might cheat a bit in order to induce early flowering and seed production. Yes, I'm just that stubborn.


You might be able to guess what I would like for christmas this year: Some more T65-class, early maturing and cold tolerant sweet potato tubers, and why not some seeds to top it off. Please?

Temperature data for Malmö, June through September 2015

2015 winter squash harvest

C. maxima - Green Hokkaido

Harvest time! All of the C. maxima plants have succumbed to end-of-season downy mildew by now, stems on the fruits have corked up nicely, and skins have hardened and faded in colour, so last week it was time to bring in the majority of this year's winter squash. Most people will leave their winter squash out in the field as long as possible, but maxima squashes actually don't mind being harvested just a tad early, about 40-45 days after flowering. Since I've had some problems with theft in my allotment, I choose to err on the side of caution and bring in the winter squash when I feel they've matured. They're currently spread all over my living room so they can cure a bit, after which they're going to the (unheated) attic for long-term storage. Having them heaped together like that is always a very satisfying sight. Name me one other food that looks as beautiful!

C. maxima - Sweet Mama

Anyway, before I launch off into another winter squash rant, here is what this year's crop looks like. The first number is the amount of squash per variety, the number in brackets is the number of plants there were of each:

15 [8] Sweet Mama
3 [1] Burgess Buttercup
4 [4] Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead
2+1? [5] Marina di Chioggia
1 [1] Galeux d'Eysines
1 [1] Blue Ballet
1 [1] Green Hokkaido

C. maxima - Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead

That's 27 squash from 21 plants, which is ok but it could definitely be better. Even though I increased spacing from last year, I think the plants were still too close together, which tends to affect yields negatively. Especially against the fence, where the Marina di Chioggia were planted, the vines were just layered on top of each other. Next year I'll be increasing my spacing further to 2mx1m, hopefully this will make for healthier plants longer into autumn as well. Sweet Mama is a semi-bush variety that needs relatively little space, so it is no surprise that it did so well compared to the others. The +1? for Marina marks a squash that is still growing and that I'm not sure will mature in time. Of the other two Marina's, one somehow got detached from the vine before it was fully grown, so I baked it the other day. While it completely lacked the typical sweetness of a ripe Marina, the taste was surprisingly good. It was starchy yet flavourful, a bit nutty and at times tasted exactly like mashed potatoes with spinach (which is a fond childhood memory of mine, in case that analogy seemed a bit random). I had one more piece right out the fridge a few hours later and that reminded me of cheesecake, which I suppose was mostly due to the texture. Surprisingly good for an immature squash!

C. moschata - Longue de Nice

As I eat my way through the rest over the coming months, I'll be saving seed from the very best for next year. I'm already looking forward to growing them out... The C. moschata are still in the garden, they need somewhat longer to mature and in contrast to C. maxima should actually stay on the vine as long as possible. There's two Longue de Nice fruits that I believe are nearly mature, and then there are a bunch of Waltham Butternut and Long Island Cheese that only started flowering very late, so it's yet to be seen if I'll get a fully mature squash off either of those. The Longue de Nice was aborting a lot of fruit in the beginning of the season. Fruits would first grow very long (some grew to 40 cms) but the head (where the seed forms, to the left in the picture) would fail to bulk up, and then it would start rotting from the top down. I believe this was due to poor pollination (there were no male moschata flowers at that time), which might mean that the moschata didn't cross with the pepo after all (or they crossed but then aborted anyway). I'll save seed from any mature (and tasty) moschata that I get and trial it next year. If it's contaminated with C. pepo genes I'll drop it, otherwise I'll try to develop a C. moschata landrace as well.

