Keeping Cassava Cuttings Through Winter: Multiple Methods!

We’ve been growing cassava in USDA zones 8 and 9 for years now. One of the biggest issues with growing cassava in a climate with frosts is maintaining a good supply of cassava cuttings you can use to start new plants the next year.

Today, we’ll look at the methods that worked and didn’t work on our homesteads, both in North Florida and in Lower Alabama.

How to Store Cassava Cuttings Through Winter

We’ve been growing cassava since 2007, when we lived in the small town of Frostproof, Florida. I got my first cuttings from Ralph Stuck, who got his from the retired Indian missionaries living in his mobile home community across the street from Lake Reedy.

He showed me how to plant cuttings upright in the soil, and we proceeded to plant a big patch of them in the fireant-infested white sand behind our mobile home. They grew well and gave us plenty to eat, and it was then that I really understood the survival potential of this staple tropical crop.

It was pleasant in flavor, versatile, full of calories, and it thrived in fireant-infested white sand!

Over multiple years of experimentation, we learned more about how to grow cassava. We experimented with planting it in Tennessee (it froze to death), growing it in pots indoors (it died), growing it in North Florida, where the winter cold would occasionally hit the teens (it froze, but grew back from the ground in spring), growing it in mounds of tropical clay down in the Caribbean, planting it on its side beneath the soil, interplanting it with sweet potatoes (which works great when the spacing is wide, but greatly reduces sweet potato yields when the canopy closes) and planting it in open areas of new food forests.

One excellent characteristic of cassava is that the roots can remain in the ground for a good period of time after reaching harvestable size – and they aren’t a seasonal crop, meaning that you can plant cassava whenever you like and expect it to produce a decent harvest about 9-16 months later.

This is a little complicated by winter in regions with frosts, since the cassava plants quit doing much of anything once the temperatures drop below the 70s (F); however, in the spring the cassava resprouts and continues enlarging its roots until they reach harvestable size sometime that summer or fall.

The biggest issue with growing cassava in zones 8 and 9 is that any cold weather below 32 degrees is capable of taking off the entire aboveground growth of the plant. Since new cassava plants are propagated by cuttings, this is a bad thing! You want that aboveground growth so you can plant more cassavas!

Fortunately, cassava canes aren’t to difficult to keep alive through the winter if stored properly. Now let’s cover the methods that have worked for us and some that didn’t.

Burying Cassava Cuttings in a Box

A Cuban family in the Ocala area shared that they “bury cassava canes in a box” in the fall, cutting canes before the first frost and bundling them into a box which is then buried in the soil.

I’m not sure if it’s a cardboard box or not, but I tried the method by burying cassava canes in a sandy hole lined with straw and covered over the top with a tarp and it worked.

Some years later I tried the same method except I buried a trashcan full of cuttings in a pile of construction sand. That failed, as the trashcan got filled with wet sand and the canes rotted in the ground. I think the main reason for this was the combination of lots of winter rain and colder conditions. When I dug up the canes, they had started to sprout and then had been eaten by various molds and rot.

My current method of keeping cassava canes in a box is to line the bottom of a big plastic bin with some grass clippings or hay/straw, then lay canes on their sides inside of it, packing the bin until it’s almost full, then topping it off with another layer of mulch before closing the non-airtight lid.

This keeps most cassava cuttings alive, except when the box freezes, as we had happen during last December where even my closed-in porch went below 32 degrees.

Fortunately, about half of the cuttings still survived, so it must not have frozen all the way through.

Keeping Cassava Cuttings in Water

One year I decided to cut cassava cuttings into about 4’ segments and then put their bottom ends into a bucket of water in my greenhouse to keep them alive.

This was a failure.

The bottom portion in the water rotted into slimy mush.

Don’t keep cassava cuttings in water.

Keeping Cassava Cuttings Against a Tree, Brazilian-style

Last year, a viewer shared a method of keeping cassava canes in a bundle against the side of a tree, as they do in regions of Brazil that experience light frosts.

We tried it and had a few canes survive.

I am convinced it would have worked better if we hadn’t received multiple overnight lows in the teens with almost three days of weather where temperatures failed to rise above freezing. You can see how we did in this short video.

It was surprising to see any cassava cuttings survive!

Planting Cassava Canes Beneath the Ground in Fall

One method that worked in North Florida was planting cassava canes horizontally in the fall, about 4-6” deep, where you want them to grow in spring.

New shoots would emerge around the beginning of April and rapidly grow as the weather warmed.

However, we tried this in the wet, rainy, cool winters of Lower Alabama zone 8b and they mostly rotted in the ground.

Keeping Cassava Cuttings in a Black Trash Bag

My friend Rick successfully overwintered cassava cuttings by putting a bundle of them in a black trash bag and stowing them in his garage through the winter.

In the spring, they were covered in long, pale shoots and were ready to grow.

There was no rot on them, and most survived just fine. Just don’t wet them and don’t let them freeze!

Planting Cassava Canes in Pots

Now we always plant at least a few cassava cuttings in pots as a backup to our other methods of saving cassava canes.

Take cuttings that are about 8-12” in length and stick them bud-side-up in one-gallon pots of soil, then keep them in a non-freezing location and don’t overwater them. We keep ours in the greenhouse.

We just cut up a bunch of canes…

Then pot them up. We much have 200 pots of cassava in the greenhouse right now.

In the spring, we simply transplant the now-growing plants into the ground.

Conclusion

I’m sure there are more methods for keeping cassava cuttings through winter. In most of their common range, winters are tropical, so those of us that experience frosts have to do a little extra experimentation to learn what works. Once you’ve figured out how to keep the canes you need for spring alive through the cold, you’ll be well on your way to growing tons of this excellent staple.

As for the stumps left behind after we cut our cuttings, we mulch them with leaves, hay or straw so they’ll spring back into growth when the weather warms.

Each of those mounds of old hay is covering a cassava plant.

If you have any more questions, please leave them in the comments section below. Also, my Florida gardening books have plenty of information on growing cassava. This crop is a long-term survival food storage bank right in your backyard – I highly recommend growing it wherever possible.

I cover it extensively in my Florida gardening books, and also talk about it in the newsletter:

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Thanks for reading – this post gives you a good overview on how to keep cassava cuttings through the winter, so there’s no excuses not to push the zone and grow some cassava of your own.