yacon propagation tubers for sale or trade

yacon (Smallianthus sonchifolia) is a low-glycemic fruit-like root in the sunflower family, which makes tubers to reproduce (like sunchokes/sunroots) and juicy, crunchy roots to eat! plenty of tubers available, each will make a plant that if treated right can grow 20+ lbs of roots and enough tubers to start 5 or 10 plants next year. pot up now to plant out in a few weeks (or more), or plant direct.

$2/propagule, plus shipping.

pm to order. i can also answer questions you might have about growing them.

will update this post with pics when i get a chance. thanks for looking!

I recieved my yacon progules today. Thanks Greg!

Thier new home...

New growth at 12 days from planting. The best one you see here. It was planted the furthest from the gopher highway whence I lost one plant. Sigh.





The tomato cages are there to protect them from the neighbors frequently escaping veloceraptors chickens. They destroyed one of my plants, and knocked back the growth of another.


They've moved now, out to their very own acreage. We'll miss them. The neighbors, not the raptors...

Is it too late for me to get in on this, Greg?

you may get somewhat reduced yield (i try to always plant before june), but still totally doable. pm me about how much you want!

greg mosser wrote:you may get somewhat reduced yield (i try to always plant before june), but still totally doable. pm me about how much you want!

They're perennial though, right? I'm in zone 6,  sooo... I'm not sure what zone the Andes are in...

yes, but.

they are perennial, but they are frequently grown as annuals. in my area, there are several good reasons not to leave them in the ground year-round. the first is that once the tops have been killed off by frost, the storage roots tend to split if there’s much precipitation - they stop being able to respirate out the excess once the leaves are gone but the roots still suck it up. also, rodents can do a lot of damage to the roots and tubers. and also, they’re just not that hardy. a real hard freeze can get through a fair amount of mulch, and once those big watery roots freeze they’re dead and will rot quite odiferously once they warm up a bit again, which can very unpleasant to discover. so all that said, i tend to try to harvest everything within a few weeks of the first hard kill-them-to-the-ground freeze and store roots and tubers in a root-cellar type situation. a relatively cool room can work too.

i doubt they grow way up in the icy reaches of the andes. more like foothills, where the altitude keeps the high temperatures down some but it’s equatorial enough that freezing is rare. most of the original (read: not bred at our latitude) varieties are super-long season.

Hmmm... so, what do they need, for growing? Is it something I could bring indoors, to overwinter? Maybe in the garage, if the aerial parts die off, so they don't need sun? Or stashed into a greenhouse? How tall do they grow? I'm guessing since they are fibers, they don't grow deep tap roots? What is the best ph? Is there a best soil type for them? (Sorry - my brain is on high speed, because I really want these to work...) I'm hypoglycemic, and these could really help me.

no apology necessary, i’ll just try to respond to the question firehose!

they like it to be not super hot (or maybe under part shade where it does get hot), and not too dry. beyond that they’re pretty forgiving.  they like deep mulch. overwintering…if the garage doesn’t freeze, or that indoor room is at least somewhat cool, they store pretty well, and in the dark is fine, maybe better. similarly with a greenhouse, if it doesn’t freeze you could have some nice big plants to transplant the following spring. they can grow up to 6 or 7 feet with really nice feeding/mulching, but up to 4 or 5 feet is fairly common. for reference, the picture in the biography section of my profile is me sticking my head out of a field of yacon i planted… i’m 5’10”ish, and there was at least another month of growing that year after that pic was taken...but also the close spacing i tend to use makes for generally taller plants. best soil type would be best for digging. the big roots can be a little brittle, so looser, less rocky soil gives you more intact (and thus better keeping) roots. they’ve done well for me in a variety of different kinds of mildly acidic soils, ph maybe 6, but they may be more widely adaptable than that.

oh and no real taproots. usually there’s a cluster of tubers all together in the center and storage roots go off horizontally like spokes on a wheel. though occasionally some do go downward.

So, they won't make it in the soil, here (heavy clay & lots of rocks). I wonder how well they'd do in some of these huge cattle mineral tubs, South some nice fertile soil I've blended from my chicken & goat lashings, kitchen compost and organic bagged soil... overwinter in the attached garage... I'll try it.  I'll get in touch, in the morning!

What are you willing to trade for? I have pretty much all of the perennial green veggies and other stuff like potato mint, African Blue basil, etc.

i’m sure you’ve things i’ll be interested in. can you pm me a link or list of your stuff?

greg mosser wrote:i’m sure you’ve things i’ll be interested in. can you pm me a link or list of your stuff?

Here's a pic of our contact and shop info. On the Facebook page I have an ad with a large list of available species albeit there's more than that available.

Hi Greg, I’m interested in buying about 10-20 crowns. Can you help? Thanks

hi john, i’ll respond via pm.

Remember those Yacon I was bragging about? They grew to about three feet tall. My "saved" progules were stored in too dry sand. In other words, I killed them.

I got some more. Yay! Thaks Greg! And I must have missed a progule in a teeny bit warmer microclimate because I got a volunteer! Oddly, after a winter that we experienced over a week below freezing with snow cover. Both are highly unusual here.

Does anyone have any Yacon crowns for sale?

yes. pm me. prices are as noted at the top of this thread.

a bit of disambiguation, since i use the term ‘propagule’, and many use the word ‘crown’, when referring to the asexually reproductive parts of the yacon:

when i dig a yacon plant in the fall, i’d call all underground parts of the plant that isn’t storage root, ‘the crown’. when i plant yacon in the spring, i separate each crown into as many different pieces with growing points on them as i can, and i call these pieces propagules. if i don’t separate them, they will generally end up separating themselves, and they’ll grow as a cluster of plants, all competing intensely with each other (and will yield small roots as a result), instead of as a single large plant with big roots. also, crowns can be highly variable - i might get 10 propagules from one, but only 2 decent propagules from another. because of this, i don’t sell undivided crowns, since there’s too much room for miscommunication, or potential disappointment.

Greg is awesome. He'll treat you right!

I would like to buy some yacon propagation tubers if you still have any.  I am new to Permies and don't quite know how to get anything from the flea market or how to pm.  Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks.