According to this farmer in Ghana, the time to harvest cassava can be greatly reduced:
He is planting single nodes. They start producing tuber in just over a month, and he states they can be harvested at only 4 months!
You can see him divide off single nodes in this follow-up video:
We’ll be testing this method in Alabama. Having a shorter season to harvest would be greatly helpful. The plants barely get growing by June here, and if we could speed that up we wouldn’t have to overwinter our slower plants to get a harvest. You might even be able to push cassava production way up into USDA zone 5 or so if this works.
Our experiments with growing sugarcane from single nodes have worked well – why not cassava?
It seems that planting a single node greatly increases the rapidity of tuber initiation.
Try it, folks, and let me know what happens! We’ll be doing the same.
5 comments
Would need to see the harvest though, right?
We’ll just have to test it ourselves.
This is an exciting development if it works! A great way for a new homesteader to establish large cassava plantings with very little planting materials. Definitely going to be doing some side by side comparisons with this one. I wonder if the nutritional content would be any less for spending less time in the ground? Very curious.
Thanks for sharing this David!
[…] I wrote about speeding cassava harvests via single-node propagation in a post back in December. […]
[…] I wrote about speeding cassava harvests via single-node propagation in a post back in December. […]