Doalnara's Produce

YACON

Yacon, fresh from the ground. Just harvested

The main property of Yacon is medicinal. It is eaten raw, like a fruit. It obtains all the advantages that grant this natural product.

Many useful tropical plants are absent from our gardens only because they are unfamiliar, and that's not a very good excuse for missing out on something as special as Yacon. If we sit down to design a plant, it would be hard for us to come up with a better combination of qualities. 

Yacon Tuber. It looks like a sweet potato, but tastes like an apple.

YACON, (Polymnia sonchifolia) a member of the sunflower family grows two meters tall, has large opposing arrowhead shaped leaves with scalloped, pointy edges, and multiple 3cm yellow-orange daisy like flowers.

The plant is distinguished by having two kinds of tubers, a central rhizome with 'eyes' like ginger for producing new stems, and multiple edible tubers radiating from the rhizome. These brittle, tan to purple, smoothly tapered edible tubers are actually fattened roots that can be up to 40cm in length and weigh two kilograms. The edible tubers are crunchy like a crisp, sweet apple, but juicier than any pear.

Yacon is delicious and nutritious. Its unusual, refreshing sweet taste and moist, crunchy texture is obviously different from those of starchy tubers. Yacon sweetness is in the form of fructose, which is 70% sweeter than table sugar and is better for us. Fructose doesn't stimulate insulin production, so Yacon, sweet as it is, does not bring a glycemic reaction. It is ideally sweet for diabetics. Instead of entering immediately into the bloodstream as what glucose and sucrose does, putting an overload of both glucose and insulin into our bodies' chemistry, fructose aids a slower and more complete metabolizing of carbohydrates. Fructose also does not affect the immune system negatively, or tend to make us fat. 

Yacon tuber has a good level of protein that comes as an excellent balance of all 20 essential amino acids. It has one of the highest levels of potassium found in any plant, and high levels of calcium, magnesium, iron, and phosphorus.

Yacon has many uses. It may be eaten fresh, dried, or cooked. Elisabeth Fekonia, suggests that we treat Yacon as we would an apple. Peel and eat it raw, dice it in salads, or slice it thinly to scoop up a dip. Yacon can be grated and cooked like an apple sauce, or baked. Yacon takes longer to cook than apple, and retains some of its crunchiness. It can also be dried in chips or stored whole for some months. Yacon leaves and the sweet tubers are excellent fodder for animals.

Yacon is effortless to grow and has no problems with predators or diseases. Start plants from rhizome any time of the year or from stem cuttings in spring or summer. Simply bury a bit of rhizome between June and October in almost any soil or location, and minimal attention will result in quite a reasonable harvest at the end of autumn. Or, if you plant the rhizome in a sunny location and feed and water it consistently, you can have a more substantial harvest several months earlier. Yacon plants should be 3/4 to one meter apart and mulched to retain moisture levels in the soil.