Apios Americana

[rrheyn]

apios americana is doing well in N.Europe, Belgium. It could be very cold in winter -20C° to +30C° in summer. They survive very well and i have small and big tubers, growing wild between other vegetables.
I have a very sandy forest soil and could enrich it by the method of the French Jean pain(fresh woodcuttings), with manure and basaltpowder, with alfava clover and symphytum.

[blueadzuki]

We actually have A. americana growing wild around me, at least we had until fairly recently which probably means we do still, just not in either of the two places I remember it being. A. americana has another minor problem, not so much in growing it, but in finding a wild patch, namely while it does as someone mentioned resemble a lupine a bit (if you are only looking at the flower) it visually resembles Chinese Wisteria (Wisteria sinensis) a lot more which (in at least my neck of the woods) many homeowners recoginze as a super noxious "kill on sight plant". therfore wheneve a patch shows up on someones land (or on public property) it's usually only a matter of time before some over-anxios and under-informed person confuses it with wistera and either digs it out or douses it with herbicide (and anything that will damage wistera will basically kill Apios outright) therby putting and end to the patch. I've actually on occasion gone so far as to when I see a partch starting, "poach" a tuber or two and try and get a patch stared on my property, but the tubers I find tend not to take off. add on the fact that for some odd reason, most of the A.americana around me seems to be sterile (lots of flowers, no pods, no seeds). For me after a while it just got tossed on the "native edible legumes I tired" pile, along with the Ampicarpa seed I collected in colledge, and the "wild bean" (dont know its scientific name a skinny legume vine, pink flowers with purple "noses" (ovaries and style) which lose thier purple as they grow (I know of one one patch of this around me at the moment, and that one will likely dissapear during the renovation of the railroad tracks. I still have a few seeds though).
I imagine that A.pricei has a similar confusion problem, any patches that get out of the sight of "the knowing" face a risk of being mistaken for kudzu and sprayed to death.

I wonder if Apios migh become more popualr if the Thoreau angle was played up (Thoreau apperanty turned to apios the year his potato crop failed, and claimed to quite enjoy them)

[orflo]

Blueadzuki,
I wonder if you have any pictures of that 'wild bean' or even enough seeds to share some... I have the same thing with apios, the varieties I tried stay sterile, these actually flower quite late over here and I doubt if they could form any seeds before the first frosts arrive. It's not a problem of pollination, not of cross-pollination (tried it by hand, crossing in different varieties), I'm still wondering what keeps them from producing seeds. They do produce seeds as far north as New Yersey, and maybe even in more northern latitudes. I noticed last year that big tubers, I'm talking about 10 cms/4 inches round tubers have a tendency to have some dry hollows inside the tubers, I never had this while eating the smaller ones.

[Hristo]

I'll post this link again:
www.jstor.org/pss/2444742

Blueadzuki, in your case the lack of seeds could be because the population around you is of triploid plants.

Frank, I just wonder - are you sure that the plants you are crossing are diploid and not close related? During the years I have seen (very rarely) small pods on my plants (they all derive from one plant, i.e. they are clones), but it's too late - usualy October to ripen.

[blueadzuki]

May 31, 2010 23:49:51 GMT -5 orflo said:

Blueadzuki,
I wonder if you have any pictures of that 'wild bean' or even enough seeds to share some... .

Sorry I dont have any pictures at the moment. At the moment the only digital camera I have is the one in my cell phone which does not have anything close to the resolution to take a picture of a flowering vine and have it come out as anything but I giant mixed color glob. All of the funds that I could use to get a better one are currently tied up in a fund to get a very expensive ($300 appx) referece book I need for one of my other hobbies. plus the patch I'm referring to is currently unreachable (see below)
As for seed I do have a vial left, and would be willing to share, but that seed is probably really, really crappy seed. You see, when I found the patch last year it was already late autumn-mid winter (it was definitely long post frost) and most of the pods had long since dehisced and thrown thier seed. The seed I have is from those pods that the cold killed before they got old enough to split so its basically dried out immature seed, which may or may not be actually viable. Due to work on the railroad tracks, that patch is now inacessable and is likey to remain so for several years (it appers to be the LAST part of the railroad platform they intend to work on and thefore the last bit people are going to be allowed on) Sorry. Maybe this year a patch will come up somwhere a bit more convient to get to and I'll be able to take a vine segment to put in the scanner (so I can post the pic). Also , now that my mind thinks back, I seem to recall that the platform of one of the other stations a little further down the line was simply covered with the vines and you never know the train could break down one day at that station in the right season (in which case grabbing a few good seeds or a section of vine should cause no problems. UGH it driving me crazy I cant remember waht the vine is, I saw it in a guide once but have completely forgotten what it is called. I told you what the flowers look like; the seeds (when ripe) are small long and thin (sorta the same size and shape as a rice bean (V. ubilliferata but without the enlarged "lips" on the hilum) a sort of greeny brown (think "military olive") to blackish and covered with a tannish powder that rubs off after a while (whether this is pubescence or simpy a seed covering powder (like on urad beans) I dont know.

