Re: [gardeners] jicama
George Shirley (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Wed, 20 Jan 1999 19:52:39 -0600
What in the world would you do with a 50 lb jicama? The old vines bit the dust in
our first hard freeze. Made plenty of beans but I don't think the seeds matured. I'm
tending to leave the roots in place until I need one. In the meantime we have eaten
about 2 lbs of the 7 dug up and gave away about 4 lbs to neighbors and friends.
George
Kay Lancaster wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 MAllen4543@aol.com wrote:
>
> > Thank heavens somone has asked this question. It seems that most of the mail
> > has been about jicama and I have been trying to work out what it could be over
> > here. I got to thinking it was Jerusalem artichokes but no. Looking forward to
> > being enlightened.
>
> Jicama (HEE-cam-ah), aka yam bean or Mexican turnip, is Pachyrhizus erosus
> or P. tuberosus, a couple of wierd beans with edible tuberous roots, and
> vines up to about 20 ft in length. Pretty good source of vitamin C, but
> very few calories. You can actually dig and eat the tubers any time...
> which is easier than storing them, as the starch tends to be converted to
> sugars, and then they get rather odd to cook with. The tubers usually
> look like flattened turnips to me. And if you want to grow them, keep
> the day length shorter than about 14 hours... they won't make tubers
> at day lengths much longer than that.
>
> George, if you can keep the older plants going, you can probably get
> bigger harvests every year. Biggest I've seen is a tuber of about 50 lbs.
>
> Kay