Hello

[billw]

This forum kept turning up in my web searches with the answers I was looking for, so I figured I had better join.

I'm from the wet side of the wet side of Washington. It is a more difficult gardening climate than you might expect and I am on the road to a lot of locally adapted varieties, having given up on most of what was available to purchase.

My biggest new project for this year is a large growout of oca (about 300 plants) and ulluco (about 50 plants) after tinkering with them last year. I'm most interested in getting seeds from them, although we certainly won't mind having a lot of oca to eat as well. As for ulluco, I would love to eat it if I could get it to grow larger than a marble.

[bunkie]

welcome to the forum billw! i'm from the other side of the state. we've only grown oca once, in a container. hope to experiment with it more in the future.

[wolfcub]

Welcome billw!!

[raymondo]

Welcome billw. Envious that you can grow oca.

[billw]

There are tradeoffs, raymondo. It is very hard for me to grow a tomato outside.

[galina]

Mar 27, 2013 16:16:49 GMT -5 billw said:

There are tradeoffs, raymondo. It is very hard for me to grow a tomato outside.

Same here in central England. Welcome billw

[hortusbrambonii]

I don't think I'm going to try ulluco again, seems like most people have just enough harvest to plant again next year, and don't particularly like the taste.
(My plants were eaten by the 1012 Belgian massive invasion of slugs and snails and did nothing last year)

Oca is fun, but not the greatest yield. But if I had a lot of them I'd regularly eat them....

[12540dumont]

Yes, but you can get kelp for your garden! And Western Washington has some of the best food in the world...and coffee shops. You can't swing a dead cat in Washington without hitting a coffee shop.

So do tell what else you grow.

[billw]

Yes, indeed. I am about to take the dogs on their walk to the beach and will return with my daily 10 pounds of seaweed for the garden.

We grow just about everything that we can find time for. We have more space than time, so it is always tempting to go too far.

* Small fruit. We have about 20,000 square feet of raspberries, gooseberries, sea buckthorn, hardy kiwi, and Chilean guava.

* Garlic and onions. We make do with potato onions and shallots for all our onion needs. We probably have about 12 varieties of garlic, but we lost track of which was which and just plant them all intermixed.

* Beans - mostly runner beans and broad beans.

* Brassicas - we can grow most year round, so I always have cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, mustards, kohlrabi, turnips, and rutabagas in some stage of growth at just about any time of year.

* Corn. Typically we fail at corn, but I grew some flour corn last year and it did OK, so I am going to try it again.

* Curcubits - Cucumber, achocha, and bitter melon. I am planting 25 varieties of bitter melon this year in an attempt to get something that will tolerate a cooler climate.

* Peas - Mostly tall peas, although we switch to short peas in late September because the tall peas can't handle our fall windstorms.

* Peppers - As many hot peppers as I can cram in our hoophouse. No peppers will grow outdoors here.

* Tomatoes - However many I need to plant in the hoophouse to keep my wife happy. I only like them green.

* Potatoes - We'll grow about 1000 pounds this year, of which we'll consume about 300 pounds and 700 pounds will go to feeding our ducks.

* Carrots and parsnips. I just harvested the last of our summer planted parsnips today and they are going to be delicious.

* Squash. Spaghetti and a mix of winter squashes. This is always a gamble. Some years I get some, some years I don't.

* Salad greens. This is the climate for greens, so we grow just about every type we can find. Our staples are lettuce, escarole, mache, orach, sorrel, and spinach. There are only about six weeks a year where greens aren't growing.

* Other stuff / oddballs. Skirret, maca, fuki, scorzonera, mashua, root parsley, rampions.

[richardw]

hello and welcome billw,i'm one of the lucky gardeners who can get Oca to grow really large

[billw]

Excellent - then let me ask you a question, richardw. What spacing do you use?

I've seen advice ranging from 30cm to 1.5m. 1.5m is much larger than my plants got last year, so I think that I'll throw that one out. But, last year, I spaced them at 30cm in row and that seemed too close, so I may have stunted them.

Lacking clear information, I've been planning to space at 45cm this year.

[bertiefox]

Welcome from France. This is a great forum where there are people who can answer almost any question and who are in the forefront of plant breeding and experimenting with new techniques. Good gardening, and good luck with the oca.

[12540dumont]

BillW, tell me about Skirret and scorzonera.

[richardw]

Mar 31, 2013 3:12:52 GMT -5 billw said:

Excellent - then let me ask you a question, richardw. What spacing do you use?

I've seen advice ranging from 30cm to 1.5m. 1.5m is much larger than my plants got last year, so I think that I'll throw that one out. But, last year, I spaced them at 30cm in row and that seemed too close, so I may have stunted them.

Lacking clear information, I've been planning to space at 45cm this year.

Up to last year i was growing them about 30-40cm apart but noticed that one plant would dominate the one next to it,so in other words 80% of the crop was coming from about 40% of the individual plants,so this summer i allowed two 6x1m beds and spread out the plants to two wide per bed 40cm apart.

Took this photo this morning of which i'm amazed to see that there's a heap of flowers,far more than ive ever seen before,this is because we had one of the warmest summers for many years and also autumn has been far warmer as well.


Lot more info here - alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=others&action=display&thread=6634

[billw]

Mar 31, 2013 14:18:37 GMT -5 12540dumont said:

BillW, tell me about Skirret and scorzonera.

We're just getting started with Skirret, so I don't have a lot to report yet, other than that germination is extremely slow and irregular. From a sowing in early Feb, I got some seedlings after two weeks and I still have new seedlings coming up now.

Scorzonera... the root tastes like salsify, which IMO, doesn't taste very good. But, I read in one of Carol Deppe's books that it makes a good perennial leaf green and that has turned out to be true. It makes pretty tasty salad greens for most of the year and comes up nice and early in the late winter around here. It makes a great dual use crop if you like the roots, but I'd rather eat a parsnip or parsley root.