Dioscorea Batatas?

[stevelau1911]

I've been harvesting quite a few of these guys.

One thing I've learned is that it may be better to grow them in large pots, or tall raised beds because it's tough digging down 3-4 feet into the ground to get the whole thing out, but in terms of taste, they far surpass the quality that you can get at the Asian grocery stores.

3 year old potatoes can weigh a few pounds each, and exceed 2 feet in length. One cool thing about these is that if they are not harvested, they will consume all the starch from the dormant tuber, and produce a larger vine which will in turn produce a bigger tuber the following year. The limiting factor seems to be trellis space.






I also have around 70 lbs of air potatoes total that I will be selling off a little at a time.

[Alan_L]

Are the air potatoes edible too?

How do you prepare/cook these tubers?

[stevelau1911]

The air potatoes are edible too, but I prefer to either grow them or sell what I don't grow.

The underground tubers can be used in anything from soups, chowders, stir frys, fried form, or baked. They are the same as regular potatoes except more nutritionally dense and better tasting. I usually use them in soups or stir fry. They just take longer to grow, and a bit more work to dig out.

[stevelau1911]

Here are quite a few pounds of potatoes.

I actually found a pretty efficient way to dig them out by using the hoe, digging a 3ft deep trench beside where the tubers should be, then breaking into the wall where I can extract them pretty quickly. Most of them aren't deeper than 3ft.