I leave you with the biggest and most alien squash coming out of the garden this year:

C. maxima - Galeux d'Eysines

Batata anxiety

Mushemeza (left) and Sula 1 (right)

With just a few weeks left of sufficiently high soil temperatures, sweet potato anxiety is setting in. Harvest or no harvest, that's basically the question at the moment, I'm under no illusions that I will have a respectable yield at this point. May, June and July have been unseasonally cool here, but the weather did pick up a bit in August, so there has been quite a lot of top-growth over the past weeks. Nothing like last year though, when vines were all over the place. The slips that were planted at the end of May still seem to have an advantage over the others, even though temperatures were suboptimal at that time, so I might try to push the growing season a bit more next year. A plastic mulch would definitely have helped a lot with this kind of weather, but I've got excuses for not going down that path... I'm trying to evaluate possible cold-tolerance, plus I feel no desire to provide another feast for the resident vole population. In other words, I'll just have to suck it up and hope that some plants will at least provide me with some seedstock for next year.

Bunduguza (top) and Kwezi Kume (bottom)

As a gardener, of course, there's always additional reasons for anxiety, and I found some in the recent potato harvest. To accommodate for ever-expanding garden experiments I've taken on a second allotment this year, which had been lying fallow for a while and was pretty much covered with grass when I first dug it last autumn. I've planted both the potatoes and the sweet potatoes (as well as all the mauka, some mashua and all of the GOB oca) on this plot, only to discover recently that it's infested with wireworms. Wireworms are the larval stage of a number of beetles, which burry into all kinds of roots and make them susceptible to rot. They prefer the roots of various grasses and are therefore quite common in newly-dug gardens, but they usually hang around for a few years after the grasses have departed and in the absence of their favourite food they will devour just about any root they find. All of this year's potatoes have had some degree of wireworm damage, some being more hole than tuber. Since potatoes are a definite dietary improvement over grass roots, I can't really blame them, but the idea that wireworms might at this very moment be burrowing their way through an already scarce sweet potato crop, therefore diminishing its storability, fills me with insecticidal cravings. There's no wireworm problems in my first allotment, so my crop placement choices this year have been highly unfortunate to say the least.

It's not all misery and desperation though. So far I've counted 8 sweet potato varieties producing flowers. These are Murasaki, Georgia Jet, Bonita, Asian Yam, Kalebe, Burgundy, Nordic White and Nordic Purple. That comes down to 7 European/commercial varieties and 1 African variety, which is in line with what could be expected. Heirloom varieties seldom flower (at least outside of the tropics) because of a long history of vegetative propagation, while commercial varieties tend to descend from flowering plants simply because breeders need seeds to work with and thus select for florescence. That there's one African variety (Kalebe) flowering is quite exciting, so I'll try to pollinate it or at least keep it alive over winter if I don't get any roots. Possibly more varieties will follow as the days shorten (some sweet potatoes are daylight sensitive for flower induction). I'm seeing very few pollinators around the flowers, so of course there's no guarantee that there'll be seed. In fact, I've yet to see a seed pod forming, but I've marked some buds that didn't fall off immediately.. where there's ribbon there is hope! I might as well increase the hand pollinations too, I've had less time for that than I would have wished so far.

Kalebe flower

On a final note, I've recently been reading Ken Allan's excellent book 'Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden; with Special Techniques for Northern Growers', which summarizes his experiences with growing sweet potatoes in Canada. Apart from repeatedly stressing the importance of using a plastic mulch to warm the soil (meh!), Ken recommends Georgia Jet as the variety of choice in colder climates. This was interesting to me because Georgia Jet by no means performed exceptionally well here last year. I got no roots at all and had to keep it alive as a cutting over winter, though admittedly I did plant it somewhat late. This year, Georgia Jet has been one of the least vigorous of all the varieties I planted. I don't know if this is because of the quality of the cutting, or because I maybe have a diseased specimen, but the two plants I have don't amount to more than a few spindly vines. It does, however, flower profusely. I've received my Georgia Jet from Frank van Keirsbilck, who has also been having some problems with it, so I was kind of bemused to read the lavish descriptions of Georgia Jet in Ken's book. Maybe I need to locate another source of it, just to give it another go.

