I would add American Hog-Peanut (Amphicarpea bracteata). Even tho it’s techically not a Perennial, it comes back every year just like one. Among the annuals, it’s competitive enough to hold their own in a Forrest dominated by perennials.
The plant is techically an annual because the tubers it makes are actually true botantical seeds that come from Underground flowers (Which don’t open thus always self-pollinate). As a result they behave just like Perrenials. These underground nuts are also edible & taste ditinctly sweet, according to Forager Samuel Thayer they are also his favorite kind of bean. The arial beans are also edible but are much smaller thus difficult to harvest in quantity.
Papyrus (Cyperus papyrus)
Chufa (Cyperus esculentus)
River bulrush (Bolboschoenus fluviatilis)
American sweet flag (Acorus americanus)
Cherokee swamp potato / cowbane (Oxypolis rigidior)
Water parsnip (Sium suave)
This one has to be processed in order to be edible, but the corm is the part that’s eaten, and it’s hardy to zone 6:
Konjac / voodoo lily (Amorphophallus konjac)
You could also grow any Ensete bananas that are hardy to zone 8 (there are a few) for their corms.
By the way, cowbone is wildly reported to be poisonous, but it’s not in the slightest! The tubers are the foraging author Samuel Thayer’s favorite vegetable. He called reports of it being poisonous “nonsense.”
The Coleus is interesting, I always forget about those.
I have found trout lily wild before, didn’t realize those are edible.
From what I have experienced the bulbs are so tiny I’m not sure it would be worth the energy of digging those!
I think it comes from the poisonous Cicuta virsoa shareing the same common name with Oxypolis rigidior. Both are called cowbane, I know Genius ! But from a distance they also look somewhat similar.
Awesome! Hopefully your plants make some seed. I’ve been looking for seeds of those plants for quite some time. Prairie Turnip in particular is among the best Wild Edibles.
Depending on which species I guess. David The Good just places a Tarp underneath his Trellised Yam with Bulbils & shakes the whole trelis as if it were a Mulberry/Persimmon Tree. All the Bulbils fall to the ground on the tarp thus easily collects them all (After separating from debris/twigs/leaves first).
Seeds from Dioscorea polystachya are extremely rare (And quite rare from most of the Domesticated Yams). I’m still learning about them especially if I want to breed/improve Yams. I’m not sure how the Toxicity functions in Yams to give me confidence in breeding & Selecting. The same Species Dioscorea bulbifera is both Edible & Toxic depending on the Variety & IDK how to tell the difference between them (It’s not like the toxic ones has any off putting flavors to let you know it’s poisonous like in Cucurbitaceae Family crops).
The local but non native discorea yam does spread through bulbils. I only have a small amount at my place but some neighbors complain it covers the edges of their yards where they interface the forest. I haven’t experienced these downsides yet firsthand.
Yeah he has grown a few different species and/or varieties, especially if you look back to his older videos when he was still in the tropics. That is what got me interested in them.
The property I am working with is rural and I am not currently living there so I would not be able to keep a close eye on them through the growing season.
The problem is if I am not there to harvest all of them, or even a few happen to get away, that’s potentially an exponential spread which I don’t want to be responsible for introducing.
That is what makes me hesitant to try them for now.
Oh wow! You talking about Dioscorea polystachya? Does it ever make seeds? It’s been a species I wanted to try for a long time! The edible & “Invasive” quality is exactly what I like about it.
That makes sense. Altho if do you let it sprawl in the wild, you will have a lot of Survival Food, waiting for you to harvest whenever you need it. Harvesting the big Underground roots are the best way to kill the plant. Actually lots of the “invasive” plants are invasive because nobody here locally harvests them for food. In Asia they hardly get a chance to be “invasive” due to being harvested & eaten. Kudzu, Creeping Bellflower & Tubergourd Thladiantha dubia aren’t invasive where they are harvested for food (Or if you have goats).
I wish this Problem happen in my Local Forrest (So much for being “Invasive”)! I would’ve gladly plant it everywhere like Johnny Appleseed (Especially the best tasting cultivars)! But I get why you wouldn’t want to, being blamed is not fun.
Well . . . yeah, chufa isn’t exactly aquatic. But it wants super duper moist soil, and isn’t papyrus aquatic? (They’re in the same genus.) You’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong.
For my purposes, I consider both aquatic because they’re native to wetlands and not even slightly drought tolerant, so if I were to ever grow them, I’d stick them in a huge pot with no drainage holes, exactly the same way I plan to grow aquatic plants.
Ahhhh, I hadn’t heard of Cicuta virsoa before. Yep, if it’s sometimes called “cowbane,” that would explain it! If it’s in the same genus as water hemlock (Cicuta maculata), I assume it is deadly and will kill you if you eat it.
I’ve bought prairie turnip seeds this year, and I am very excited to plant them next spring. They were very expensive, so I hope they will work! If they do, hopefully I will eventually have a thriving population with more seeds than I need (though it will take years to get to that point – I’ll be keeping all my seeds for myself at first, hee hee).
