Yacon: Don't Try This at Home

If you thought I was late harvesting the maukas, get a load of this: the 2012 yacon harvest only just being lifted. This really isn't the done thing and I cannot recommend it as a sensible course of action if you want to keep your yacons going from season to season. Nevertheless, they seem to have survived. It was also an opportunity to have a look at the roots of the hybrid yacons (Smallanthus x scheldewindekensis), whose story is told here and here. True yacons are on the right, hybrids on the left. That's a matchbox for scale.

The hybrids have produced long, carrot sized and shaped storage roots, which fan out horizontally in all directions, somewhat like an iron-pumping Eremurus bulb. They're much smaller in diameter than proper yacon roots and not as sweet, with a slightly more resinous taste. Oh well. It was probably a little unrealistic to hope for anything better, but there's no reason why they couldn't be used in a yacon breeding programme to add some new qualities to the genepool. In the Grand Yacon Winter Wipeout of 2010 for instance,

Hybrid yacon roots

they survived, whereas the true yacons didn't, perhaps indicating some extra cold tolerance not found in the true species; that would be well worth having. And unlike the Jerusalem artichokes, they don't seem to blow down all the time when it gets windy - quite impressive considering their stature. Maybe those horizontal storage roots act like guy ropes and give them extra stability.

Small but perfectly formed proper yacon root

In any case, they are enormous plants, towering at three metres or more in height. I put this down to heterosis - hybrid vigour - which often occurs when plants are crossed. No seeds have been set to date, sterility being another common occurrence with hybrid plants; they certainly flowered profusely though, despite the miserable weather last summer. But this summer is going to be different, right?