One of my favorite crop of all - metre is the oft - overlooked yam .
Not these :
I care those , but those are sweet potato . They are not yams . Never call them yam .
Never .
These are yam plant :
And those rattling roots grow untamed here in the mysterious tropic locale we now call home .
They are in the jungle , just waiting to be travail . And at this time of the class , they have produced bulbil which can be used for planting .
Yesterday Rachel and I took a hike down the mountainside , across the river , then up the other side into the jungle .
It was a combination of bulbil hunt and difficult exercise .
By the way , that grandiloquent tropical grass there makes a corking mulch / compost amendment / fertilizer . Cut it down and let it lay on the priming coat … it turns into beautiful humus and land in lots of life sentence .
But I digress .
This hunt for yam bulbils for planting is n’t a new thing for me .
I did it for multiple years in North Florida as well , where the exact same delicious species of yam plant get in the wild , just as it does here in the Torrid Zone . The state of Florida calls it an incursive . I call it an awesome informant of high - calibre calories and I ’m GLAD it invaded the state .
Heck with you fuddy - duddies and your invasive species lists .
I love these things . They taste remarkably like a potato , though I in reality cogitate they taste a little better , and they take almost no work to grow .
If you run for bulbils a few months from now you are n’t likely to find any – you really only get them during the wintertime months when the vines have entered their dormancy cycles/second after fat up the bulbils , which start fall to the flat coat as the vine fade . The bulbils are just aerial origin with a more entertaining name .
Snag them if you may find oneself them , then plant now through early spring . And make the bulbil William Holman Hunt fun . Rachel and I did .
unfeigned yam are one of my top staple crops and feature prominently inmy popular Florida gardening book .
You canread more about them here as well .
