Last week was Chufa nut harvest time.
Chufa nuts are not nuts per se. They are little crunchy tubers related to everyone’s favourite weed – yellow nutsedge.
But whereas nutsedge can be a nightmare, In our climate Chufa nuts are not a problem because they winterkill.
Most of the tubers are clustered in a clump at the base of the plant.
All you have to do is grab the base of the stem and pull and voilà! A bunch of Chufa nuts.
Use your fingers to crumple the dirt and tubers off of the plant and drop them into your harvest bin.
Toss the leaves behind you and check to see if you missed any nuts where the plant was. Quickly gather them with your fingers and into the bin they go.
You can dig around to see if there are more, but usually I’ve found most of the nuts are pretty close to where the root bal was.
Bring your bins back to the barn and let them sit for a few days.
I’ll follow up with another post in a few days about all the Chufa postharvest fun!
This was part 1 of the Chufa Harvest and Post-Harvest experience.
Here’s Part 2
Interesting. The weed looks quite pretty actually. I don’t recognize it. Perhaps it doesn’t grow in the Laurentians?
Yellow nutsedge tend to grow in wetter areas of fields. It isn’t omnipresent like quackgrass or lamb’s quarters. But once it makes it’s appearance it is hard to control.
Chufa doesn’t create this kind of headache with our COLD winters!
Dan
Dan, do you sell the chufa tubers in the spring? Would like to try growing them next season. Tina
We actually are selling some for the next few days on our store: https://boutique.fermetournesol.qc.ca/products/cy101
We’re trying to ship them before really cold nights.
We will have them available again come mid April or so.
Dan