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Post by macmex on Jan 4, 2022 11:50:49 GMT -6
Okinawa is an Asian sweet potato which traces back to Okinawa, though it found its way to Hawaii hundreds of years ago and has become "the Hawaiian sweet potato." Hawaii is famous for its purple sweet potatoes, and Okinawa is the most famous of them. In spite of that it's good to know that Hawaii has hundreds of other "Hawaiian sweet potatoes."
I got my start from an ethnic grocery store in Anchorage, Alaska. There they carried a good stock of them to meet the demand the local Hawaiian population had for them.
This variety is the only purple sweet potato that I've tasted which doesn't leave an aftertaste in my mouth. I call it the "anthocyanin bite." Others tell me that they can't taste it but I can. This one doesn't have it. i think Okinawa would become wildly popular in other parts of the USA but everyone I know that has grown it has complained that it has very low production. I've heard that it requires volcanic soil and more heat that what we have... but wait! I went to Hawaii twice last year. Heat? I didn't find heat in Hawaii, at least not compared to Oklahoma.
I only managed to coax two slips out of my roots by the time I planted. I suspect they got severely chilled when I traveled with them. At any rate those two plants gave me six or seven decent size roots. I was not that disappointed with the size of the harvest. We'll see what happens in the coming year. I set all the roots aside for making slips except the one pictured above. That one accidentally got placed in an unmarked bin. Seeing its white skin I mistook it for a white variety and baked it for my lunch.
2022 will hopefully be the year that I find out if I can produce Okinawa in sufficient quantity to recommend it to other Oklahoma gardeners.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 5, 2022 9:28:06 GMT -6
That purple is kind of shocking. If I saw something like that in a product in the grocery store, I’d automatically assume it was filled with artificial colorings.
I remember reading a thread once on a different forum where some tomato breeders were talking about the “anthocyanin bite” in blue tomatoes, how some people could taste it and others couldn’t. One referred to it as an “off whang,” and I was so amused by that term and another person’s reaction to it (“I love it when you guys get technical!”) that it has stuck in my brain. For some reason it seems to fit well in my mind.
I wish you success in getting good slips from Okinawa purple this spring. It would be great to have a purple sweet potato without an “off whang.”
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Post by macmex on Jan 5, 2022 11:13:21 GMT -6
LOL! I thought maybe I was all alone in this world, the only one who could taste "off whang." I remember 20 years ago, reading about how wonderful Black Plum tomato tasted. Those who were raving about it were people whom I highly respected. So, I purchased some seed and grew it in my NJ garden. They produce beautifully and looked great, but when I took a bite... yuck! That was what I'd call "a spitter." I didn't even want to swallow what I had in my mouth. Some years later some other garden friends insisted that Black Plum was so wonderful, maybe my problem was the cooler conditions in NJ. So, I planted it in my Oklahoma garden and raised it in the HEAT. I hesitantly took a bite of a ripe tomato and... only had to spit a little bit. I hadn't taken a hearty bite for the test. Nope. That tomato has a anthocyanin aftertaste to me. Apparently there are plenty of folk who don't taste it.
Here's hoping we can get a decent crop from this variety. I'm going to do a bit of research on fertilization of sweet potatoes. I usually don't fertilize at all.
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