#tubers

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Wednesday 30 August 2023

A great display of Solanum tuberosum (potato) varieties at the local horticultural show. Each cultivated variety has different culinary values, storage and cultivation needs.

Jill Raggett

[facts-i-just-made-up]

do you know anything about vtubers?

A "VTuber" or "Virtual Tuber" is a type of potato that only exists online. While most tubers grow underground in the real world, a virtual tuber can grow online without the restrictions of gravity and available nutrients. Popular VTubers include Gawr Gala, Kuzuhabec, Usada Primura and KaguYam Luna.

Excessive "consumption" of VTubers can lead to VTuberculosis.

[wereplant]

Made this root beast for Turnip 28 out of a plastic donkey, dinosaurs bits, a toy palm tree and milliput. I’m thinking he might be part of the fungivorous herd cult.

[crumb4]

Had to call 911. My neighbor's rantsona got off his leash and he's prowling in my yard for his least favorite Spongebob Episodes and if I go out there I think he's goign to put stuff in my ass

[ryanscabinlife]

Moved a few of the daylilies to a brighter spot. Apparently, these tubers are edible. Not sure if I’m feeling adventurous at this moment but it’s really good to know. 3-Aug-2023

[balkanradfem]

So I went to the field, to see if I could possibly locate the jerusalem artichoke; I'm craving it, but locating it is a little tricky. I know it's there, because I've seen the plant lady dig it out a few years ago, and the plant is invasive and aggressive and impossible to get rid of. I know during the summer, it looks like some sort of sunflower, it's related to sunflowers. I haven't exactly seen anything similar to sunflowers in the summer, but I was sick and not checking for the most of the time, so I wasn't sure if it flowered or not. There was one time the plant lady found it, and pointed at it and said 'Here, this is where you can dig for the jerusalem artichoke in the winter' and I still didn't see the sunflower-like plant, she was pointing at some grass. I tried really hard to remember the location, but there's very little to get oriented with in the field, and I only remembered that it was on the left side of it.

So. I'm standing in the big field with 10% hope that maybe I will find it. I tried to research 'how does the jerusalem artichoke look in the winter' and got absolutely nothing, only pictures of yellow flowers. I figured, maybe I'll see a stalk with a big dried flower, and that will be it. No such luck!

I'm checking the left side of the field. The only stalks I could see were those of the goldenrod, and that was easily recognizable. There were dry stalks of some other flowers as well, but always very tiny ones. I was looking for big flowers. There was blackberry, and tall grass. And some black, leafy stalks that looked a lot like goldenrod, but without the flowers on them.

I was suspicious about those, and I broke one off, to see if they were like goldenrod from the inside. They were different, more mushy. I decided to go and dig under that plant, based only on the premise that it was, on the left side on the field, and different to every other dried plant I could recognize.

And to my big surprise, it was the jerusalem artichoke! When I pulled a few of the stalks up, I was met with these big tubers, muddy and looking almost like ginger, which is how the artichoke looks like! I started laughing and wooing, because there was so little hope that I would be coming back home with food that day, and the stalks give nothing away, it literally looked like this:

To just randomly find delicious food digging under this? Feels like witchcraft.

I dug out just a few, and immediately had my hands filled with tubers. I didn't take pictures while digging because it was very cold, and I was extremely muddy and wet handling these, but I took a picture once I got home and cleaned them up. Here they are!

And this is just a bit, there's plenty more to dig out! They're both healthy and sating, their taste is exactly in the middle between a potato and an apple. My favourite way to eat them is pan fried, like you would do potatoes!

Now that I have these, I'll probably have jerusalem artichoke forever. Since the plant is so aggressive and asks for no upkeep, I can just plant this wherever I happen to live in the future, and they'll grow me new plants that need no looking after. I could plant these in the wild and they would still bring me winter food. Some things are just so cool like that.

[arcademyth]

"clowns invade and steal all the beer" was definitely not on my jerma dollhouse stream bingo card

[ka-19]

hspoy haljowesn 😁

[allthingssoulful-garden]

40 L garden basket full of dahlia tubers waiting to be stored away for winter.

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Thursday 7 December 2023

These Dahlia cultivar tubers have been lifted from the borders to protect them from freezing soil temperatures. They need to be overwintered in a dry, frost-free place with good air circulation. One of the cultivars was the white, fimbriata flowered Dahlia ‘Ice Crystal’.

Jill Raggett

[taxifurbied]

manifesting this for myself

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Known as “the tuber man of Kerala”, Shaji NM has travelled throughout India over the past two decades, sometimes inspecting bushes in tribal villages, at other times studying the ground of forests closer to home among the green hills of Wayanad in Kerala. His one purpose, and what earned him his title, is to collect rare indigenous varieties of tuber crops.

Today, Shaji’s prized collection consists of more than 200 varieties of wild and indigenous tuber crops. The day we spoke, he had just finished giving a tour of his farm to 50 students from Bengaluru. To him, knowledge should be easily accessible. “I grow these crops on my land and then give the seeds to farmers and to anyone who wants them. In return, I encourage them to multiply the crops and to include them in their diet,” says Shaji, who calls himself a “cultivator” rather than a farmer.

But conserving some of the rarer tubers is not so easy as the climate heats up. Kerala is losing biodiversity as incessant and unseasonal rains wash away fertile fields. When, in 2018, Kerala received one of the heaviest recorded rainfalls in its history, Shaji’s farm was under water for 15 days.

“The scientists told me that everything would be rotten, and I believed them. I thought it’s OK to lose everything and start from the beginning as I did once,” he says.

But to his – and the village’s – surprise, “everything started to sprout back after a month or so,” says Shaji. “I have never used any chemical on my soil, ever. Maybe it’s because my soil is so good that nature does not devastate my farm.”

Researchers noted in a paper in 2018 that tuber crops “are resilient to climate change due to their capacity to surge over the adverse conditions by becoming dormant and resuming tuber growth during favourable conditions, thereby bringing down the chances of crop failures”.

This ability to tolerate changing climate conditions, say the researchers, makes the tuber “very important for the food security and income of people in this region as well as in many parts of the country”.

[caseyhwilkinson]

Doing important work while playing with fonts over here

[cookingwithkimberly]

#steakfries with #lunch today! #fries #potatoes #sidedish #cookingwithkimberly #webchefkimberly #winter #tubers #healthy #chip #homemade #selfsufficiency #selfsustenance #selfreliance https://www.instagram.com/p/CpGFlYqudgt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[glutenfree-rootbeer]

[tonytomeo]

Horridculture - Inexhaustible Resources

Wild cucumber is not a particularly substantial vine. Except for its tubers, it is quite delicate. Wild cucumber, Marah fabacea, is also known as manroot because it develops massive tubers that can weigh as much as a man. Such tubers can supposedly weigh more than two hundred pounds, and some sources claim that they can weigh twice as much. That is a lot of storage. Their thin leaves, slender…