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!

37 shades of sweet potato

Back in the middle of June I planted out all my sweet potato starts out in the garden. I could surely have nursed some a bit longer but they were beginning to suffer indoors and, frankly, I thought that anything I planted after that day would have very little chance of producing tubers anyway. I was also struggling a bit with the logistics of it all and was eager to have them out there rather than being dependent on my undivided attention. I'll have to devise a better system for next year, though it might already help to have less varieties to sprout and keep happy...

I counted them after planting and ended up with a total of 37 varieties. In no particular order at all these were

12 commercial European/American/Asian varieties: 

T65, Nordic Purple, Nordic White, Nordic Orange, Burgundy, Bonita, Murasaki, Georgia Jet, Asian Yam 1, Asian Yam 2, Okinawa Purple, Garnet

25 (mostly) heirloom African varieties: 

Alira, Kalebe, Silek, Kanya, Uganda Orange 1, Uganda Orange 2, Kipapari, Mukekuru Tarya Bibiri, Tangara, Kitambe, Orphan, Rwabafurugi, Kitekyere, Mpame Hegia, Nyariowera, Kwezi Kume, Sula 1, Sula 2, Burundi, Bunduguza, Mushemeza, Kidodo, NASPOT 1, Bamuhachira, Magabari

A map of the 2015 batata garden

Some of these were not particularly viable though, and in some cases I just chucked a yet-unsprouted tuber in the ground, hoping that against all odds it would still do something. The amount of plants per cultivar varied a lot; of some I got 20+ plants, of others just one. This almost exclusively had to do with how fast the different tubers sprouted. For those that were very slow-going I ended up with few (or no) plants. By now some of these have quite definitely died, so I'm probably left with under 30 varieties.

Nordic Purple (left) and T65 (right)

It's been my luck of course that, exactly in the year I'm embarking on this grand sweet potato experiment, we're experiencing one of the coldest summers in decades here in Sweden. Except for a few tropical days in the beginning of July, the last few months have felt more like early autumn, with exceptionally windy, chilly and rainy weather. Predictly the sweet potatoes haven't been all too happy with this and growth is just a fraction of what it was last year at this point (though I was growing them under plastic then, so it's hard to compare). The optimist in me sees this as the perfect selection pressure and thinks that if any of these plants yields something this summer, it will reliably do so most years. My pessimist self on the other hand is quite convinced that I will end up with absolutely no sweet potatoes whatsoever. Either way I'm hoping that August will bring some direly needed sun for these:

Sula 1

Rwabafurugi

Nordic Purple

If I would formulate my ambitions, they would consequently be quite modest (or at least I think so..). I would like to get some kind of tuber from at least 3 of these varieties, plus some seeds. If I would have to choose, then I suppose the latter would be the most important, since it would make possible the long, very, very long, process of breeding nordic-adapted varieties. For that to happen I will first need some more growth and some flowers though.. Indian summer, anyone?

Please, world, make it happen.

From Amandine to Zillifera; an Andean summer update

It's high time for a brief update on this year's experiment with the Andean family of exciting tubers. Spring has been chilly here, with temperatures not much higher than 15°C for most of May and June, and the Andeans seem to have loved it. It must be that the wind and the cold reminds them of home. So far I have managed to keep all of them in reasonably good health with few if any casualties (that I recall..). I'm not sure how that rates as an indicator of gardening success but on a personal level it feels pretty satisfying.

Oca
Prematurely bereft of their identity, my blend of oca tubers has been growing steadily. Of the 30 or so that I planted I believe only four did not come up. The four plants that I had potted up in March have sized up considerably and over the past two weeks actually started flowering. Some days ago I noticed two other varieties doing the same, so I had a first go at oca pollination. Oca has a tristylous flower morphology which basically means that not all flowers are compatible (here is a more detailed decription) and you need flowers of two different types in order for succesful pollination to occur. I've yet to see if the flowers I pollinated are setting seed... The weather has actually gotten a lot warmer the past week, and oca seems to require fairly cool temperatures in order to flower, so I will probably have to wait until later this summer for more pollination opportunities. Pest-wise, oca has been fairly troublefree for me so far, the slugs don't seem too fond of it (they have decided to decimate my root parsley seedlings instead..) and not much else does either it seems. Some of the plants have some black aphid colonies but really nothing majorly worrisome. Oh, and after planting my first batch, I've received some more varieties courtesy of Rhizowen and his newfound Guild of Oca growers. These are 'brand new' varieties so it will be exciting to see what comes of them. Reassuringly also, I've managed to get these in the ground unshaken and correctly labelled. I might have a scientific career ahead of me after all.

