Jicama: A True Survival Plant

Mark S. shares success with growing jicama as a survival crop:

Hi David

I’ve been growing jicama for a few years now   I live in the Australian tropics so it grows all year round, in fact it’s absolutely free here during the wet season.  Automatically watered by the climate. You just pop a seed in the ground and forget it for 4 months

I live on a standard quarter acre house block and have about 60 plants growing at any one time in a combination of pots and in-ground beds.  Most of my pots are two gallon in size so they don’t take up much space.

My plantings gives me from 2 to 4 kgs of jicama per week as a constant sustainable supply.

The number of ways this amazing plant can be prepared in the kitchen seems to be endless.  Our favourite at the moment is what we call jicaslaw, an alternative to coleslaw.

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I thought it might be a good topic for one of your survival gardener videos if you haven’t already focused an episode on this plant.  I watch your channel regularly and enjoy the content immensely but I don’t think I’ve seen anything specifically focused on the history and growth of this vegetable

Anyway, keep up the good work.  Advice on cheap affordable sustainable gardening techniques is truly lacking on the internet, in my opinion.  I always preach to people that if they want to save money just grow your own vegetables, it’s easy.

Kind regards

Mark

Jicama is a crop I haven’t done much with. The only time I grew it was on accident, when I gave some yard-long bean seeds to a friend and he planted them and brought me some starts. As they grew, they looked weirder than any yard-long bean I’d seen. The vines were exuberant and densely covered my big bean trellis. The leaves were also larger and coarser – and then they went into bloom. The blooms were purple-blue. At that point, I was wondering if I had ended up with kudzu somehow.

I can’t remember how I figured out what they were. I think it was when a friend visited, perhaps Craig Hepworth, and said “hey – nice jicama!”

“Wait… that’s jicama?”

I called my friend who had started the seeds and he had no recollection of planting any jicama, but jicama they were, as evidenced by the beautiful tubers they made.

A little while after, I moved to Grenada and didn’t get a chance to actually grow them on purpose. There I did get some seeds from my friend Dr. Guido Marcelle, but we ended up leaving the island before I planted them.

I must admit to not generally doing well with vining plants, as I rarely seem to have enough trellis space available for everything I want to grow. It sounds like I need to make some more room for jicama in 2023.

If I grow it, I will indeed make some videos. It sounds like a grievous oversight on my part. They were certainly easy to grow – even on accident!

“Jicama” image by Gary Soup is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

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