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garden:about:plants:quinoa:varieties

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Quinoa varieties

We are trying Dave 407 from Adaptive Seeds and Red Head from Uprising.

Dave 407

Dave 407 quinoa from Adaptive SeedsDave 407 is said to be heat-tolerant. Quinoa is a crop originated in mountainous areas and is happiness with cooler temperatures.

I have planted a flat of 72 cells for transplanting to the Fall City garden.

Here's what adaptive says:

This is our favorite quinoa because of its excellent performance on the Willamette Valley floor. Golden orange seeds. 4-5' tall plants with seed heads that turn vivid orange when ripe. High yielding when compared to other quinoa grown here in low elevations. Short season & open seed heads resist late season damp weather. Collected in southern Chile.

Red Head

Red Head quinoa from Uprising OrganicsA good feature of Red Head is that the seeds are less likely to sprout on the seed head just before harvesting. This happens in moist conditions. The loose arrangement of the seed heads allows the seeds to dry out after rain.

I intend to plant Red Head quinoa directly into the Fall City farm.

The following description is from Uprising Organics.

(Chenopodium quinoa) Staple grain of the Andean Altiplano where it was domesticated 3-4000 years ago (and was second only to the potato in dietary importance), quinoa was fairly unknown in the US until the 1980’s. Quinoa is an amazing and delicious food. High in protein (12-18%) as well as being a complete protein (rare in the plant world), it boasts a low glycemic index rating (good for diabetics), is gluten free (for celiac sufferers), high in iron, magnesium and fiber, and even rescues kittens from tall trees.

It is pretty unfussy and a visually beautiful plant in bloom. A close relative to the common weed, lambquarters, we actually recommend transplanting quinoa so you can know with certainty where it is in the field as it is virtually indistinguishable from its weedy cousin in the early vegetative stage.

Red Head is a selection by Frank Morten out of some of the first wave of imported quinoa to withstand potentially wet and cool fall harvest times, something it doesn’t often face in the Andes. It has a more open head structure and resistance to premature seed sprouting in wet weather near harvest time.

garden/about/plants/quinoa/varieties.txt · Last modified: 2015/03/31 13:36 by davidbac