Ulluco
If I can conclude one thing from my first year attempt at growing ulluco so far, it must be that it is really, really, really slow-growing. I thought I would lose these to the slugs at some point, since there seemed no way they could possibly outpace this year's onslaught of Arion vulgaris. Yet with a little help of some plastic bottles and my murderous garden scissors, they seem to have pulled through and are now... well, just standing there, really. I assume their growth will speed up at some point and who knows, they might even flower, which I will be eagerly looking out for (viable ulluco seed is very rare).

Ulluco

Mashua
Mashua must be something of the polar opposite of ulluco. It is growing faster than anything else in my garden and has already filled the space that I had intended for it. In fact, I found three of the mashua plants invading the oca patch the other day, and one of them was happily strangling one of the oca's. Safe to say I seem to have significantly underestimated mashua's territorial requirements... It's also remarkably pest free, I have yet to see a slug, snail or aphid show any interest in it. The only creature that did fall for mashua's undisputable charms was a rabbit, which promply munched down half of the 'white' variety but left the 'zilifera' untouched. It must have been on to something there.. Both plants recovered swiftly. Mashua is related to the garden nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) and seems to have equally interesting flowers, so I'm looking forward to seeing those. I will have to wait until September though, since mashua normally only flowers with short daylengths.

Mashua, just before it got a bit out of control

Mauka
There's so much mystery surrounding mauka that this is easily one of my favourite plants at the moment. I've got two varieties growing, one red-leaved (which is either 'roja' or a red cipotato variety) and one that I grew from seed and is in all likelihood a direct descendant of the 'blanca' variety. These seem to be the only three varieties grown outside of the Andes at the moment. My objectives with it this year are first, to be finally able to taste it, which should be possible with the two plants that are in their second year now, and second, to somehow get it to produce seed. The latter will be tricky, since mauka apparently only starts flowering long into the European winter and is therefore very unlikely to produce mature seed before the frost kills it. I am planning to overwinter two plants indoors and hopefully can pursuade it to flower that way.

Mauka is fast-growing though not nearly as much as mashua. It has attracked a lot of aphids in my garden, with the result that all the growing tips have curled up. I assume this is slowing down the plant somewhat but it's still growing strongly so I see no immediate reason to start despairing. With the warmer weather of the past week, I'm also counting on increased predator activity to bring the aphid population back under control. Bring on the ladybugs!

Mauka blanca (?)

Aphid infestation in mauka growing tips

Quinoa
Ok, yes, so this is not exactly a tuber crop. It's all the more Andean though, so I propose that its inclusion here is fully justified. I'm trialling three kinds of quinoa this year, though I've had very poor germination with one and am yet to see if I will have any viable plants from that variety. I am also yet to be convinved that I'm actually growing quinoa and not the common garden weed lambsquarters (Chenopodium album). The two are closely related and plants look similar enough that I really can't tell them apart at the moment. I direct-sowed the quinoa in a place with plenty of lambsquarters, so the only real way to tell is to wait I suppose. I would be pretty excited to be able to grow quinoa, and going by ongoing attempts to commercialize it as a alternative agricultural crop in different European countries, this should not at all be impossible.

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa)

Potato
For good measure, and to do justice to the humble potato's origins, I'll include an update about this year's potatoes as well. I'm currently growing 7 varieties: Minerva, Juliette, Linzer Delikatesse, Amandine, Asterix, Arran Victory, and Mandel. I'm not exactly expecting a bumper crop since I planted them on a newly-dug piece of land that I didn't have time to prepare properly, but they should last for some months at least. I've since also read up on growing potatoes from seed ('commonly' known as TPS or True Potato Seed, as opposed to potatoes grown from seed potatoes, i.e. from tubers) and became sufficiently fascinated to put this on my (ever expanding) list of garden projects for next year. The idea is that, rather than relying on (disease-prone) tubers, you save the berries that (sometimes) form on potato plants and then grow those out to create your own locally adapted potato varieties. Incidentally, when I was thinning out the beets the other day I found one potato volunteer that must have come from one of last year's 'Sallad Blue' potatoes. Any potato that sows itself is a good potato in my opinion, so I'll consider that a humble start for next year's potato project!

