In addition to the standard spring and summer vegetables, I like to grow things that are a little bit more unusual – Bolivian sunroot, or yacón, for example.  It’s a perennial from the Andes, and I ordered my original crown maybe 10 years ago from (I think) Seeds of Change.  Yacón is a large, fuzzy-leaved plant that produces sweet, crisp tubers that taste to me something like a combination of carrot, celery, apple and watermelon rind.

Below the ground, but above the tubers, each plant has a crown of sorts, with reddish buds (sort of like potato eyes), and the crown can be divided and saved for planting in the next season – I read once that the plant doesn’t produce viable seeds.  As wet as the winters are around here, I can’t leave it in the ground or it will freeze and rot, so in fall after the first real frost, I dig the whole thing up, separate the tubers from the vegetative crowns, and store the crowns in a bucket of sand or peat, to be planted out the following spring.  The stalks and leaves go in the compost pile.  I like the tubers best skinned and eaten raw, and they taste better after a few weeks in the crisper drawer.

I have shared divisions of the plant with a number of gardeners in the county, and in other counties, and I have this romantic notion of the plant spreading throughout California, radiating out, the map producing a visualization of gardener sharing networks.