Apios americana

This wild plant has a long history as a forage plant amount natives and is an obvious prospect for domestication and global distribution.  Recall that all domesticate plants looked rather like this in the wild state.

Can the greens be consumed?  That turns out to be yet, but fussy as always.  Sweet potato leaves are also god as well.  my point as an old grower is that picking during the season can provide cooked greens.  however we all grow spinach or chard for just this.

The tuber and peas are good enough and i am sure dried peas must be good.

The natives used the plant universally and it behooves us to spread therm in the wild wood.  We so need to do more there.

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Comments

It was only harvested in small quantities because it is VERY time consuming to gather. Dig an hour and still not get enough to eat a full meal. It was never a domestic crop because potatoes were brought to North America and beat it in every way. I have grown ground nut for 28 years and have yet to get enough to be worth one meal. Its bland and very unproductive. It requires a climbing trellis. It's expensive to get because its so unproductive. I still have it but it can't handle being harvested more than every few years. Worse yet, it does not taste as good as potatoes and is very tedious to clean up.

To grow these you have to plant the improved varieties. The wild types are not great at producing food in a small area. One improved plant can be 100× the yield of a wild one.

If you grow them in deep mulch, you can give the root a tug and a whole string will come out. They have this white sticky latex so a bit messy, don't cook them in aluminum pans. The pods only produce peas on diploid plants, and I've yet to get enough to try them. Honestly I almost never eat them but I let them go wherever they want as an emergency food. If they climb on something I don't want them to I just cut it and it's fine. But everywhere there are little tubers if I need them, they last for years in the soil.

Looks VERY labor intensive to process and prepare, per unit of nutritional yield. I don't think you can even compare them rationally, with potatoes or yams and for nitrogen fixing, peanuts are an excellent rotation crop. Peas and beans, too. The ground nut is not grown or harvested or processed or distributed or used commercially, and only on a very limited scale otherwise, for very good reason. The end product is a trivial amount of food for all the work involved, even though there does not need to be any cultivation labor. That's not to say that it isn't a great idea to have a go at it, out of interest or for variety, but there are a LOT of far better things to raise or gather if you really want to feed yourself, family, or others, or make a profit.