Oca growing and the dangers of bicycle transportation

One of the root crops I'm trialling this year is oca (Oxalis tuberosa), an Andean tuber popular with fellow tuber enthusiasts but largely unknown with the potato-consuming crowds of Europe and North America (curiously though, it does seem to have established itself as a minor crop in New Zealand). Oca is an important staple in the Andean highlands, primarily Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and seems to have everything going for it: it grows fairly easily in harsh environmental conditions and poor soils; produces yields (potentially) rivalling those of the potato (at least in the Andes); and according to reputable sources (i.e. wikipedia) is a high-quality dietary source of potassium, vitamin C and iron amongst others. It is supposed to have the taste and texture of a potato, but with a lemony aftertaste (because of the varying levels of oxalic acid the tubers contain), though taste, along with colour, size, and yields in oca appears to differ widely depending on the variety. I wouldn't know to be honest, because I've never tasted one, but with some luck that's all about to change this winter. May this be my annum tuberosum!

I sourced some 14 (if I remember correctly...) different varieties past autumn, one of which came directly from Peru, and chitted them in egg cartons on my windowsill for a few weeks, much like potatoes, though these sprouted much slower. The Peruvian variety had started growing already when I received it and it was looking pretty shriveled by January so I potted up the tubers and grew them out on the balcony when it wasn't freezing. This is what it looked like back in April, just before I planted it out in the garden:

Oxalis tuberosa, var. 'annelotte'

The reports I read suggested that a lot of people pot all their tubers before planting them out but I had neither the space nor the patience for this, so I decided to give all the others the potato treatment instead and plant them out directly after my last average frost date. I thus meticulously labelled my egg cartons with the names of the different varieties and then, one sunny day at the end of April, packed everything into my bicycle crate and set myself on my way to the allotment. 

The science of egg carton chitting... here, oca and ulluco

I should have anticipated the result, for, notwithstanding this place being the Valhalla of bicycling, the road to my allotment is anything but even and I have over the years upturned plenty a plant start with what appears to be my excessively enthusiastic bicycling style. Anyway, suffice it to say that by the time I arrived, the oca's had been happily bumping all over their egg cartons, making my labelling efforts completely redundant and therefore putting a premature end to my intentions to systematically keep track of, and compare, the progress of the different varieties I have in my possession. Instead of making neat little variety-specific groups in the oca bed, as I had planned, I thus had to resort to planting everything at random. Please forgive me, Carl von Linné, but I suppose that as long as they grow well, I don't care so much what all of these were originally called. And grow they do, at least for the time being! With some exceptions, most of the plants have emerged by now, and they seem to be escaping the voracious appetite of the slugs in my garden this year. I wished that could be said of my Brassica seedlings, which keep disappearing overnight...

The oca bed, the four plants in front are the Peruvian variety
 that got a headstart on my balcony

Of course, in being so violently thrown all over the place, some of the oca also got separated from their sprouts. In a half-hearted attempt to make up for my foolishness I potted up these sprouts as soon as I came home and to my pleasant surprise almost all of them have since rooted. Some of these sprouts were really only half a centimeter or so tall, so these truly seem to be very resilient plants. Thus far this seems to be my kind of vegetable!

The sprouts that broke off easily rooted

What next? As most of the Andean root vegetables, oca is a daylight-sensitive plant and only starts producing tubers when days are short enough, sometime after the autumn equinox. In a frost-prone climate this essentially means that in order to get any kind of yield at all it's crucial to secure growth until well in November, which is far from impossible here in the Swedish south, but it's certainly not a given either. Oca enthusiasts such as Rhizowen and Bill Whitson are attempting to breed varieties that are daylight-neutral, and these are bound to pop up at some point (after all, the common potato started off as a daylight-sensitive plant as well), but until then, I suppose I'm facing the real possibility of an early frost killing all my plants before a single tuber has formed. At the other extreme, my plants might feel comfortable enough in their new surroundings to flower and produce seeds, which would allow me to do some oca breeding myself in the future. Fingers crossed!

