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Please note these are part of the Winter Selection Pre-Sale and will be freshly harvested & posted in November.
Ideal starter kit for anyone looking to grow ancient edible tubers, a most rewarding crop for years to come. Vigorous tubers are freshly harvested and posted unwashed for extra preservation. More information and videos below. Free postage on additional items!
Mix 1 includes: 10x Oca Tubers, 5x Jerusalem Artichoke Fuseau, 5x Jerusalem Artichoke Red Fuseau
Mix 2 includes: 100x Tiger Nuts, 5x Jerusalem Artichoke Aurora Rubin and 5x Jerusalem Artichoke White Truffle.
Mix 3 includes: 10x Chinese Artichokes, 2x Madeira Vine Tubers, 5x Jerusalem Artichoke Chinese.
Tiger Nuts, also known as Chufa is a hardy perennial producing a generous deposit of delicious starchy tubers commonly known as tiger nuts or earth almonds. These can be eaten fresh or dried for long term storage. Tiger nuts were the primary source of food for our Paleolithic ancestors 2 million years ago and they are among the oldest cultivated vegetables dating back to 16000 BC in Egypt. The nuts grow underground and can easily be made into a beverage called tiger milk by blending them with some water and sugar. Ideal plant for a perennial vegetable garden or a forest garden as it will grow year after year with almost no maintenance. Tiger nuts are dried for storage, please soak for 24 hours before planting. Please note they are frost sensitive, so they are best planted out after chances of a hard frost have passed. You could start them early in trays or pots in a greenhouse in April or May to give them a head start.
Chinese artichokes are a reliable cropper producing lots of small tasty tubers. It’s perennial and in the mint family so it’s best grown in containers or in a permanent location. Tubers can be eaten raw or cooked. We like to add them to salads or just snack away at them while we’re in the garden. Latin name: Stachys affinis
Madeira Vine is a frost tender perennial climber producing masses of edible leaves with a pleasant flavour, these are a really good spinach substitute. It also produces edible tubers that have a mucilaginous texture, this characteristic is lost after roasting. It’s quite ornamental with it’s thick heart shaped leaves and white flowers in autumn. Harvest video below.
There are many other rare tubers. Most of them quite similar to the well known potato but often healthier and can be grown with near zero maintenance. In our experience tubers can be stored in a well drained and mulched garden bed all winter, or in some almost dry potting compost or sand in a cold well ventilated shed. Best suited are open trays, buckets, pots or paper bags.
We like to get them off to a good start by planting them in small pot or trays in the greenhouse around March or April and plant them out into our mulched garden beds as strong seedlings in May when there is no more hard frosts. We have some videos on planting and harvesting Oca, Sunchokes and Mashua.
Reference: https://pfaf.org/user/plant.aspx?LatinName=Oxalis+tuberosa