Hi Mark! I really enjoy watching your videos. Here in the Philippines, we cook the entire taro plant with coconut milk. Just peel the stem and dry it out in the sun for about half or whole day before cooking so that it will not get mushy.
The leaves are edible as well. In Hawaii we place Fish, Pork & Taro or Sweet Potato in the large leaves, wrap in Banana Leaves and steam. Its called LAU-LAU. Really good.
I grow tarrow and arrow head in my swale in front my house. It completely takes over and provides good coverage for the small animals to make a home with. I have tons of lizards and frogs that sing all night long. Great plants but I don't eat them their just for landscape.
Not so sure. The swale they grow in has sewage discharge going to it. They grow well but I don't know if they would be safe for consumption with the media they grow in. The plants are mainly for helping with the natural breakdown of the sewage and they also make nice landscaping.
@@supertech104 people have used human waste for fertilizer for generations; they use it in Asia today, which is okay as long as you let it break down naturally or heat it to temps high enough to kill any pathogens. They're trying it in Africa now and nobody's dying~
I grew taro in containers. 1 per container. Similar growing material but not flooded. Instead I put the pots in a larger non draining container and kept that full letting the water wick up which I believe allowed for better oxygen with adequate moisture. It turned out pretty well. Whenever a sucker got to about 3 inches, I removed it and repotted it in an another identical set up. In a few months time, my overall crop quintupled. This of course was due to the climate here in Hawai’i and the serendipity of the correct variety for this type of growth. I still don’t know what variety it was. Hawai’i has over 200 known traditional varieties itself.
Yes, I don't think it's necessarily a "bog" plant as it is mostly cultivated in normal fertile soil (particularly commercially) but I saw Taro growing in water during a farm stay in Vietnam back in 2016 so ever since I wanted to give it a go. Cheers 👍
I didn't either. I didn't know you could eat them either. Maybe we have something different that looks like them. I'll have to check on that, my husband should know. His Mom taught him a lot about this sort of thing.
@@sharonc1858 there are also apps that can sometimes tell you what plants are. You download the app, point your phone camera at it and… it tells you what the plant is. Although sometimes it doesn’t work or it gets it wrong. I use SEEK, but there are many out there.
I have planted arrowroot and taro in containers much smaller than your but had an better yield . My personal suggestion is plant them on ground and water occasionally,it doesn’t have to be muddy . Much love from India 😊
Gardening is all about successes AND failures Mark (and we all know you’re not afraid to show your less successful experiments, it’s one of the reasons we all watch you ) , I’m sure you’ll find a way to get better crops of this nature in the future. I have complete faith in you , great video as always 👍🇬🇧🇦🇺
We cook taro leaves as well. In a pot cut taro leaves finely fry off gently with onion and add coconut cream to cover and simmer for at least a hour to avoid an itchy throat Second, on top of tinfoil use the taro leaves like wrapping paper and enclose onions, a thick coconut cream and corned meat. Wrap tightly to avoid spillage and bake at 180 for an hour and a half. Both are delicious. Your welcome 🙂
To add to what @Nanny Prep already said, in the Philippines, one of my favorite dishes was taro leaves, taro root, onion, garlic, cooked in coconut milk. For protein you can add any fish, chicken, etc. My favorite is with dried fish. It rehydrates from the coconut milk, delicious served over rice.
@@Selfsufficientme just a concern for those who may be sensitive to calcium oxalate--it is water soluble from the plant, but that just puts it into the water/liquid portion***it does not stop being calcium oxalate because it was cooked😥get a kidney stone--then you'll know **the liquid must be tossed to removed the calcium oxalate from the final product
I really appreciate your positivity and creativity. I've had many disappointments this year with my garden. But I'm going to try and adopt your attitude more and keep pushing forward
I csn relate. I had a bumper crop of tomatoes and cukes but everything else just sucked. I live in north central Ohio and we can get all 4 seasons in a week.
I have some very happy and fat critters running around. Lol. I don’t mind sharing. Did anyone know foxes eat blackberries? Or squirrels love strawberries? I told them they’re fine until society collapses and I get hungry for meat. Till then we have a peace treaty.