I’ve considered growing yamberries. People freak out over how invasive yams are (and with good reason in climates with wet summers), but they aren’t particularly drought tolerant, so I strongly suspect they will not be invasive in a summer-arid climate. Of course, “they’re not particularly drought tolerant” is not a selling point for me, so it hasn’t been a high priority.
There are two hardy perennial morning glories you may be interested in:
Neither tastes anywhere as good as sweet potatoes, but they are both species that are known to be highly drought tolerant, cold hardy, and edible.
I completely understand the appeal of perennial root crops. I’m fond of them, too. Perennial root crops are very nice because you can harvest seeds and also pull up the root to eat it. With annual and biennial root crops, you generally have to choose either food or seeds. Not only that, many perennial root crops even let you harvest only some of the roots and leave the rest alone (or replant them), so you can even keep your favorite genotypes around indefinitely. Perennial root crops for the win!
Huh that would make sence. I found the wild chuffa near the lake but not in standing water.
Yea pretty much, as far as I’m aware the entire genus is poisonous. However Apiaceae is not strictly “This genus is Edible” & *This genus is Poisonous" as the Oenanthe has an Both an Edible & Poisonous species. However what’s even MORE INTERESTING is that the Oenathe genus looks closely Phylogenically related to Cicuta genus. I hope to find my Phylogenic Studies to get a more resolved view of Reationships in the Oenatheae Tribe.
I actually have grown both of those, with plans to see if I could cross either of them with sweet potatoes. They did not like my soil.
I may try them again since I have a nice loamy soil at the other property.
Oh, cool! I’m glad to hear you’ve tried them! What soil type did you have before?
I’m planning to try both of them next year. Bush morning glory especially. I have sandy soil (actually, it’s pure sand interspersed with a whole lot of huge rocks), and bush morning glory is apparently extremely drought tolerant and native to a climate right next to mine that has similar rainfall patterns. So it seems like it’d do well. I’ve sown seeds of those into a bed that I plan to water not at all next year.
Ahh, I found the words to describe what I was enthusing over before!
Annual or biennial root vegetables tend to be monocarpic – they can only flower and produce seeds once, and then they die. Thus, you have to choose between getting seeds and getting a harvest of roots.
Perennial root vegetables tend to be polycarpic – they can flower and produce seeds many times in their lifetime, so you can harvest the seeds and then harvest the roots. That means you can get both, and don’t have to choose between them.
That’s much more sustainable for the dual goals of locally adapting your plants and also getting something to eat.
With perennial vegetables that stay in the ground (as opposed to perennials where you harvest everything and then replant some of the roots, which is true of most root crops), there is the additional opportunity of the plants getting larger and the roots getting deeper each year, which is nifty. More drought tolerant, etc. You can’t really get that advantage with root crops that you need to pull out to eat.
But even though that particular advantage of polycarpy isn’t there for root vegetables, the mere fact that you can eat your plant and harvest its seeds too is a really big deal. It makes it much easier to breed for flavor, and it makes it much, much easier to accomplish the twin goals of eating this year and also collecting seeds so you can eat next year.
Anyway, it delighted me to find out those two words. Even though “perennial” and “polycarpic” are probably closely related, they’re not exactly the same thing, so I’m thrilled to find a more specific word to state what I think is so neat.
I plant my sweet potato seeds and in two months or even sooner, start harvesting seeds. Then later, I harvest the roots and then harvest more seeds until a freeze kills the vines.
This year I harvested the first seeds in early July and the roots in mid-September and am still harvesting seeds. If I take cuttings with young seed capsules and bring them in, seed harvest might continue into December or longer. This year the very dry and warm weather since harvesting the roots has yielded more seed than the whole season before. But that might because it is so much easier to collect seeds from stems stuck in jars of water with most of the leaves removed and sitting up on a table than it is stoop over and collect them from actively growing plants.
Incredible! Sweet Potatoes can do that? Giving you both seeds & root vegetable without compromising the other? Did the commercial sweet potatoes forget how to make true seeds?
WOW! That’s incredible & very smart! Can the seeds ripen off vine? Or do they need to be connected to somekind of water source as cuttings? It’s not like ripening Green Tomatoes or Slightly immature squash off vine is it?
Yes, they do that and after over a decade of selection they do it reliably and abundantly. Apparently after being cloned for a long time, they do “forget” how to make seeds, but I don’t understand how or why that happens. I guess a similar thing happened with garlic.
With sweet potatoes I think the inability to make seeds actually got reinforced by breeding selection. That sounds counter intuitive, but all the government and university breeding programs seem to have been focused on just finding a new great one to clone and patent. Toward that goal they do things like soak seeds in concentrated sulfuric acid to make them sprout easier or graft them onto something else to induce flowering. That just passes on the genetics for poor sprouting and flowering to the offspring. If a plant produces a dozen seeds instead of hundreds, they are fine with it as long as one of those dozen makes a great clone.
They also do mass polyculture breeding where the mother plant is known but the father is random. With that, and actually to a degree with mine, really good ones show up at random. If a really good one is fit for marketing, they go with it as a clone and don’t care if it doesn’t have the ability to make seeds or even flower. They may actually prefer it that way. The patent documents of one really fine sweet potato currently on the market says that it is both male and female sterile.
