For old age we ’ve been get various types of true yams ( Dioscorea spp . )
This year we had a effective harvest of roots and have been able to share some of them with others . On Sunday we gave a couple of purple ube yam to a Filipino friend who was stunned to see that we ’d grow them ourselves .
Here ’s a pile of yams we glean some years ago :
We have more than that baby-sit in a big money on our porch right now … and we have n’t even dig them all .
Yams are Easy Calories
Those big , root - covered genus Tuber are a fortune of calories gained for very little work . The biggest effort is raising the yam plant hills and then planting and later staking the yam .
This is how Grenadians make yam plant Alfred Hawthorne :
If you were to till with a tractor and use a bedmaker , it would be really well-off , yet we do n’t have that form of a setup here right now so we just make a long bed and establish it .
That trellis to the right of the pale yellow is one of our yam beds from this class .
Our yam have had no pest or disease issues and are easy to develop , take in them a very good survival harvest , as I track inFlorida Survival Gardening , wholly Crazy Easy Florida Gardening , and in the new , massively expanded and illustrated 2nd edition ofCreate your Own Florida Food Forest .
The yields are nice , too , especially if you bulge by engraft larger piece . you could make a lot more plants by using smaller pieces via theminisett methodorstarting yam from cuttingsor bulbils , but bigger yam arise from larger planting material .
The bulblet that grow onD. alatalook like this :
Larger unity grow into large yams .
If you found modest bulblet or low pieces or cuttings , you ’ll still spring up yams , but they wo n’t be a well sizing and you ’ll have to let them mature another year to get adept - sized origin . Since yams are perennial , this is soft , so plant what you have and bonk that good things come to those who hold back . This yam claim two years to reach this sizing from a bulblet :
On the up side , it tookalmost no workplace to get , since I just planted a bulblet at the base of a dogwood tree and ignored it for two year .
Yams Aren’t Sweet
Another welfare of true yams is that they ’re starchy , not sweet , making them an fantabulous pedestal - in for the common potato . you could boil them , mash them , and put them in a swither , just like a “ normal ” murphy .
We made mashed yams for Thanksgiving one class as a substitute for mashed spud and a visiting Quaker could n’t tell the deviation .
Someone remark on YouTube the other day that “ white sweet white potato make a practiced relief for regular livid potatoes . ”
This is n’t really straight . They are still sweet , which is less useful than having something starchy . I do n’t know about you , but I often get shopworn of sweet-flavored things and opt to just exhaust white-hot potatoes , casava , yams , green bananas , etc . , as a side with some meat .
Yams Have a Wide Growing Range
Though most yam are tropic , many can be pushed up into zone eight . Others , like the Chinese yam plant ( D. polystachya ) will grow all the direction into zone five .
Name yam have grow well for us here , though their tubers have n’t kept through the winter , either in the ground or in entrepot .
fundamentally , you may grow some variety of true yam plant from the equator all the way up into the Midwestern United States .
late we got a fresh variety that we ’re going to try , though it drive us some time to track down what it was!you may read about our search for the name of that mystery root here .
Conclusion
Part of the joyfulness of being a garden author and instructor is learning about new plants and crops and new ways to grow them . of late I ’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos from African yam farmers so we can improve our own harvests .
There are so many with child plants out there that we ’ll never get to the remainder of them , and that ’s a heavy part of the fun of horticulture .
If you have n’t tried growing yam , I highly recommend giving them a scene . There arelots of articles on the blog comprehend yamsand other interesting crops . We ’re up to 2,983 posts on The Survival Gardener so far .
In an era where most gardening site are overrun with junky articles lack information – or worse , written by AI ( heyo , Sports Illustrated , we’re looking at you ! ) – this site is a place where we portion out tangible research and real tips for growing , not just re - hashed stuff from Wikipedia written to drive clicks .
Thanks for sticking with us . Now go find some yams and implant ’em !
