reproduction and food.

the chinese yams have begun to produce aerial bulbs ( top photo) as their reproductive cycle booms along with alternating hot weather intermixed with cool, rainy spells...there is a significant difference in the way rootstock ( rhyzocarpous) and tuberous perennials reproduce and that has a lot to do with how much edible produce they generate in a season...most of plant energy is geared to reproduction ( dna is persistent stuff ) and if the reproductive mechanism is what we eat then we get relatively more produce form a plant than if it isn't what we eat...jerusalem artichokes are tuberous perennials...the parent plant sets tubers in the late summer or in autumn...the parent plant then dies back and the next seasons plants are produced from the tubers...jerusalem artichokes produce multitudes of tubers...the second photo is of eighty-eight tubers harvested form one plant ( when i grow potatoes, which are also tuberous perennials, i usually get only two or three tubers per plant as a comparison) last october with a weight of 2.38632 kg...the third photo is of chinese yamns growing at the bottom of the plant's root system...it's basically stored energy for th eplant's early spring growth ( i was careful to leave about eight inches of rhyzome at the bottom to make sure the plant had a good start this spring ) i have two chinese yam plants on campus and between them they produced just 814.2 grams of edible produce because most of the plant's energy went into growing vines ( bottom photo ) and producing aerial bulbs for another generation of plants ( last year i harvested nearly five hundred bulbs from the yards of vines the plants produced )...think about it ( if you haven't...doubtlessly old stuff to some of you )apples, tomatoes, potatoes, maizes, wheat, soy beams, pears, grapes, squash...plants that generate a lot of produce do so because we eat the reproductive systems...rootstock perennials ( like the chinese yams and asparagus in the garden) require a large population of plants to produce significant quantities of produce and are generally specialty foods grown more for taste or status than as staples...the bottom photo also caught the cowpeas which are filling the trellis and that dark green color tels me that their bacterial buddies are churning out the nitrogen in quantities greater than what the plants can use...i have a plan to capture that excess nitrogen and save it for next season...but that will have to wait for autumn to start...more on that as it develops.