I wouldn't mind that Indian summer now...

Ode to a (lot of) cucurbit

Let's do a little quiz. What food is highly nutritious, productive, easy to grow, stores for months at room temperature, and tastes fantastic? And what food is highly underrated, wasted in copious amounts during the holiday season, and often reduced to its decorative qualities? I guess this really isn't much of a challenge for most of you... It's the winter squash of course!

Before I go any further, I should probably declare my bias and confess to a rather serious obsession with growing winter squash. In fact, this blog might equally well have been titled 'the cucurbita gardener'. Winter squash is one of the first vegetables I started growing and I consistently dedicate a quarter of my allotment to it. Last year I had the ambition to grow one squash for every week of the year and very nearly made it. Needless to say I was in over my ears with squash and as the winter progressed my skin was taking on an orange hue from all the beta-carotene I was consuming (a harmless condition known as carotenosis - I can recommend it as a healthy alternative to sunbeds, for the few of you concerned with your winter tan). Why this overt squash fetishism, you might wonder? Because it's such a fantastic food of course! A great winter squash is a rich, sweet and filling food that makes a very satisfying dish all on its own, as well as being an excellent addition to stews, stir-fries and a basis for all kinds of odd baking experiments. Furthermore, I aim to eat out of my garden as much as possible and in that respect squash is one of the more grateful crops to grow. It is fairly pest and disease-free here in Europe (apart from powdery mildew, which tends to occur only towards the end of the seasons and therefore does not really hamper fruit production), it's a storage champion, it's easy to save seed from, and it's a fascinating and beautiful plant to hang around with in the garden. What's not to like? It's a real mystery to me why winter squash is not utilized more. I suppose one reason is that a lot of the varieties out there are really not worth eating. I've had my share of bland, watery, and stringy squash, and it's easy to see how such experience could make anyone into a lifelong squash-skeptic. But there's really no comparison between the latter and a great winter squash at optimal ripeness, so please don't dismiss the whole squash family on the basis of a few of its inferior offspring! I guess you get the point, as far as I'm concerned, the neglect of the winter squash as a staple vegetable is a culinary tragedy waiting to be corrected.

The squash patch. It's seriously overcrowded, which I think is harming my yield.
Lessons learned for next year.

Any-way.. This year I'm deepening my winter squash commitment and I'm choosing quality over quantity. I've been reading up on so-called 'landrace gardening' in the past months and I've become convinced that this is the way I want to go, first and foremost for the winter squash, and then, hopefully, for a lot of the other vegetables I'm growing as well. If the concept is as new to you as it was to me, let me attempt a very basic summary... Most people (including myself) tend to buy their vegetable seeds from seed companies or, if they do save their own seed, aim to preserve existing varieties. If you do this, then essentially this means that you are working with the plant characteristics that others have selected for you. This in turn means that the seeds you buy and/or save are from plants that might be adapted to growing conditions very different from your own, including different soils and soil fertility, different (micro-)climates, different disease and pest pressures, etc. This is a perfectly good way to garden, but if you think about it a bit, it could probably be improved upon. Species evolve and environments change (not in the least, unfortunately, the climate...), so it actually makes perfect sense to try and work with these evolutionary pressures rather than against them. This is what landrace gardening (in the scientific literature it seems to be called 'evolutionary plant breeding') tries to do. The idea is that you grow out as many different varieties as possible (to maximize genetic diversity), let all of these varieties cross freely, grow out large amounts of the resulting seed, and then continuously select for the most vigourous plants that fit your personal preferences. The result, after many generations, should be your very own locally-adapted (and evolving) variety with high genetic diversity, and in possession of any of the traits that you have chosen to prioritize. Sounds great, right? I thought so too, so I'm set on testing this out on my winter squash.

