success/failure = gardening

if there weren't a failure or two to puzzle over and learn from ( and to keep me honest ) this would become a self-congratulatory litany of success...and while the season has gone well so far we are still in the real world and stuff goes wrong...the red nordalnds i got from the potato introduction station in sturgeon bay wisconsin were done a month ago..the negra ojosa and isla caucahua have been dying back for about a week so i decided it was time for them to come out...the isla caucahua produced three smallish tubers ( top photo ) but as i recall the tubers i got from wisconsin weren't much larger...no behemoth idahoan russets...so they will go into the basement with the red nordlands as part of the potato storage project to see if i can keep some seed potatoes until spring...unfortunately when i dug up the negra ojosa i found no tubers...zip..zero...nada...just roots ( second and third photos )...they were in the same half barrel on the south side of the house as the others..plenty of sunshine and well watered so what happened? they are classified as a "primitive cultivar" not an "improved" landrace that has been selected and adapted to grow outside its native range ( at least as far as the research i have done so far indicates...emails sent to the international potato center in peru for, hopefully, more clarification )...like oca, ulluco, and mashua, potatoes are andean tubers that are sub-tropical and sub=tropical and tropical plants have day length issues...they don't like long ones like we have here in summer...they'll grow but they won't set tubers ( "unimproved" varieties that is...strains of oca that will grow and set tubers this far north have been developed i'm told ) and i am wondering if that's what's going on here...i have another isla caucahua and negra ojosa plant on campus that are still in so we'll see if the campus plant set tubers...if it did then there was something here that it disliked...if the campus plant fails i will stick to day length explanation until something ( or someone ) comes up with a more plausible explanations ( gardening skills?)...the fourth photo is of the more successful ( but still oddly behaved ) jerusalem artichokes at the pgp as well as the flourishing brussels sprouts ( bottom photo )...still more good news than bad...more on the potatoes as i dig things up.