eggs & tea blog

Recently i’ve discovered a fascinating crop to try growing here. Yacon (prononuced yah-kohn) is a South American tuber, a “lost food” of the Incas. It’s a relative of the sunflower, grows to 2m tall, almost completely pest- and disease-free. Yacon produces a bunch of delicious roots which look something like a yam but you can eat them raw, and they taste like a crisp, mildly sweet pear or apple. The sweetness comes from fructo-oligosaccharides so although it’s tasty, it has no calories. Here are some good links about yacon: the Wikipedia page, an article on the Seeds of Change newsletter, on Plants For A Future and Mother Earth News article about the Yummy Yacon.

A few weeks ago our friend Liza and Josh gave us a couple yacon plants in pots. I planted them in the ground at the edge of the garden and they almost immediately grew into big, happy plants, as tall as a person:

Yesterday, on the way back from picking up our Organic Chicken Feed in Laupahoehoe, i stopped by Liza and Josh’s place, and Josh harvested several yacon plants to give me the root-buds for propagating. (Curled around around one of the tubers was a huge scary centipede, another reason i’m happy we live up at a high elevation, where centipedes don’t like it!) Here are pictures of the harvest, the root-buds, and the result: 20 pots of yacon starts:

Related posts:

1. More harvesting – Jicama and Yacon January 11, harvested the small row of Jicama in the...
2. First Yacon Harvest Today it was finally time to harvest our first yacon...
3. Major Yacon Planting There isn’t much happening with our tea right now. The...
4. Flowering Yacon Yacon (see previous post Yacon) is supposed to grow for...
5. Propagating tea cuttings Today i did some major updates to my online notes...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 8:49 pm and is filed under crops, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.