winter harvest january 2014

[cye]

here's the ocas, a tuber also known as 'new zealand yam' . these originated in the andes but seem to be fairly pest and blight resistant in UK/ireland. This is the second year i've grown these - thanks for tphase/gerry.

i was very late in planting these (june, should have been april), and one normally picks them a few weeks after the last of the foliage has died, which would mean these are normally harvested here in December. I picked these today. Yield was 0.5kg from just over 0.5 square metre, so i guess we'd get 1kg to the square metre. These were grown in plant pots and grow bags improvised from empty wood pellet bags.

i will sample the largest ones (roast in oven with garlic) and will keep the rest in newspaper to use as seed tubers for April coming.

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[cye]

here's the last of the apples still on the tree as of 12th january. i picked up two windfalls yesterday so i guess this is pretty much the end of the harvesting season, though they were ripe for picking since october, i left them on the tree to see how long they would keep.

i had thought these were the 'james grieve' variety, but google tells me james grieve is a late summer harvest and not a winter apple. i must have got my labelling mixed up. the only other possibility from my labelling muddle is that they're with the 'coxs orange pippin', which google tells me is a late season apple. so these must be cox's orange pippin!

i would strongly recommend folks plant some of this variety to provide fresh fruit well into the depths of winter. they are absolutely delicious too.

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[caveman]

Fair play to Cye (silent web based applause chimes out) I am ashamed to say that our garden is barren these days. We have yet to get to grips with maintaining some output across the seasons. We have more than we can use and preserve by the end of the summer and until we get going again "there isn't in it what would fatten a snipe" as an old friend used to say. I have been spending a fair bit of time reading about permaculture, mostly on the Permies site. I am thinking that I should do a Permaculture Design Cert. It seems to be regarded as the right place to start.

[tphase]

Jan 12, 2014 7:57:18 GMT -5 cye said:

Yield was 0.5kg from just over 0.5 square metre, so i guess we'd get 1kg to the square metre. These were grown in plant pots and grow bags improvised from empty wood pellet bags.

hi Cye

just harvested the last of my oca's earlier this week. I reckon I got about 6kg out of 2sq m. They were planted reasonably densely in open ground and studiously ignored until after the foliage started to die back.

g