yam harvest

the yam vines have died back to a point that indicates dormancy so i went out to campus to harvest this morning ( you can tell it was early by the dark in some of the photos…i simply didn’t realize it was still dark at 6:30 )…it wasn’t as difficult as i expected since the yams were only about two to two-and-a-half feet deep…depth wasn’t really the issue though…the yams don’t usually develop directly at the base of the root system…instead they are off to one side…but which side is what matters and it usually takes a rather large excavation to locate them…not a simple task in a small garden with plants that really need to be left undisturbed…so it is time consuming ( a bit over two hours for the haul of yams you can see in the “after” photo ) it also does not help matter that the yams themselves re nearly the same color as the surrounding sandy soil…however the harvest came off without collateral damage to other plants and they yams will not have all that stored carbohydrate energy to use on the stupefying number of vines ( and so aerial bulbs ) that i dealt with this year….i retrieved another three hundred and forty-eight bulbs that were still on the ground today which brings this year’s total to over a thousand aerial bulbs from two plants…invasive is too mild a word…these yams are used in traditional herbal medicine and aren’t a food crop ( they taste like they are medicine ) the limited amount of yams per plant and the harvest issues make them unlikely food sources ( famine maybe?) so clearly ( for me, anyway )the cultural imperatives for their cultivation lay outside agriculture yet most texts that i have read ( or own such as “food crops of the world” ) classify them as food…it must be an acquired or enculturated taste.