The Ocaey-Cokey

So, anyone remember the new experimental tomato/oca bed, that was based on top of the bones of the failed carrot experiment from last year? The theory was very simple - a ring of tomato plants, which would grow big and tall, with a bushy oca plant in the middle that would spread out and provide ground cover without shading the tomatoes overly.

I'm beginning to think that pot's cursed.

Big and tall.

This is the problem with growing odd vegetables - it's very easy to get information on how a broccoli plant grows and what to expect of it, but more difficult to find what an oca does without growing one. I think it's safe to say it doesn't play nicely with tomatoes in that close a proximity.

I did consider trying to rescue the experiment - I turned the pot so that the shaded tomatoes would get their time in the sun, I fed them special tonics to encourage them to grow and I gave thought to trimming back the oca bush, as that allegedly wouldn't hurt the yield with the actual eatey bit being the roots. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that that was just shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic - the pot either had to contain oca or tomatoes, not both. I had four other oca plants growing in various places in the garden, so that made my choice for me.

What was surprising was that the oca plant came out in one piece. I expected to have to hack it to pieces to get it out, but the root ball was compact enough to fit through the hole in the plastic mulch. I was left with a relatively undamaged plant and the sheer amount of crap that fills my sheds and attics testifies to my waste-not-want-not proclivities.

Thus, the Three Sisters bed has now been transmuted to "The Three Sisters and the Mad First Wife That We Keep Locked in the Attic."

Hannibal yams. Definitely not allowed out to play with the other children.

When I first started planning the garden for this year, I considered planting an oca in this bed on the basis that it would a) need harvesting far later in the year, b) have deep roots and thus not interfere with the sweetcorn or beans and c) is supposed to be low and bushy ground cover that's perfect for keeping weeds out of the empty soil that the sweetcorn and beans have between them. I originally decided not to, on the basis of getting the Three Sisters themselves to work properly before I tried fiddling with the theory and introducing something that could potentially fuck up three other crops. However, it turns out that I'm really bad at throwing away fully grown and viable plants, so here we are - another experiment, this one fenced in to try and keep it from eating the other children. Let's see how well this one goes.

PJW