Oxalis Triangularis Care (Purple Shamrock): A Houseplant You Can Eat

What's up everyone? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. In this pot here, I have one of my favorite houseplants. It's Oxalis triangularis. It is a houseplant that you can actually eat. We'll get into that later in the video, but it's an edible houseplant, which is really, really cool. So this is a very unique plant. It grows from corms underneath, so it can be somewhat easy to propagate, which again we'll talk about. And the leaves are highly photophilic. So just like the flowers, the leaves will actually close and open in response to light. So if you see those time lapses of Oxalis that maybe you've seen from some of my friends on Instagram, which by the way, check me out on Instagram if you haven't already, they're just a very beautiful plant. So at night it looks like it's closed shop for the night and then in the morning and it kind of wakes up again. So very beautiful. So today we're going to talk about light and temperature, water, soil, fertilizer, all sorts of problems that you might run into as well as a couple other notes about this plant. So stay tuned. You're going to learn exactly how to care for Oxalis triangularis. Our first and most important topic to cover is light and temperature. So my east facing window is right here. You can see I've placed it pretty darn close cause Oxalis really prefers bright indirect or sometimes even direct. So as close as you possibly can to your most south facing window is going to be a really good placement for this plant. And as far as temperatures go, you want to keep it in between 60 to 80 degrees and 15 to 27 Celsius because if you don't, it's going to go into that dormancy phase because you know it's going to look for growing conditions that are favorable. And if not the leaves will start to die back. It'll start sending that energy back down into the corms and kind of hanging out until time is better. So again, most of us have temperatures within that range. Make sure that it's not super drafty, not crazy windy. Although, you know, a little bit of a breeze can help this plant. I've noticed when I'm starting my seeds over here, it's actually kind of nice to have this kind of blowing in the wind a little bit. I've noticed it kind of strengthens the stems a little bit. Kind of similar to how you would start seeds. But that's it for light and temperature. Pretty darn simple. So when it comes to watering this plant, you want to make sure and give it average moist soil. So don't overwater because again, it's a, there's rhizomes, there's corms down there and you don't want to soak them and rot them out. But at the same time you don't want it to be completely dry just because the leaves are quite fragile. They're quite thin and delicate. And you want to make sure that they're, they're full of water. They've got everything that they need. So this is a pot without a drainage hole. So I'm very careful not to overwater this plant. I just kind of soak it and make sure that the soil looks moist to maybe one to two inches or so and you're good to go. And speaking of soil and fertilizer, again, it's kind of a simple plant in that regards. Average indoor potting mix is going to be completely fine as long as it's pretty well draining and not too high in like a peat or a coconut coir type of product. Again, you're going to be completely fine. And as far as fertility goes, if you're going to fertilize it, I would fertilize it during spring and summer kind of cut back in fall and winter. And in that same vein you would cut back on your watering in fall and winter as well as it does like to go a little bit dormant. So that's kind of it. Now when we talk about propagation, that becomes a different story. This is one that you're really going to want to propagate by division, which is kind of an outdoor gardening technique that will propagate a lot of plants that way. But this is, again, all plants actually are outdoor plants if you really think about it. So this is one that you can propagate by division and you'd want to do that in the fall and the winter. So what you might see as a problem is in fall and winter this plant might start to die back and look very sad. And that's actually just the natural cycle of the plant. And if that happens, it's actually a really good time for you to propagate the plant. You can actually dig up the corms, cut off the offsets, plant them into new pots with fresh potting soil. And then when conditions are right and it comes out of dormancy, it's going to start throwing out new leaves, new stems, and as well as developing new corms underneath the soil so that you can then keep propagating or it'll just start to get nice and bushy. So really long lasting plant. Many people will save the corms and pass them down through their family. So certainly one that I would like to do with this plant, this is actually the Ebony Allure variety of Oxalis and it's a fantastic one. And I actually covered it in my recent Josh's Frogs unboxing video. The amazing, amazing company that I love for all these smaller versions of houseplants. When you buy them small, you get to actually grow them and that's kind of, at least to me, the point of gardening, right? So problems you might run into, again, if you see that droopiness and that die back, just make sure that your growing conditions are really good. Otherwise the plant's going to want to go dormant. Besides that, you're going to deal with potentially some pests like an aphid or a whitefly or something like that. Just make sure that you audit and scan. If you're going to buy a houseplant, make sure you're looking underneath the leaves, you're checking it out and you're saying, are there any diseases that I'm bringing in? I kind of like to have like a little quarantine zone of my, of my home before I introduce into the houseplant jungle here in the Epic Gardening Bedroom. But besides that, you may deal with something like a powdery mildew that's more of an outdoor disease. But who knows, some of the spores could come inside. You're going to see white spots. And the only other thing I would say is if you get super bright sun, you might see some sun scald on it, which also shows up as whitish spots, but more of a drying of the leaf. So just look for that. And besides that guys, like I said, it's a plant that is edible and I would recommend keeping it away from pets because it's called oxalis. There's a high amount of oxalic acid, which is safe for humans in small amounts. It can cause an upset stomach if you eat a lot of it. But yeah, I mean certainly has that tart acidic taste. So what I use this for when I have my ornamental oxalis that's actually outdoors is I'll cut some, kind of shape the plants a little bit and I can use these leaves almost as like an ornamental flower in a salad. It creates this really sharp, pungent acidic flavor and it's really nice. I don't, I wouldn't make a whole salad out of oxalis. Certainly not. It's a bit too much for me. But people will also dig up the corms and you can eat those raw or cooked and those are much sweeter. Kind of makes sense because you know where that energy is being stored, there's more sugars down there. But guys, that's oxalis triangularis. Again, this is ebony allure. This one I particularly got from Josh's Frogs, which I'll link a video to. But if you have any questions, any suggestions, any interesting varieties that you think I should know about, definitely let me know down in the comments. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing. And by the way, if you want more frequent updates about the houseplants that I'm growing, you can always check me out on Instagram. I'm posting those to my feed or my stories over there. Much more often than I'm actually making a video. So check it out over there and I'll see you next time.