Category: Featured Plant

I grew two kinds of yacón this year.  The first you see on the right is an unnamed variety with brown roots, which seems to be the most common kind at the moment.  The other variety, on the left, is called yacón morado and has red roots.  You can see yacón morado also has reddish leaves.

The unnamed variety is significantly more productive, yielding around twice what the yacón morado does, or about 10Kg per plant.

Yacón morado has an abundance of small flowers throughout most of the summer.  While the unnamed variety can bloom from time to time, it usually only does so as a result of some kind of stress.

The flowers also attracted large numbers of bees, but for whatever reason every time I was ready with the camera all the bees went away.

Here are the harvested roots.  Either something changed in the way it grew, or perhaps I was a little rushed during harvest, but it seems like the tubers broke off more readily this year during harvest.  Anyway, the one sure thing about yacón is the harvest is big, so even with a few pieces broken off there’s still lots left.  I’m not sure if the broken off pieces will rot before I have a chance to eat them or not.

I also haven’t had a chance to taste these two varieties side by side, so I’m not sure if the flavors are different.

For me this is the year to start getting into fruit tree grafting.  I’ve purchased a few fruit trees already grafted onto rootstock, but also extra rootstock, a grafting knife and grafting wax.  I hope in the coming years to start trading scion wood with others, and doing my own grafts.

I’ve already had an offer of a trade from Søren!

If any of you have tips, tricks or favorite fruit tree varieties, I’d love to hear.

By the way, I bought my fruit trees from Blackmoor Fruit Nursery in the UK, and so far I’m a very satisfied customer.  Everything arrived in very good condition, and the varieties they offer are interesting ones, and not just commercial ones.  For me it’s very important they were willing to ship to mainland Europe, as not all nurseries in the UK will do that.

I even changed my order in the middle of everything, something not a lot of online companies appreciate.  It didn’t phase them a bit, and my order arrived just as I expected it.  If you live in the UK or mainland Europe, I would recommend them as a place to look for soft fruit and fruit trees.

This was a fun plant to grow this past year.  I purchased seeds from Baker Creek, who highly recommended them.

It’s called a tomato, but is a totally different species and has little to do with normal tomatoes aside from the color of the ripened fruit.  It should grow in almost any climate, and doesn’t have any special needs.

I suspect in a hotter climate the fruit is a little sweeter, but it was perfectly edible grown in my temperate garden.  The fruits were a little on the seedy side, which makes for easier seed saving, but detracted from the taste.

The plants were not very productive, and honestly I would consider them more of a novelty than anything else.

The really pronounced feature of this plant were the thorns, covering nearly the entire plant.  The fruits were enclosed in a sort of pod covered with thorns, which dried up and peeled away as the fruit ripened, leaving a luscious tasty fruit ready to be (carefully) picked.  This plant really teaches you patience as a gardener, as attempting to harvest a less than completely ripe fruit can be a painful experience!

If anyone is interested, I have some seeds of this available.

It’s still sort of early days here, but this past year I began experimenting with nitrogen fixing trees in the garden.  In this case I’ve planted a number of black alder trees, like the one you see pictured above.

Many gardeners plant nitrogen fixing plants like peas or beans, or a cover crop like clover.  As a rule, these grow and leave behind more nutrients than they consume, especially in the form of nitrogen.  By turning these plants under, you also benefit from the organic material they leave in the ground.

Nitrogen fixing trees however serve a slightly different purpose.  Nitrogen fixing trees are perennials, and so keep growing in your garden.  They also have deep root structures, allowing them to fix nitrogen far below ground level.

Most nitrogen fixing trees are very hardy and fast growing.  They tend to tolerate frequent cutting back, and so the idea is you cut them back as they start to get in the way of other plants.  As well as producing nitrogen, nitrogen fixing trees can also consume nitrogen, and cutting them back is important to minimize their using up their own nitrogen.  In particular, producing seeds is very nitrogen intensive, so you should cut them back before they do this.

As well as fixing nitrogen in the ground for future use, in many cases nitrogen fixing trees can feed other plants when their roots comingle.  This has often found to be effective with fruit trees, and I intend to experiment with this.

I expect to see the benefits of these trees more in the coming years.  What I did notice was shortly after planting, as the trees started to grow, quite a number of weeds grew agressively around the base of the plant indicating the availability of nitrogen.  As the trees became more established, this was less obvious, presumably because they were fixing the nitrogen deeper in the ground.

I’m hoping the trees will improve the overall nitrogen levels in my garden, which in general are a bit low now.  I think the reason nitrogen levels are low is because of previous excessive dependence on nitrogen based fertilizers, which have now washed away.