Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Groundnut, apios americana

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Groundnut, apios americana
  • Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 08:13:13 EST

>Is there some reason this doesn't get talked about much, or am I
>missing some problem with it? N-fixing and 17% protein! Is it any
>good? Seems like I hear from time to time about various lost crops
>of the incas but not about this lost crop of the native north
>americans...

Lawrence asks, "Isn't there a lot of work involved in making it 1) palatable
2) safe to eat? Maybe it is used to make flour."

Wikipedia says of the groundnut, a.k.a. hog peanut or potato bean, that it
"is a perennial vine native to eastern North America, and bears edible beans
and
large edible tubers. It grows to 3-4 m long, with pinnate leaves 8-15 cm long
with 5-7 leaflets. The flowers are red-brown to purple, produced in dense
racemes. The fruit is a legume (pod) 6-12 cm long."

"The tubers are palatable and nutritious, with a high content of starch and
especially protein. The plant was one of the most important food plants of
pre-European North America, and is now being developed for domestication ".

Yet another example of how the presumptuous Westerner cleared his fields of
perfectly good crop materials, to replace the hardy local vegetables with
exotics that may or may not acclimate as well to local conditions.

When the Boers came to South Africa they went to quite a lot of trouble to
clear the land of antelope, creating mountains of useless carcasses where
there
used to be a stable ecology of eight or nine endemic species-- now, I
believe,
all extinct. In their place they introduced European cattle, which promptly
caught the rinderpest, and died from it.

There's a lesson here, somewhere.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page