We had the Peruvian Aji Limon pepper in the Pepper Garden last year, so I had the idea to do a whole garden growing traditional Peruvian vegetables. A couple of our Master Gardeners have really gotten into the theme and even went to a local Peruvian restaurant to learn from the owner about what they eat.

We haven’t done corn at all in the garden because it’s difficult to have enough space to ensure good pollination. But we really wanted to try growing this giant Peruvian corn, so we decided to risk it. This garden is in our largest raised bed, and we have allotted about half of the bed to this corn. It has much larger than normal kernels, and I’ve seen some information that says it can get up to 14′ tall! Yikes!

The “normal” things in this garden – the purple fingerling potatoes and red onions are things that we’re relatively familiar with.  Same with the cilantro.

The peppers. Aji Limon, Aji Red Rocoto, and Aji Amarillo. The Aji Limon we had last year. It’s small, yellow, and hot. It made an awesome salsa. The Aji Amarillo is the most popular Peruvian pepper that they make a sauce from and use in many dishes. It is a golden orange color at maturity. The Red Rocoto is a hot/sweet red bell-type pepper.

Then….the weird stuff. The Andes mountains are home to a lot of less common roots and tubers. Many of them are marginal for us in the U.S., so these may or may not work for us.

Yuca or Cassava is a starchy tuber that is an important food source in tropical climates. It is very tolerant of less than ideal conditions, so it should do okay for us.

Mashua is related to nasturtiums, but has edible tubers. Yacon is related to dahlia and also has an edible root. As both nasturtiums and dahlias prefer cooler temps, it will be interesting to see if these edible versions can grow well here. They will need to grow throughout the hot part of the season to produce, so it could be a challenge depending on our weather this summer.