Jicama 沙葛 harvest

Ever since our move to our new location in the community garden, I planted these jicama seeds for nearly 8 months! 

 I kept hesitating to harvest them because I was worried that there would be nothing edible to collect therefore the long wait. By the way for jicama, only the root is edible, everything else is inedible, even the seeds and leaves. Which meant the plant was a pain to get rid of by the time it came to harvest. 

So I harvested one for myself, left one for my mother (she was very fortunate to find two buried in the same vein), and gave the rest to the old folks to the garden, who split each jicama into two because they were very big.

Next time i will grow #jicama for only 6 months instead of waiting nearly 8 months. Had some monster sized ones, my mom weighed one. Was 2 kg! #gardeningsingapore #allotment #gardening

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Nov 7, 2015 at 2:07am PST

Mutter weighed the bigger jicama she got and it was at least 2 kg, she said.

Well, the plant was useful on sunny days where it provided shade. But other than that, it might be too much effort to grow. Now that I had relative success, the old people wanted to attempt as well, taking the seed pods off me. Well, they are welcome to them as I won't be growing them for the next three months with the monsoon season coming.

How tall the plant was:

We often call Bang kuang (also known as 沙葛) as turnip. But after some failed attempts at Googling "turnip" (because the old folks at the #communitygarden wanted to know if its pretty purple flowers and recently emerging seed pods are edible), I found out that its English name is #Jicama. And it turned out that other than the edible tuber, everything else on the jicama plant is poisonous, esp the seeds which contain rotenone. I had to spend my evening cutting down the pods as they take away the plant resources, thus impacting the tuber size... 🐈 Anyway the super yummy tuber is great in stews, salads, braises and is most famous as the filling in #popiah.

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Jul 7, 2015 at 9:26am PDT