An old woman can't eat two

A brief update on the sweet potatoes. I've got plenty of slips [basically tuber sprouts that one pulls off and then replants] ready to be planted out, but the potatoes and me are all waiting for the weather to turn a bit more friendly. It's been 12 degrees here, rainy and windy - very much the complete opposite of sweet potato weather - and the slips I condemned to my balcony for 'hardening off' are just sitting there with wilted leafs looking miserable. Nevertheless I'm gonna have a go at it pretty soon, I will have more slips than I will be able to use anyway so planting some out a bit early seems like a good way to test their adaptive capacities..

Sprouting in progress

Meanwhile I've made a list of the varieties that I have and that seem viable. Probably the number will change (hopefully in the upward direction) but so far it's 26 different varieties. Most of the names that I got are in different local African languages, and it's really quite a pity that I don't know the translation for all of them, seeing how original some of these names are. My favourite must be 'mukekuru tarya bibiri', literally meaning 'an old woman can't eat two', a name holding out the promise of fast-maturing tubers with corpulent qualities. Another good one is 'Orphan', denoting its alleged ability to feed large families. Here's the full list (with reservations for the spelling on some of these...):

Nordic Purple - offspring from my own garden, unknown original variety, purple skin and purple flesh, produced respectable tubers last year.
Nordic Orange - offspring from my own garden, unknown original variety, red skin and cream-coloured flesh. This one also produced some respectable tubers but got pretty devestated by the voles.
Nordic White - offspring from my own garden, sourced this in the US, maybe O'Henry? This one actually didn't do very well, either the voles got all the big tubers or I only managed to get a few small ones.
T65 - only variety that produced a respectable tuber without ground mulch last year, probably one of the most promising for my climate. Red skin, pale cream-coloured flesh.
Georgia Jet - I didn't get any tubers from this last year, but I have two cuttings that seem to be hanging in there so hopefully I can give them a another try.
Orphan - white skinned, allegedly named like this because it's a prolific cropper that will feed large families
Kitekyere - white skinned, long and thin tubers
Sula - red skinned
Bamuhachira - red-purple skin, with very dark purple sprouts
NASPOT I - improved African variety, light brownish skin and very white flesh that is extremely dry. This reminded me more of cassava than sweet potato when I tried it. Supposedly a good variety for processing.
Orange-fleshed I - 
Orange-fleshed II - light brownish skin
Bunduguza - white skinned variety
Tangara - copper skin
Kwezi-Kume - light purple skin
Kipapari - light brownish skin
Kitemere - white skin
Kalebe - copper skin
Mushemeza - Highland variety, grows at or above 2000m
Rwababurugi - Highland variety, grows at or above 2000m
Mukekuru Tarya Bibiri - 'an old woman can't eat two', according to the person I received this from this one should mature in 1 month, which is hard to believe but we'll see! Also a highland variety.
'Asian Yam' - I got this from a US supermarket, no idea what it is..
Alira
Kanya
Kitambe
Mpama-Hegia

Different leaf colours and shapes on 4 sweet potato varieties

In contrast to the varieties available in the US/Europe, most African sweet potatoes have white to pale yellow flesh and a very high dry matter content. Current sweet potato breeding efforts in many African countries concentrate on producing orange-fleshed varieties because these have much higher beta-carotene levels (a dietary precursor for vitamin A) than native white/yellow-fleshed varieties. American orange-fleshed varieties are regarded poorly by African farmers because people tend to prefer potatoes with a higher starch content, and from what I've read there seems to be some kind of trade-off between beta-carotene content and dry matter composition. I will be growing some traditional US orange sweet potatoes and some of the improved orange African ones, but most of the varieties here are the traditional ones with white and yellow flesh and all kinds of different skin colours.

Meet the last of my organic aphid control crew

Early spring musings...

My windowsills are filling up with pots and seed potatoes, seed packets are scattered all over my table and the balcony is slowly being colonized by obscure roots. It must be that time of the year again! It’s starting to look a lot like spring here, or at least it feels close enough to get carried away dreaming about the coming growing season. Here’s a brief rundown of this year’s projects:

Sweet potato galore

    I’ve collected different sweet potato varieties over the past months, including quite a few that reportedly grow at 2000+ meters. My hope is that I will stumble across a few varieties that could (potentially) produce a worthwhile crop here in Sweden or, failing that, that I can get some plants to set seed with which to breed. Sweet potatoes don’t produce seeds easily, and the key (apart from some very un-Swedish climatic conditions, needless to say), seems to be genetic diversity, which I should be able to provide. There were 40+ varieties stored in my apartment at some point but quite a few of them succumbed to dry rot while I was out of the country, probably because storage temperatures dropped lower than I had anticipated, and sweet potatoes really hate cold storage. I guess I’ll just consider this as a first evolutionary pressure selecting for cold-tolerance! It’s yet to be seen how many of them I will get sprout successfully, but so far it’s 18. Whether I can make it warm and cozy enough for them long enough is an entirely different matter of course…

