Thanksgiving, time to start harvesting yacon. I went back and checked on the plants. One pallet box is ready. The other looks like it still needs a couple of weeks more.
This is what the plants looked like in the first pallet grow box. They've bloomed out and are losing all their leaves.
Harvesting the yacon was so easy. It was a matter of disconnecting one side of the box then using my hands to scoop out the soft soil/compost. The roots were readily exposed.
Once I twisted off the tubers that were exposed, I then could easily pull on the stalk to pull the rest of the root ball out. How easy!
The edible tubers are the tannish things that look like fat sweet potatoes. The propagation tubers, or knobs, are at the base of the stalk and are considerably smaller. In the above picture, they are white. In the picture below, they are reddish due to the fact that the soil wasn't covering them as well.
I'm amazed at how many edible tubers the plants produced. I got a full five gallon bucket of varying sized tubers from this one pallet grow box. When I've grown yacon in the ground, I didn't see such heavy production. Plus it was difficult to harvest the tubers without breaking them all.
By growing the yacon in the pallet grow boxes, the tubers were nicely formed, big, plentiful, and simple to gather. I was impressed. Impressed enough to say that this is the way I plan to grow yacon for now on.
Bonus......I got a half a yard of nice composty soil from the box.
My article for the January-February issue of Ke Ola is about yacón
ReplyDeleteGreat. I'm looking forward to your article. I'd love to learn more about what other people do with yacon. So far my favorite way of preparing and eating it is to dehydrate it somewhat for a week or two, then slice and eat it raw. The drying process is done with the tuber remaining whole, uncut. Then I slice it and eat . I can't take credit for coming up with this method. I learned it from one of the community garden volunteers.
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