Hirsto you may be right about triploids. Icidentally we appear to have the same ripening problem around here. Back in colledge I did find an Apios patch that produced pods (same place as I got the Ampicarpa seed) I never got any actual good seed though becuse the pods always came in so late the frost destryed them before they were ripe. It may be that above a certain line apios just can't make mature seed in time (the tubers do overwinter so tecnically I doesn't need seed to propigate and expand it's range) You said you had seen mature seed in New Jersey (I'm assuming "New Yersey" isn't some other part of the country I'm not familar with, and is simply a typo.) The patch that got frosted out was in Ithaca, New York. If there is a line it's probably somwhere in between.

[blueadzuki]

Quick update
As of yet, I have not been able to get acess to the place where I saw the "wild beans" (that side of the train tracks is now open again, but its only being used for the return trips (which is in fact normal for that part of the line, and I'm usally too far back on the train to be anywhere near that spot (and to be honest way too tired after a day of walking around the city to have the energy to tromp the length of the platform and then some to check) I have however (thanks to a few guide references) been able to identify the plant, it's trailing wild bean,Strophostyles helvola aka the amberique bean or the fuzzy bean (or possibly S. umbellata whose range officially starts around Long Island). According to what I have read, it is edible (in fact archelogical evidence seems to suggest some Native American trives may have purposely sowed patches of it for harvesting) As soon as appropriate circumstances occur I see if the patch is still there

[rr1usa]

Just a quick note to thank you all for sharing your information on Apios. We have it growing wild all over our place here in Iowa. I thought the chipmunks were spreading wisteria beans and have been pulling off the foilage to try to stop it from taking over my Water Irises. This year I have even noticed it growing on the north side by the creek, again thinking the chipmunks were propagating more Wisteria. Now that I know it is a good plant I work at keeping it free of other vines like the poison oak we been trying to eradicate.

[Hristo]

Recently saw this:
www.oikostreecrops.com/store/product.asp?P_ID=560&strPageHistory=search&strKeywords=apios&numPageStartPosition=1&strSearchCriteria=any&PT_ID=80
Quite impressive I would say!

[ottawagardener]

Yes, I'd love some of the oikos stock or any apios actually. Still haven't sourced this yet. Apparently, some people

[MikeH]

Jan 28, 2009 23:46:08 GMT -5 orflo said:

Here are some thoughts I wrote down for an article:

Frank,

I read what you wrote here - www.thevegetablegarden.be/Apios.html. It seems they might be difficult to harvest if plant in the wild and allowed to naturalize go back to Nature. What do you think of the idea of planting in a large pot in a mixture of ProMix BX and well-aged manure? Harvesting would be a simple - turn the pot upside down. Given the 2-3 year lead time to produce mature tubers, 2 or 3 pots would be required to produce a steady annual harvest. Do you think that this would work? I also plan to plant some stealthily.

Mike

[rowan]

I managed to obtain one plant and grew it in a pot this year. It didn't produce many tubers and I think it may not be as productive in pots. I could be wrong though.

[MikeH]

If you're growing ground nuts you want to have their roots accessible so you can easily harvest the nuts come the fall (if you want to eat them) or the following spring (if you want to individually re-plant and propagate them). The easiest way to do this I have found is by building an above ground self contained organic garden.

Attachments:

[khoomeizhi]

yep - doing whiskey half-barrels this year. it's the step from mid-sized pots, without going all the the way to having to fill beds...

[caledonian]

I'm growing out some tubers I received from Fedco Trees - but it seems the rabbits enjoy eating the young shoots. One plant grew tall enough that it's beginning to leaf out again higher than the rabbits can reach, and I'm using soda bottles with the bottoms cut out to try to protect the others.

[orflo]

Frank,

I read what you wrote here - www.thevegetablegarden.be/Apios.html. It seems they might be difficult to harvest if plant in the wild and allowed to naturalize go back to Nature. What do you think of the idea of planting in a large pot in a mixture of ProMix BX and well-aged manure? Harvesting would be a simple - turn the pot upside down. Given the 2-3 year lead time to produce mature tubers, 2 or 3 pots would be required to produce a steady annual harvest. Do you think that this would work? I also plan to plant some stealthily.

Mike[/quote]
It could work, provided the pot is big enough, and that a steady amount of water is provided throughout the growing season. Meanwhile, I've learned to live with their natural spreading habitat, and harvest can be done at any time of the year, except when the ground is frozen solid. They're best harvest when they're three years old over here, I guess that some other climatological circumstances can speed up their growth. Older tubers sometimes rot away, and yes, these are usually the big ones, about 10 cm/4 inches in the round or more, and would make a wonderful dinner!