Mauka take two

    Last year’s mauka crop was not much to write home about. I’m not one to give up easily, especially after seeing what Frank Van Keirsbilck’s maukas look like, so I’ll be replanting the overwintered roots as well as some of the cuttings I took in November. The roots already started sprouting so if anything I’ll struggle to keep them under control until they can go into my garden. I’ve also got my hands on some rare mauka seeds, so if all goes well I’ll soon have some new varieties to play with! To be continued.

 Invasion of the Inca crops

This year will also mark my first year growing oca, mashua, ulluco and quinoa. If you think trying this many new crops all at once is pushing my luck a bit, you are probably correct. I am most excited about oca (Oxalis tuberosa), which in the Andes is second in importance only to potatoes and which amateur growers here in Europe generally seem to lavish with praise. As with most Andean crops, oca unfortunately needs short daylight hours and at higher latitudes therefore only starts producing tubers after the autumn equinox. People like Frank van Keirsbilck and Rhizowen are trying to rectify this injustice by breeding a daylight-neutral variety and if I manage to cajole my future crop into producing seed for me I will gladly join this guild of oca growers. Mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum) and ulluco (Ullucus tuberosus) have received slightly less ravenous reviews but I’ll judge them when I’ve tried them. Most people these days are familiar with quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), that Andean staple food-gone-global that has become the darling of hipsters and foodies. Prices for quinoa have in recent years risen to such astronomical heights that those in the Andes who used to rely on the crop can no longer afford it, so what better thing to do than grow your own!  Quinoa is one of the few (pseudo-)grain crops that yields acceptably even on smaller scale, and I’ve collected some varieties that have been selected for northern, wet climates so as to minimize the (considerable) chances of end-of-season disappointments and depressions.

Oca in close up, it started sprouting spontaneously

Ulluco (Ullucus tuberosus) - this must be one of the most beautiful root vegetables out there

Landracing my wintersquash

In past years I’ve been on a quest to grow and sample the world’s variety of wintersquash. Honestly, this must be one of the most underappreciated crops out there. Incredibly easy to store, nutritious and delicious, it’s simply mind-boggling that the main purpose we’ve come up with for this amazing food crop is as a Halloween decoration! A staggering 95% of all pumpkins grown in the UK are used for carving and hollowing each year, amounting to enormous amounts of food waste. The humble pumpkin deserves so much more! It matters enormously which variety you grow though, and many do taste bland and uninteresting and frankly are of little culinary interest. But there's so many truly fantastic varieties that we could be growing instead.

Essentially the squash family is made up of three commonly eaten species: Cucurbita pepo, Cucurbita maxima, and Cucurbita moschata. C. pepo includes most of the varieties that we eat in the form of summersquash as well as what are traditionally referred to as pumpkins. It is these that are usually carved up for Halloween lanterns. C. maxima includes winter squash of various colours and sizes. They usually do quite well in temperate climates and are completely underutilized here in Europe. C. Moschata includes the well-known butternut varieties and is very productive but it tends to require more warmth than C. Maxima and is therefore more difficult to grow here in the north. After three years of squash growing I’ve come to realize that I’m a C. maxima kind of guy. The best maximas are smooth, incredibly rich in flavour, nutty and sweet and in my opinion far outshine even such C. pepo favourites as 'sweet dumpling' and 'delicata squash'. This is why this year I’m abandoning my C. pepo (except the summersquash varieties) and launching an attempt to create my own C. maxima landrace variety that should bring together the best of ones I've sampled.. I will be selecting for a medium-sized, dry-fleshed variety that is nutty and rich in taste, has edible skin and stores forever. More details soon! I’ve never really tried to grow C. moschata, so that’s on this year’s list as well.