I'm growing two species this year, cucurbita moschata (6 plants) and cucurbita maxima (21 plants). There are also some reputedly good winter squash among the cucurbita pepo's (I'm yet to be convinced of this..) but I tend to prefer the maximas and anyway, a lot of my neighbours are growing summer squash (which generally is also c. pepo) and this would make open pollination a bit difficult. There's a chance that the moschatas too crossed with my summer squash (damn you promiscuous squash!), so that leaves me with the maximas to save seed from (c. maxima doesn't normally cross with c. pepo or c. moschata... in theory). I started off with 7 varieties and plan on adding more genetic diversity over the next generations. For this year I've got:

C. Maxima - Sweet Mama

Sweet Mama: a hybrid that I grew last year and that I found to taste fantastic. It's nutty, rich, sweet, medium dry, and yields pretty well. This is also a semi-bush type plant so it's quite economical space-wise. Fruits are about 1-2 kg and mature early.

Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead: I haven't grown this one before, but the reviews I read were uniformly positive so I had to include it. Bred by Carol Deppe for reliability and production, It's supposed to be a great 'homesteading' squash with thick, very dry, and very sweet flesh. They can weigh up to 10 kg. I found it to be a bit slow-going compared to the others, and it seems to have characteristically rough leaves.

C. Maxima - Marina di Chioggia

Marina di Chioggia: An Italian heirloom that I grew last year and that I loved for its taste, which again is deliciously nutty and rich. It's a very vigourous plant that will take over your garden if you let it. It yields one to two large squash (up to 10 kg) with a characteristic dark green, bumpy skin, almost like a savoy cabbage.

Burgess Buttercup: An old American classic, reputed for its taste. I grew a buttercup variety before and frankly wasn't that impressed with the taste, so I'm hoping this one is quite different. The squash are fairly small and somewhat cubical, weighing around 1 kg.

Green Hokkaido: Supposed to be the same as Blue Kuri. This is my first year growing this as well. Actually my initial plan was to just use a select few tried and tested varieties for the start of my landrace project but the lure of new and exciting squash was too much to resist... This seems to be your average kabocha-type squash (which is just to say that it has Japanese origins), which are probably my favourites so far. It's green, sweet, and supposedly fairly dry. Medium sized fruits, 1 tot 2 kg.

C. Maxima - Galeux d'Eysines

Galeux d'Eysines: First year attempt at this one as well. It grows big (up to 5 kg) orange squash with a high beta-carotene content that form peanut-like warts on the skin upon maturing. From what I can tell it's really quite a fascinating sight. I'm mostly growing it for its supposedly excellent eating quality though.

Blue Ballet: This is a smaller version of the Blue Hubbard squash. I've been growing Blue Hubbard the past two years just because it's such an intriguing squash, but I've abandonned it since they never really stored that well for me (somehow, despite its armoured appearance, the Blue Hubbard was always the first to show signs of spoilage). They also seem to deterioriate in eating quality quite quickly, plus the seed cavity on these is positively enormous, making for a fairly poor flesh to overall fruit ratio. I grew Blue Ballet last year and found it to be superious in nearly every aspect: it keeps longer, it tastes better, plus the skin is actually edible, which in my book is a big plus. It's a vigourous grower that is fairly early and weighs about 2-4 kg.

Sweet Mama with Buttercup on top

So where am I going with all this fantastic genome? As stated, I've let the bees do their happy buzzing and am eagerly awaiting the approaching harvest. Upon which I will be storing the squash for a month or so (this maximizes their sugar content) and then dutifully embark on the (very pleasant) task of tasting my way through the squash stash to find the chosen few that I will save seed from for next year. What I'm selecting for is a medium-sized squash that is as dry, nutty and richly sweet as possible, that is highly reliable under my growing conditions (this should pretty much select itself), has an edible skin and a small seed cavity, and that stores well into spring. Next year's progeny will then probably be a mixed bunch, some of which will undoubtebly be fairly bad eating, but some of which should bring together the best qualities of the above varieties and provide the basis for a true Malmö winter squash landrace. Exciting!