Bloom for me, mirabilis expansa

Mauka seedling, Spring 2015

I realize that a status report on last year's mauka cultivation is long overdue. I was holding off this post hoping that I would be able to invoke your envy with some pictures of my magnificently flowering mauka, but alas, the Inca gods refused to bestow this pleasure upon me. It might very well be that I angered them somehow. As you will remember, mauka combines the unfortunate characteristics of being frost-tender and flowering under short-daylength conditions, right in the middle of the European winter. I therefore brought in two mauka plants (one Roja [that I had mistakenly labelled CIP208001 before] and one Blanco) in November with the intention to induce flowering and produce seeds. Let me clarify that I don't possess the best of conditions for overwintering plants indoors. I live in an appartment that gets quite dry in winter and the only outdoor space I possess is a 2sqm balcony (that I manage to cram full of plant starts in spring). Greenhouses, spare rooms, cold banks and root cellars are utopian concepts to me. If anyone would like to make me a present of, say, a farm, that would be very much appreciated...

Mauka root close-up, with wireworm damage

Anyhow, the maukas got a rough ride through the winter. Shortly after I brought them in, both plants got infested by aphids, which in a warm, dry and predator-free environment is prone to spiral out of control pretty quickly. Since we don't usually get frosts that often here in November and December, I figured I could more or less control the aphids by keeping the plants out on the balcony as long as possible, and just transporting them inside whenever a frost threatened. This worked pretty well for a while, but then one day in December (I guess you see where this is going..) we had a rather violent storm that pretty much blew the foliage to pieces, leaving behind a sorry-looking, bony mauka skeleton. The plants were undeterred however and quickly sprouted new leaves indoors. Then I was travelling over Christmas and New Year's, and upon my return I discovered that my absentee watering regime had failed me. Again, both mauka's lost their entire foliage, but they weren't dead and again resprouted leaves, although much less decisively than the first time. A plant that takes this much abuse definitely has my respect, though I would rather have avoided it.

But then there they sat, during January, February, and March, with no signs at all of flower buds appearing. Frustrating. I dutifully ferried them between the balcony and the living room, gave them all the love and attention I had to give (well kind of, anyway... the Roja plant eventually died somewhere towards spring, I'm not sure why...) but apparently it just wasn't enough for Pachamama and colleagues. The mauka flowering code remains uncracked, for me at least. I've now planted the Blanco in the garden together with its siblings. I might give it another shot next year, or else I'll try to lure a helpful greenhouse owner into adopting a mauka plant or two for the winter. Any volunteers?

Mauka Blanco

Mauka Roja, 2nd year growth

Seeds are not everything of course (though I have to confess I think increasingly more of them). What my plants did produce last year was plenty of roots! Of the nine Blanco seedlings that I harvested (I left a couple in the garden to see if I could overwinter the roots in situ - the answer is no), all but one were significantly larger than the first-year roots I had harvested from my two Roja plants the year before (both of which were a meagre 150 grams). Root weight ranged from 120g to 700g, with 3 roots weighing 500g or more. I also had three Roja plants (two plants in their second year, and one cutting) that were 1kg, 1,1kg, and 30g. All in all a pretty good result, which somehow confirms my hunch that the Blanco variety is superior to the Roja in terms of yield. Observation also leads me to believe that the Roja is marginally more susceptible to (light) frosts than Blanco, though the difference is probably a matter of decimals. They will definitely need more than that if they are to stand their own against the Swedish winter.

There's plenty of roads still to be travelled for mauka and me in 2016 and beyond. Apart from seducing it to bloom sooner or later, I would also like to get my hands on the CIP208001 variety, which looks a lot like the Roja but should have much better yields. And then of course, it would be exciting to try and find some additional varieties. After all, who knows what unexplored gems are still hiding somewhere in mauka's Andean homelands...

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!

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