Oh my word – you tell our guinea pigs that they can’t!!!
Yacon – or XXXX is totally fine for guinea pigs and totally loved too. Just throw in a whole leaf per pig as a treat every week and listen to them wheek!
Yacon grows so prolifically anyway with giant soft tasty leaves that you will only need a few tubers in the ground to keep them in greens for half the year. We have been feeding yacon to our guinea pigs since July and the plants are still healthy and producing giant leaves well into December. The frost might get them if they aren’t protected – but it isn’t hard to have one plant at least in the greenhouse (if needed). The one outside will have more leaves – as these daisy-like plants grow SOOO huge. They are multi-stemmed and grow about 4ft high and about the same wide over all – perhaps 15+ feet (about 4.5 meters) around in girth at their widest part.
Keep them healthy by only cutting the leaves from the centre of the plant (within the stems) so they don’t overlap each other. That way you are keeping the whole plant well ventilated and healthy AND making the most use of the plant itself. No point letting the inner leaves go rotten when they are free food basically for most of the year.
Yacon plants are also called sunroot or Peruvian ground apple (as they are famously eaten as tubers or roots that should be treated like apples) – and grow wonderful sunflower-like flowers. They regrow themselves too – so dig them up at the end of the season, store over winter and replant in spring. Simple, easy and free food all fall long!
Their leaves are super soft and totally edible – and this is what the piggies love. Full of antioxidents, huge and tasty like spinach and chard as well as produced in large numbers for absolutely no effort from you at all.
Your guinea pigs will just love yacon – the petals too once it flowers. And you get to enjoy the roots yourself!
Who wouldn’t grow yacon?
Thanks.