True yams (Dioscorea spp.) are one of the most underutilized and exciting survival food crops you can grow. In today’s presentation, David The Good shares how to grow yams, how to propagate yams, yam varieties for warm and cold climates, uses for yams and a lot more.
If you appreciate what I’m doing, please join our community and see the many other exclusive presentations like this one, as well as our courses and more: https://www.skool.com/the-survival-gardener
Thank you very much to my faithful channel members and my Skool community. I couldn’t do this without you.
DAILY BLOG:
***
https://www.thesurvivalgardener.com
RECOMMENDED BOOKS/PRODUCTS:
***
VLOG SETUP
***
Camera: https://amzn.to/3Sll6sG
Shotgun Mic: https://amzn.to/49f3rK3
Small Mic: https://amzn.to/3ubvifv
DAVID’S BOOKS
***
Compost Everything: https://amzn.to/3SArbCW
Grow or Die: https://amzn.to/3SLzfBf
Free Plants for Everyone: https://amzn.to/3vY1zHC
Push the Zone: https://amzn.to/3UjZP5t
*
Create Your Own Florida Food Forest: https://amzn.to/3UlywHU
Florida Survival Gardening: https://amzn.to/3vRe1sC
Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening: https://amzn.to/3vRBQAq
The South Florida Gardening Survival Guide: https://amzn.to/3Oov5wl
*
How to Start Your Own Home-Based Plant Nursery: https://amzn.to/3SyyuuW
Turned Earth: A Jack Broccoli Novel: https://amzn.to/3ShNyf9
Garden Heat: A Jack Broccoli Novel: https://amzn.to/47PAgw5
*
JOIN THE NEWSLETTER
***
https://thesurvivalgardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=d1c57e318ab24156698c41249&id=1f74a21dc8
GET TEE-SHIRTS:
***
The Survival Gardener
Growing yams is a great idea for survival gardeners and people concerned about food inflation and possible supply line disruptions. Imagine having thousands of calories in the ground without expending much work! Yams allow you to do this, and are a very forgiving crop. Today we talk about ube yam, dioscorea alata varieties, dioscorea rotundata, dioscorea polystachya, edible yam bulbils, dioscorea pentaphylla and a lot more. Learn to propagate and grow yams, and how to process and propagate them.
22 Comments
This presentation was made possible by my Skool community.
We do talks like this regularly, and have great discussions, food forest courses and even a plant swap.
If you want to support this work and see many more exclusive videos and interviews, join us here: https://www.skool.com/the-survival-gardener
Thank you for watching!
These videos are so beneficial because, for me, it can be very intimidating to grow and eat a crop I don't know what to do with. But, many of these what seem to be unusual and rare garden crops, are becoming a big part of my suburban garden, and are doing well! So thank you!
My loquat tree has produced 68mm diameter fruit this year. Last year the biggest was 65mm.
I have a Vietnamese channel I watch and they are always digging a variety of yam that grows straight down. They often dig holes a meter/Yard or more deep to harvest them. Yes, they are VERY delicate. There's the Greater Yam and the lesser yam that they harvest. One looks like MASSIVE um.. hairy balls. Like the one in your propagation segment. The other is often flatish, many feet long and very fragile. They both have very white flesh.
šā¦ yeah, canāt wait until you present us the macaroni & cheese plant! š a bacon plant would be amazing, too! š š
Thankās for these amazing insightsā¦ already looking up, where to find those bulbills here in Europe!
I recently saw a video where they grew this chinese yam variety with the long root ( we call it āLichtwurzelā in german, what means ālight rootā. They call it the heathiest veggie of the worldā¦ š and made a huge expenditure building a special 1,5 m high raised bed with 4 m high trellises that they opened and emtied (is that an existing english word? You know what I meanā¦) in fall, to harvest the root. This is how they did it and successfully harvested the root without breaking it: https://youtu.be/9BzlV6utwZU?si=8lRz5h2gtOL7SWDz
They havenāt even mentioned that the bulbills are edableā¦ i will tell them about the tater top plantā¦ and show them your video! š
Yes, please write a book about it! Take this as my pre-order! šš»
Humanity is an invasive species
Please don't tell the Dept. Of Ag…
Hi David! I'm a new enthusiast of yams from Hungary, zone 7b in particular. I've just started building 80-100 cm high raised (hugel-pellet board) beds for our chinese yams (and my wife) with which I was rather satisfied with this year – but I would like to experiment less cold hardy species as well.
I got ube this year from seed (true seed) and 3-4 plants out of 10 managed to grow some teeny-tiny roots by October when the leaves were actually still up (we were expecting frosts). But I can't find white alatas anywhere. Do you have a suggestion? Do you happen to ship outside the United States, or know someone who does? (Or is it as much red tape to get out of as to get in to the States?)
(Edit: having red one of the comments, the gutter solution sounds much more practical. I sure will give those a try. Good thing the raised beds were designed in for multiple reasons. š )
Gives the phrase" Don't eat your seed potatoes " a whole new meaning…
Why don't the fire ants eat those grubs?
I was cutting up and roasting seminole pumpkins while listening to this video and then a commercial came on and my hands were too messy to hit the skip button, so you just got a billion ad dollars from me listening to some dude talk about his abs for 30 minutes against my will.
Thank you, this is the video I've been looking for. Please do right a book on yams, I'm very interested.
Thank you so much for the video, Iām going to grow some yams š would definitely buy a book David on Yams if you wrote one š
I titled one of my videos "yamberry" and got almost no views. LOL, maybe tater tot plant is better!
I have grown the polystachya in containers before and it would make the fat root in the ground underneath the pot by growing through the holes in the pot! And still had the same issue you described.
I have heard the Chinese yam is sometimes grown in tubes, something I want to try next year
Does anyone know if the bulbils on purple ube are edible when cooked?
I have a purple yam plants in my backyard and it gives me a decent size for 10 months.
I grow Dioscorea polystachya, aka Chinese yam, cinnamon vine and nagaimo. It is hardy in Zone 6! I grow them in 25 gallon pots. I just harvest the roots by tipping out of the pot. They also produce lovely little yam berries that taste like potatoes. The tubers should be peeled. The flesh has slippery and slimy texture like okra. My favorite way to prepare this is to chop it and puree it in a food processor and then make into waffles. I donāt add any other ingredients. I freeze the waffles to store my harvest. My family loves them.
Where does one get what we call ā yam headsā for planting?
Hey David, do you think a morus rubra would be able to fruit in a USDA 9b climate?
Four years ago now I was gifted a bulbul of D. bulbiferae by an older nurseryman here in middle TN who has since passed. He raised bamboo and sold it around the country, and I believe he had the largest collection of bamboo species in the U.S. at roughly 200 species as I recall. He also bred tree peonies and was working on breeding cold hardy pomegranates, and was a collector of plants in general. The bulbiferae he gifted looks to be the first variety you showed here, and I have been growing it the past three years here in zone 7. The first two years they began producing in late June, setting a few bulbils, and then put on a bunch more starting mid to late august with the largest being big enough to fill both hands ( I didnāt weigh them unfortunately) This year they didnāt put on until August, likely due to the cooler spring and my not bothering to baby them the way I had previously. All of this is to say that they do seem to be a viable crop here in zone 7.
Chinese yam can be grown horizontally by burying a two foot length of gutter, large diameter bamboo split in half, or some similar barrier that can redirect the tuber to grow sideways.