If a really good one shows up in my patch, but does not flower and make seeds, we eat it ALL and it goes extinct. Only those that make great roots and seeds get cloned for backcrossing the next year. For the first three or four years I selected for nothing but seed production. Then I added in nice roots and seeds. Now I want nice roots, abundant seeds, good storage ability, short maturity time and great flavor.
Nobody I’ve ever heard of, other than me, has tried to turn sweet potatoes into a seed grown annual. Or maybe I should say, did turn sweet potatoes into a seed grown annual. While I still can save and clone great roots, I don’t have too. If something happens and all the roots are lost for some reason or eaten, I can just get out some seeds and start over. Seeds are extremely durable and stay viable for years or even decades. By saving and cloning some very good roots but at the same time saving seeds each year a person is close to guaranteed to never run out of sweet potatoes, no matter what. Unlike potatoes you don’t have to pamper little tubers for a couple years just to find out if they are good to eat, sweet potatoes produce a crop the first year from seed.
They don’t seem to need much of anything. I often find mature seeds on discarded vines, sometimes even after a freeze. For plants I like, I will repot the vine after removing the big roots, chop off most of the leaves and just leave it in the garden. Often if the weather is right or if I keep it watered it starts growing and blooming again as well as finishing the seeds it already had. If I take smaller cuttings or just individual seed stems, I generally put them in a jar of water. Older seed capsules probably don’t really need that, but the younger ones will mature too.
An individual capsule probably wouldn’t finish by itself unless it was pretty much already mature and just needed to dry. They are nothing like tomatoes, squash or anything else I have ever saved seeds from.
Interesting, I suspect the plant understands that the “Human” isn’t saving my true seed, so the plant goes “F*ck it” we investing in root production . I’m glad you got Sweet Potatoes to do it reliably, I just wonder how/where you started? Where did you get the seeds for it? Did you do something with the grocery store Sweet Potatoes to shift their hormonal balance into fruit/seed production? I know Summer Pruning Trees works wonders to stimulate fruit production, same concept doesn’t apply to sweet potatoes does it?
Very interesting! by graft, we assuming they still working within the batatas section of Ipomoea or different genus entirely? I’ve heard about crazy cross-plant families grafting possibilities with sweet potato roots.
Oh… That’s an interesting technique! Hmm… so do the offspring more often resemble the mother or the father, or it’s totally random which way as long as one of the parents has the good traits you want?
I ask cuz Rhizowen crossed C. maxima pollen onto a female C. ficifolia, & the fruits turned out looking more like C. ficifolia, just with color from the maxima genes.
Does something similar happen in Sweet Potatoes, or any other crops? In other words, Is it always the mother that has the stronger influence or can it be the other way around? If so why? Is it because the mother carries the seeds, thus by default has more time to influence them?
, so no donating to the Universities . About the short maturity time, did you notice any Short-Day or Day Neutral plants while working with all kinds of sweet potato? When do they flower for you (Like Late fall or sometime in summer)? Also why did you select for the seeds first? Does it make it easier in the long-run?
Yea, I’ve never heard of anyone doing something similar. I’d love to collaborate on the project so it’s not just you doing it. Ideally exchanging germaplasm to 2x speed run the breeding efforts.
Hmm… but by saving the best tasting roots, you get re-enforce those really good traits again, right? That way you have the same really good mother plant pollinate the next generation thus giving you more seeds of what what made the pollinator mother plant so good in the first place, right?
NICE! So all the same benefits as with True Potato Seed. Speaking of which, have you bred Sweet Potatoes for the edible leaves too? Have you tried the young leaves & Shoots? Does selecting for the root also select for delicious leaves? Are the 2 correlated?
Wait, what? You actually have to pamper litter tubers for Potato (Solanum tuberosum)? I thought it they don’t get big by the first year, the variety remains stuck that way due to genetics (Or does leaving the same root in for multiple years aka Pampering them, increase the tuber size somehow?).
I was planning on weeding out all those that taste bad, make ridiculously small roots, or fail to produce anything at all. Speaking of which, have you noticed any bad tasting sweet potaotes, like those you’d suspect may be toxic? Or does root toxicity simply not exist in Sweet Potatoes Ipomoae batatas? Like wild Solanum potaotes are quite toxic but can the same be said for sweet potatoes?
That’s AWESOME! Does that mean the sweet potato vines could actually survive all on their own as a wild edible? Seeds surviving frost is a good start! and being able to take cuttings & put them in water to help mature the immature fruits is SUPER USEFUL too!
! But from a distance they also look somewhat similar.
. I’m glad you got Sweet Potatoes to do it reliably, I just wonder how/where you started? Where did you get the seeds for it? Did you do something with the grocery store Sweet Potatoes to shift their hormonal balance into fruit/seed production? I know Summer Pruning Trees works wonders to stimulate fruit production, same concept doesn’t apply to sweet potatoes does it?
. About the short maturity time, did you notice any Short-Day or Day Neutral plants while working with all kinds of sweet potato? When do they flower for you (Like Late fall or sometime in summer)? Also why did you select for the seeds first? Does it make it easier in the long-run?