Tag Archives: laurus nobilis

Oca harvest 2022

Xmas isn’t Xmas without Oca and a hoard of other tubers, served with the traditional nut roast. Pre-xmas preparations includes the annual oca harvest. Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) is a short day root crop hailing from the central and southern Andes. When harvested at the first frosts, yields are poor, the plants needing a long mild autumn to fatten up the tubers for the festive season. I therefore grow my oca in large buckets which we bring into the extension to the house at the first hard frosts which was late October this year. We don’t heat the extension which is normally a fairly constant 5-10C in winter and hence a good place to store vegetables and other plants like my bay tree (Laurus nobilis). There’s no sunlight and I don’t use artificial light so there’s no diurnal variation in temperature either. The oca plants don’t grow vegetatively, but miraculously the tubers do grow over the few weeks to harvest:

 

An alternative spring harvest

Somebody asked me the other day if I use floating mulch (fiberduk / agryl) to be able to harvest all these greens so early. No, no and again no….this is one of the biggest benefits of perennial vegetables….it is totally natural, no microplastics are released into the environment, no oil is needed to plough the fields, significantly less migrant labour is needed and little or no fertiliser and water is needed, it is almost totally free once established and can yield year after year! So, whilst large areas of farmland in the northern hemisphere are being covered by plastic mulches to bring on annual crops for the market earlier, I’d just like to point out that there’s an alternative better way!
So, here are the plants that I harvested for yesterday’s delicious green pasta sauce:
Armoracia rusticana shoots (horseradish / pepperrot)
Myrrhis odorata
(sweet cicely / spansk kjørvel)
Houttuynia cordata “Chinese Market” (shoots and rhizomes from the cellar; this cultivar is significantly larger than other Houttuynia I’ve grown) (Fish herb, Himalayan water creeper)
Allium senescens x nutans (hybrid Siberian onions)
Laurus nobilis (bay / laurbær)
Brassica oleracea (perennial kales)
Crambe maritima (sea kale / strandkål)
Taraxacum officinale (dandelion / løvetann)
Allium x proliferum (walking onion / luftløk)
Hablitzia tamnoides (Caucasian spinach / stjernemelde)
Dystaenia takesimana (giant Ulleung celery, seombadi)
Oenanthe javanica (seri)
Polymnia edulis (yacon) (second picture)
plus garlic and chili 

Greens (and reds) harvested from under the snow in the garden and in the cellar; Houttuynia cordata are the red shoots bottom left
Yacon