I had a good enough harvest from the Dioscorea bulbifera from Caesar to show and even eat. I picked bulbils and dug out tubers to relocate them this spring. They were strong growers and began to overtak some young mango trees planted close by.
The flesh is yellow and not so slippery as most yams. I fried some and the taste was excellent, very neutral flavor with nothing off-putting, equal to potato. The batch pictured I left the skin on but it was too tough to chew, however it pulled off easily with no waste.
One thing about these is they are good eating and the outward appearance is pretty regular, smooth and not gnarly bumpy or covered with roots. Plus they do taste very good!
I am so glad that they fared well for you! I was beginning to worry that the beetles would impact your harvest too much to make them worthwhile.
The cooking description is well appreciated as well, and I’m glad you liked them. I sometimes worry (despite feeling that I oversell their productive qualities) that I undersell them in terms of flavor... condemnation by faint praise, you could say. But while it’s true that I’ve had better yams in terms of flavor, I really do enjoy the air potatoes, and I’ve nothing negative to say about them when eaten fresh (I’ve only felt distasteful bitterness from air potatoes left sitting for a long time).
I harvested this Air potato two days back, it weighed a whopping 3.1lbs.
That’s an aerial bulbil? It’s huge! How old was the root that produced it?
About 3 months back I found this Yam growing on a tree in my farm. It looks as if I had planted the tuber two or three years back and had not noticed the vine.
The vine is different in that, it has 6 ridges and not 4 as compared to other Dioscoreas I have, and there are small thorns in the ridges.
Last week when I checked on the vine it had dried up and the seed tubers were falling down. So yesterday I decided to dig up the tuber. Initially the tuber appeared the thickness of a thumb but as I went deeper it became thicker, but it is so tender that the slightest pressure on the soil would break the tuber, as you will see from the no. of pieces! Finally after a depth of about two and a half feet, the tuber had grown into the root of the tree and I had to abandon my attempt.
After boiling the tuber, when I tasted it I got a surprise! It is the tastiest Yam I have eaten! It is very creamy and unbelievably 'White' !!
Six ridges and thorns are within the range described for the species, but I’ve never seen it myself. The vine is very likely to grow back from the portion remaining in the soil.
Alatas are often some of the best yams out there. Rarely have I had any bitter ones, the worst ones I’ve had were fibrous, but those were few and far between. I’m partial to rotundata myself, but that’s because I mash them, so it doesn’t matter that they’re hard and dense. Alatas are generally soft, they practically melt in your mouth, and can fall apart and dissolve with long cooking, no mashing required (unless you prefer it). At least, that’s been my experience with the varieties I’ve had here.
The mother root has been in the ground two years. Every three years I dig up the mother root to boil and eat, as it is tastier than the arial tuber. I plant a new one in its place.
Have any roots older than that remained in the ground? Have you noticed a difference in quality, size and production with older vines?
Anyone have any yams they want to trade? I have a fee types of bulbifera: Hawaii and Mexico. As well as a few alata cultivars: Emperor(i think was the name)) purple, another purple, yellow and white fleshed alatas.
PM sent! I’ve lost some varieties, and am interested in getting them back.
This bulbifera tuber I had dug up yesterday and it weighed 4.756 kgs or about 10.5 lbs. After boiling, it was soft but not mushy and slightly sweet! Much better than the arial tuber.
I guess it pays to renew the stock every once in a while! I think I may start doing that myself with my own bulbiferas.
I’m sorry to say that the bumpy CV-2 was among the varieties I lost (though CV-1 remains a survivor for me). I’ve justified growing them in totes for so long out of a fear of losing them to my heavy soil. But after several losses despite my best efforts, I get the feeling that they might actually have a better chance of weathering drought and accessing nutrients in my heavy clay instead of the tote containers.
I dug up these Dioscorea esculenta tubers today. Tubers from this vine is what Caesar has.
They’ve borne decently well in the totes, but this next year I may put them into the clay ground as well. All I need is a pickaxe to fluff the soil at planting, and a good layer of mulch. They make good eating, but my methods haven’t been good at yielding larger tubers (even the usually prodigious rotundata has repeatedly yielded baseball-sized tubers in my totes).
God I wish there were more folks involved in cultivating and selling the edible bulbiferas. It's an extraordinary producer and I'd love to get my hands on some.
I’ve been wishing the same for a long time. At the height of my collection, I had no less than 9 varieties (and possibly more). I’m now down to 3, at least. If there were more growers, replacing them would be simple, but now I’m nearly at a loss as to how to replace them. Some of my own sources no longer sell them. As to my own situation... it is the same as when I first started in this forum. The same little suburban backyard. No farm, no land. My efforts at obtaining them have waned, but I’ve not fully given up, and am looking forward to this next year. But to return from the digression, my current state of affairs is not conducive to the preservation of a species, let alone multiple varieties of space-needy vines.
In terms of bulbifera, I still have CV-1, Saipan Purple, and Mae-sai Yellow. I believe Sena may still be available from Stephward Estate (though they wouldn’t likely call it that, I named it on my end). The one I call Nonthaburi Yellow still seems consistently available from the same eBay vendor. I still have my contact for the Tefoe varieties (Purple, Green, Yellow), but I haven’t contacted him in a long time, so I don’t know if he’s still online. I don’t know where to re-acquire Odisha Yellow, Africa or Mexico, and my source for Hawaii has been difficult to reach on my last attempts.
This has been my pet project, one of my most important efforts, and my failure to yield good results with what should be a very productive species has taken a mental toll on me. It is actually the biggest reason why I’ve dropped off the forums for so long.
The last couple of years I have propagated a bunch of dioscorea with varying soccess. The alatas went crazy. A few other types did o.k. About January when the vines had all dried out and some bulbous started dropping I carefully collected the bulbils and brought them into the house. Early March I put them in pots and back outside. Then the critter raids started. Everything got mixed up and no labels were left in place. Guess I'm going to have some now unidentified dioscorea....
Fading labels and shared containers were a big issue with my ability to identify varieties. Species ID is a cinch, but good luck telling different varieties apart during the growing season.
