I planted out my very sorry looking mauka plants today. Above you can see one of what’s left of the 4 cuttings Frank gave me last fall. At one time this was a very healthy plant, even blooming at one point.
It’s a little early to be planting out, but I concluded it was the best thing to do under the circumstances. The danger of frost is probably past (but not for sure), and they weren’t doing well on my roof in their tiny containers.
The instructions Frank gave me was they needed to be over-wintered, protected from freezing and with lots of light. He said a very light windowsill would probably suffice.
I didn’t have a very light windowsill safe from my cats so for a few months, after it started freezing outside, I kept them under a growlight. In order to save electricity, the light was on 12 hours a day, what I thought was probably the minimum possible. They were in a room that was part of my house, but otherwise not directly heated. The temperature was probably between 5-15C for most of the winter. Probably colder at night when the light wasn’t on.
I didn’t know it at the time, but cool temps and short day-length are the perfect conditions to trigger flowering with this plant that’s very hard to get to produce seeds.
Owen got a few flowers on his plants as well.
While it did flower, I had to move them outdoors. They had an aphid infestation I couldn’t risk spreading to other plants, and I needed the space to start my 2010 seedlings. In the end, the flowers faded and I didn’t get any seeds.
Frank gave me 4 cuttings, and it was all arranged on short notice. I could only find 3 containers to plant them in, all a little smaller than Frank recommended, and one of the containers ended up with 2 cuttings. It fared the worst of the lot, and you can see it above after transplanting.
On the right you can see one of the plants started developing a tuber (next to the bug that walked into the picture). None of the others showed any signs of tubers yet. Both of these plants lost all of their leaves, but you can see the one on the left is starting to bud new foliage.
Frank grew this last year and said the tubers really tasted very special. These are one of the Lost Crops of the Incas plants. Hopefully they’ll recover from my neglect, and I’ll get some tubers this year…
