Wild Potato-Vine (Ipomoea Pandurata)

[imgrimmer]

Does someone know Wild Potato-Vine (Ipomoea Pandurata)? Is it edible? I read often about it but never could find seeds or tubers to buy.
What taste it like? Like sweetpotato?

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Don't know anything about it. Curious to see what others say. Though it sure sounds like a sweet potato from the name!

I also recently ran into a wild potato name online that apparently grows near here in my county. I'm curious about it as well, though i don't wish to hijack your thread. Solanum jamesii. Anyone know anything about it? Breedable with regular (diploid?) potatoes?

Some sources say that the "Colorado Wild potato" (Solanum jamesii) is edible, though slightly bitter. And that the Hopi Indians cook them.

edit: i guess i'm finding answers to my own questions. www.capitalpress.com/Nation_World/Nation/20150806/researcher-use-wild-spuds-to-develop-better-hybrids

wo wild species — S. jamesii and S. fendleri — are scattered around Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

[billw]

Manroot. I've considered trying to do some breeding with it, but it's a big project to start. It is not totally clear how edible it is. I have tasted it and I didn't die. It is noted to be both diuretic and laxative, which suggests that you might not want to eat too much, although the properties that are ascribed to many wild edibles by herbalists often turn out to be incorrect in my experience. It's kind of bitter and fibrous. The roots do grow very large, but by the time they are big, they are woody.

It is in the same genus as sweet potato (I. batatas), I. lacunosa, and I. costata, structurally similar edibles.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

blog.emergencyoutdoors.com/edible-wild-plants-wild-potato-vine-ipomoea-pandurata/

www.illinoiswildflowers.info/savanna/plants/ws_potato.htm

Apparently you can eat it. The tuber needs to be cooked though.

i thought one page said the leaves were edible too. but i cant find it again if it did.


the name that really got me was "Bigrooted Morningglory". When i saw that i wanted to shout, "great, another form of bindweed!, just what i need". Though i do like learning about wild forms of domestic crops. Could this be used in peoples sweet potato breeding programs to help develop TSPS?

[prairiegardens]

JlHudson has seed for ipomoea leptophylla which he says was eaten as a famine food by the Plains Indians. Which doesn't suggest deliciousness. The description says the tuberous roots can get to be the size of a mans body, although they are usually football sized. That catalog doesn't list ipomoea pandurata though the name "man of the earth" is common to both,  leptophylla is said to be a bushy upright stemmed plant to 4 feet with wine colored flowers sometimes called bush or tumbleweed morning glory. 

[steev]

A famine food the size of a man's body that tastes bad, sounds like a preferable reason for anthropophagy to me.

[prairiegardens]

Perhaps they just preferred buffalo to digging the roots up, that'd be a job, digging up a man sized root 3 - 4 feet below ground with sticks or bones. Perhaps they tasted fine but had unfortunate side effects if they ate much of it, not necessarily fatal but uncomfortable. Or perhaps they were just nasty tasting I thought about trying them but digging is decidedly not my thing so never ordered any seed. Maybe if I had a backhoe handy...

[reed]

Jan 25, 2017 21:38:20 GMT -5 billw said:

Manroot. I've considered trying to do some breeding with it, but it's a big project to start. 

If you were to try breeding with it how might you go about that? Do you have any reason to believe that it could cross with I. Batatas? I eyeballed some last year along the road not far from my house and considered bringing flowers home to try pollinating some of my sweet potatoes. I didn't do it cause I figured it was unlikely it would work and I would never know if it did because of all the other varieties I had in my garden.

Now that I know I can clip stems with unopened flowers and bring them in to finish up I might try doing so and pollinating with the I. Pandurata. Or I could bag and tag some flowers. I wonder if it has any of the self incompatibility traits that I. Batatas has? In case it doesn't, I wonder how easy it is to emasculate the flowers so I can try crossing both ways? 

Since I'm working with seed grown I. Batatas anyway and have plenty of I. Pandurata growing a mile or so away I guess I should see if I can answer some of these questions. Just seems like if it was that simple someone would have done it already. 


[add] turns out there is some info out there www.jstor.org/stable/2442899?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. The abstract says I. Pandurata is self incompatible and rarely produces seed. So, maybe I could just take a single blooming I. Batatas in a pot, sit it in the weeds by the I. Pandurata and leave it for a couple weeks. Any resulting seeds on either plant should be a cross. 

[billw]

Because it grows in the same general area where sweet potatoes are grown, I think that there would probably be more information about crosses if it were easy. Sweet potato is a hexaploid and I. pandurata is a diploid, so crosses will be challenging.

[billw]

The first step in breeding is always learning more about the cultivation of the plant, so I'd probably grow it for a few years to start. Sample seeds from different sources and see if any of them have better edible quantities. There are a few sellers on eBay.

[reed]

Jan 26, 2017 14:40:01 GMT -5 billw said:

Because it grows in the same general area where sweet potatoes are grown, I think that there would probably be more information about crosses if it were easy. Sweet potato is a hexaploid and I. pandurata is a diploid, so crosses will be challenging.

I suspected some genetic mismatch might a problem. I'll probably try it anyway since I can easily put them in proximity to one another and I have lots of bumblebees. That and maybe some hand pollination is probably all I'll do, if it don't work it don't work. How would you rate probability of success? 

[billw]

Hard to guess. Every plant family handles polyploidy a little differently. You might find that they cross normally, yielding a tetraploid that would be 3/4 sweet potato. That would likely have sterility problems due to the imbalance between the two genomes. You might find that it only works with one or both producing unreduced gametes, in which case you could end up with a pentaploid, a heptaploid, or an octaploid. The odd ploidies would typically be sterile. The octaploid is the only outcome that I would generally expect to be fertile.

[imgrimmer]

I wasn`t thinking about to cross it with I.batatas but this is surely a good idea.
Screening wild plants for better taste could be also a start. pandurata is very exotic here I know only one seller for plants and these are labelled as inedible. There are some seeds to buy but nothing in comparison to a wild population to screen. Probably too inbreed or too less variation and expensive.
If someone is interested in digging holes in the landscape and tasting them I am highly interested to read about.

[Marches]

I'm wondering if they'd cross with morning glories (Ipomoea tricolour). The reason being that Morning glories aren't very hardy here (UK) but have nice flowers so presumably this cross would make them tougher garden plants. Morning glories aren't invasive here either.