Expansion of the perennial patch

A small section of my garden is currently dedicated to perennials and this area will be expanded/filled in more densely this year. For example, I’m once again trying to pre-grow cicily (Myrrhis odorata). In past years I’ve tried seeds from three different seed companies and for some reason I haven’t gotten a single seedling yet, despite scrupulously following stratification instructions. This year’s seeds have been outside the whole winter but no signs of life yet. I’ve also started various other perennial greens and herbs, including bunias orientalis, mountain mint (Pycnanthemum pilosum) and mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica), and I will be planting some perennial kale (Daubenton) and some yams!

And then, of course, there’s also a host of smaller projects, such as trialing a host of new greens and testing a variety of new potatoes, but I’ll spare the details of that for now.

Mauka meets Sweden, take one

I was not actually being very correct last time when I wrote that my tuberous adventures in 2014 were entirely restricted to sweet potato cultivation. There is one other rather exotic crop that I got my hands on this year. In fact, this is probably one of the most exotic tubers out there, eclipsing the humble sweet potato by lunar magnitudes. I am speaking, of course, of mirabilis expansa aka mauka, miso or chago, an Andean root vegetable that is as deliciousy mysterious as its multiple names suggest.

Mirabilis expansa

Since my ambitions in growing Andean root vegetables far outweigh my patience in actually acquiring the plant material, I have recently gone ahead and purchased Lost Crops of the Incas, the 1989 standard work for aspiring cultivators of unusual and long-forgotten plants from the Andes. The book contains some intriguing facts about mauka. Believed to have been a staple crop of the Incas, mauka was completely unknown to scientists (a fate that many an animal and plant species would probably benefit from) until the beginning of the 1960s, when it was found being cultivated in remote parts of Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. Growing at altitudes above 2700 meters, it is said to be particularly tolerant of harsh conditions, which of course makes it a promising plant to try in more Northern latitudes. Its alleged ability to grow to mythical proportions over the course of one or sometimes multiple seasons (it appears to be a perennial though its frost tolerance is uncertain) has inspired some people to describe it as some kind of Andean cassava. Frank Van Keirsbilck told me they tend to weigh 800g to 2kg after one growing season in his garden. As most tuber crops, mauka is believed to be very nutritious, and, more importantly perhaps, is also reported to be delicious. Descriptions on the internet place the taste somewhere in between potato, parsnip, and sweet potato. Now, these just happen to be three of my favourite foods in the world, so there was plenty of reason here to make me very excited indeed.

Harvesting mauka

I was then quite pleased last spring when I managed to acquire two cuttings of the CIP208001 variety (courtesy of Rhizowen, and actually also of Frank, who is the original source of the plant in Europe and who also sent me cuttings, though these didn’t survive the onslaught of the Belgian/Swedish postal system). Since this was probably one of the first times that mauka graced these parts of the world with its presence, I first pampered the cuttings on my balcony until they seemed strong enough to stand their own in the real world. For space reasons (read: I’m horrible at planning) they ended up in the border of my garden, where they soon took off and seemed happy enough. Nothing really seemed to disturb them very much, not even the vole invasion in the nextdoor sweet potato patch or the biblical floods in early autumn that temporarily turned my garden into an miserable wetland. Though apparently not daylight-sensitive like many other Andean crops, Mauka roots seem to bulk up fairly slowly, and it was therefore good fortune that the first frost came fairly late this year, just a few days ago in fact. The frost was very mild and killed just the top leaves, leaving much of the foliage undamaged, so I could probably have left the plants in the ground for a while longer. Impatient gardener that I however am, I didn’t want to wait any longer so I harvested the rest of the leaves for salads and ommelette-fillings (and pretty tasty they were too!) and dug up the roots. Amazingly, I already found some new growth sprouting from the top of the roots, so this certainly is a plant that wants to grow.
    

The two underwhelming tubers... on a piece of A4...

I hope this does not turn into a trend on this blog, but the harvest, dear reader, was not exactly something to write home about. The two tubers weighed about 150g each. My plan was to eat one, and save the best one to resprout next year, but at 150g that seemed somewhat premature to say the least. I’ve therefore postponed the taste test to next year and stored both of the roots on my unheated attic (for lack of a better option), where I hope it will be cold enough to keep them from sprouting too soon. I’ve previously also taken a dozen or so cuttings that are happily growing new leaves at the moment, and I have received at least one new variety (mauka blanca) to try next year. Together this should give me plenty of plant material to carry out a proper trial next year, in the absolute best spot my garden has to offer. It’s all uphill from here for mirabilis expansa!

The 2015 mauka babies