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Post by khoomeizhi on Aug 13, 2012 8:16:50 GMT -5
in an old thread that i can't seem to find at the moment (doesn't help that the search function thinks 'oca' is too short a word to search for), orflo talked about a method to get oca to start tuberizing early, so tubers could get bigger before weather shut them down.
the idea was to give them 9-hour days for at least 2 weeks, keeping them covered with something that doesn't let light through for the rest of the time, starting in mid-august.
so, here we are in mid-august, and i've just started the process. in looking at the calendar of the next two weeks, though, i may have hit a snag. there's at least one, sometimes two days a week when i can't be here at an appropriate time to take the cover off. so my questions are as follows: should i lean towards less light on those days? i'm pretty sure i don't want to let them have full-length days in the middle of the process, right? should i be canvassing the neighbors harder, to find someone who'll be around at a more appropriate time on those days?
any thought on this would be appreciated.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Aug 13, 2012 16:54:49 GMT -5
I would lean towards less light. My understanding of daylength sensitivity is in actual fact "nightlength" sensitivity and most plants are using Phytocrome conversion from Pfr to Pr to measure night length. Pfr degrades to Pr overnight. So Pfr has to fall below some threshold level to initiate flowering in photoperiod sensitive plants. If your nights are longer than your ideal "9-hour day" that is OK, Pfr levels are still falling below the threshold. If the nights are shorter in the middle of your two weeks you aren't going to hit that threshold minimum, whether or not that will matter is hard to say but I'd say you'd be better off leaving the plants covered longer.
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Post by khoomeizhi on Aug 16, 2012 7:30:23 GMT -5
that's about what i thought, thanks for the feedback.
the only question this brings up for me is this - if it is a night-length thing, and keeping my 'daylength' constant, changing the timing of the uncovering would change the length of the 'night'...i.e. if i uncover one day at 11:20am (and cover again at sundown ~8:20) and then change to uncovering at 8:30 am/covering at 5:30, the night in between those different timings will be around 12 hours, not the 15 that it would be if i could manage to do it the same time everyday.
as my schedule necessitates a somewhat different schedule on a few days, i wonder how this will affect what i'm trying to do...
any more thoughts are welcome. i'll pm orflo and see if he'll weigh in on this, too.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Aug 16, 2012 8:03:49 GMT -5
The photo-period experiments I remember being described have shown that you can have any "day-length" 1 hour, 24 hours, 48 hours, etc. It is the length of the night that the plant actually has a mechanism to measure, if you can't actually achieve an 15 hour night, you might be better off leaving them covered till you got home and just giving them a super short "day" on those days than giving them the 12 hour night. One or two days of inadequate light shouldn't hurt them, even if the "day" is only an hour or two long.
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Post by wingnut on Nov 8, 2012 19:06:43 GMT -5
How did it work?
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Post by khoomeizhi on Nov 12, 2012 7:50:15 GMT -5
my plants are in pots, and i've been protecting them from frost as of yet, so i don't really know. there are tubers poking out of the soil here and there, but i won't really know about how well they've sized up until i tip the pots out. trying to wait as long as possible to do that. i was mostly good about the day/nightlength stuff.
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Post by richardw on Nov 12, 2012 13:01:51 GMT -5
Poking outa the soil is a good sign that there's reasonable sized tubers below. Whats really made a huge difference for me for increasing the yield of my crops is putting a clear plastic hophouse over them for that last month before winter,i would say that they would have doubled in size    |
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Post by jbl4430 on Nov 12, 2012 13:59:43 GMT -5
Poking outa the soil is a good sign that there's reasonable sized tubers below. Whats really made a huge difference for me for increasing the yield of my crops is putting a clear plastic hophouse over them for that last month before winter,i would say that they would have doubled in size The biggest oca ever seen!!!!!!!!!!! |
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Post by richardw on Nov 13, 2012 0:53:34 GMT -5
You can see what i mean then  |
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Post by khoomeizhi on Jan 8, 2013 7:31:19 GMT -5
here's the update...  definitely got bigger tubers than in previous years...but nothing like richardw's...more tubers in the 3-inch range, which never really happened before, so that's good. didn't cover with plastic, as i have some reservations (if there's already rot issues, i'm not convinced that the growth benefits of being warmer will make up for the rotty-ness of decreased airflow)... |
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Post by richardw on Jan 10, 2013 15:13:30 GMT -5
Still a good eatable size khoomeizhi.
Yes having the stems rotting can be a problem for me too,what i do is i don't water them in that last month also i keep the foliage dry by rolling back the plastic in the middle of the day for an hour or so if its warm/dry enough.
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Post by raymondo on Jan 10, 2013 16:57:52 GMT -5
How do you eat them Richard?
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Post by richardw on Jan 11, 2013 13:26:41 GMT -5
Mainly roasted but they are nice in the mush spud also.
Ive doubled the amount of area i normally grow them in this year because spaced them out a bit wider to see if i get a more consistent crop,i've found in past seasons that one plant may grow a great crop but its mate next to it would have bugger all,i used to have them three plants wide in a one meter wide bed,30cm apart,this season they are still at 30cm but only two wide,ive also got four more slightly different coloured types thanks to orflo(Frank) this season.
Do you grow them Ray??
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Post by wingnut on Apr 1, 2013 22:23:04 GMT -5
I keep planning to black them out, maybe this will be the year!
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Post by billw on Apr 2, 2013 2:32:18 GMT -5
Clearly I need to grow enough to try them cooked. The tubers that I didn't have to save for this year were all eaten raw. I was surprised by how much they taste like apple, given that I have read that the cooked product tastes more like potato. They were just sweet enough that we wondered if they might not make an interesting pie ingredient.
I wonder if blacking out might be a way of screening for varieties that are less daylight sensitive. Figure out what the typical minimum blackout time is and then work backward from there, screening promising varieties for progressively smaller blackout periods.
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