Harvest: Yacon

Last August I decided I needed more room to grow root vegetables, and that meant expanding into the remaining ornamental garden beds. The only space available that would allow me to dig up and harvest root vegetables (without harming the roots of nearby permanent plantings) was the raised garden bed in the front yard, next to our driveway.

That meant turning this:



Into this:



We tore out Yuccas, a pygmy Date Palm and the Purple Heart, and planted out Yacon, Queensland Arrowroot, West Indian Arrowroot (which rotted in the ground after prolonged wet weather), three types of sweet potato (one of which also rotted) and some potatoes.

Not surprisingly, the neighbours were a bit nonplussed, especially when self-seeded cherry tomatoes came up in their dozens in the compost, but it wasn't long before the tomatoes were finished, the sweet potato vines took over and the bed looked like this:


The sweet potato vines are taking over the driveway LOL. That's the QLD Arrowroot in the middle back and the Yacon next to it on the far right with most of the leaves having fallen off, ready for harvesting.

Last year I had a pretty good Yacon harvest from just the one plant - in fact I think I got more from the one plant last year than I did from three plants this year! That's them below, with some bonus red Desiree potatoes on top.



Yacon are delicious vegetables - the kids love them raw - peeled and sliced. Raw they taste like super-juicy carrots to me, although much of the literature describes them as tasting a bit like watermelon. I also love to bake them, they stay quite juicy and a little crisp. Leave them out in the sun for a week or so after harvest, to concentrate the sugars and make them even sweeter.

Sadly, for whatever reason, the plants out the front never did as well as the one I had the previous year in the back yard. They never grew as big and were never as lush looking. Again, like the water chestnuts, I wonder if the long, hot summer affected them? When I dug them up the soil was quite sandy, despite heavy applications of compost and manure when we planted them out last year. Hmmm.

Anyway I ended up with about 4.3kg of edible tubers, and probably twice that amount of rhizomes for replanting. Yacon grow two types of roots - the edible brown tubers you can see above, and small, purple-red rhizomes from which new plants will grow. These will be packed in damp sand to prevent them from drying out, for replanting next Spring.




It's been a funny old season this year! Ah well, that's the life of a gardener isn't it; you have to take the good with the bad, then cross your fingers and hope for the best next time :-)