@@erroneous6947 I feed my swamp rabbits for the same reason. I put a low fence around what little garden I had left so I might have *something* to harvest, but they got all the squash and peas/beans. When SHTF, they can go in the pot, leaving a few to roam for later. As long as they don't bother the chickens, I'm cool with it. Yeah, foxes aren't known as omnivores, but they are like dogs/wolves in that they are more omnivorous than you might expect. It's still fun to see them eating berries, though. Squirrels are a problem in some areas and Brunswick Stew is a well known way (in Georgia/South Carolina) to keep them in line. I'm sure you can keep your peace treaty going even when you start culling, as long as you don't get overenthusiastic and wipe out your local population. I'm using a lot of the enthusiasm for learning, trying, doing I get here along with the "Just try it" attitude from David The Good and seeing what happens. I figure that the worst case is I get something to eat, learn a lot about my garden and what I might want to try next, and learn more about what I really want to grow.
Aloha Mark! Next taro harvest, when you cut the stem off, cut off a little of the corm with the stem. Leaving about a half an inch of corm on the stem and then replant like that. Also, when you harvest, hand clean the roots off if you can. You keep more corm on, more to eat! 😁 🤙🏾
I was gifted black taro by a friend after losing at least half my garden in the Lismore floods. Chucked it in a shaded, raised bed cos I didn't know too much about it and was sort of treating it like monstera and it is still going really well (probably with the amount of rain we've had). Now I know I can divide it and grow it almost anywhere.
Next time, add some watercress in your taro bed. You can put watercress in your salad, nice peppery like the rockets. Not bad taro harvest for a small bed. Yes, plant in the garden beds too. It will taste a bit different taro grown on dry land and mud. It's not the stem, Mark, it needs a basal plate. on it. We usually grow taro that way. Plant some taro around your duck pond or areas that flood in your tree area. Good to see ya, matey :)
I've yet to eat any of my elephant ear, I usually just leave it in the ground, sometimes it rots, sometimes it comes back. I've had 6+ patches before, and had years where only a single patch came back. This year I separated them all and even dug it all up before the freeze or heavy cold rains. Elephant ear(tarot) is one hell of tough plant, practically a weed with how durable it is in my experience.
Cassava is good up there too Mark, Taro is SOOO nice boiled with coconut cream, and the stem's and leaves can also be eaten , BUT MUST BE COOKED PROPERLY , as it has a strong acidic (could be like arsenic) substance in the green parts of the plant , so needs to be cooked out . once it is it is very nourishing flavor ,green vegetable .
These plants are both top of mind here in the far northern USA. We can treat taro/elephant ears/colocasia escualenta as a summer decorative plant, you dig them after a frost takes the leaves and store the tubers - really similar to dahlias. My tubers last year roughly doubled total volume just our short growning season. The locally indigenous 'arrowroot' is harvested around now in the autumn, just before the freeze. The plant that grows here is also called wapato - sagittaria latifolia is most common specific species. It gets a little bigger than what you harvested, and is various shades from white to purple!
Cassava is a staple right throughout the Pacific , it is also called Tapioca ! You can grow from cuttings , just poke them into a mound , as the usa will says , they are the best. I like the creamy yellow one , but the white one is also nice .
I thought that I had watched all your videos until you mentioned that duck one from a year ago, I was shocked. We can't have that now can we. I'll be doing a thorough check after this to make sure I don't miss any
We have taro growing all over the place in Florida and I never knew you could eat it. Its actually invasive. I pull it out of the ditch every summer. We call them elephant ears. Some get massive and others are small. Huh! Learned something new today Thanks Mark
For growing the taro, you might want to treat it like a bi-annual crop. The ones that grew on my parents property were like yours the first year. The second they became monstrous. If you have the room might be worth a two year crop rotation.
If you want a taro variety that produces a large singlar tuber you can certainly find them because the plant is highly veritable in size; growth habit and even taste. I have a variety that tastes like vegetable soup(celery) and a variety that tastes like sweet potatoe.
Taro loves to be a bit crowded so you could easily stick a ton of or even all of the shoots back in the original bed. I also recommend using taro as an edible ornamental since it’s at least in my opinion it’s quite an attractive landscaping plant. I recommend a variety called ‘Illustris’ which has beautiful multicolored leaves but is also almost as productive as regular edible taro.
💡I like the way you are experimenting with the Taro by attempting different propagation methods as well as having it in the "full sun" and believe that your next crop of Taro will do much better.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge Mark, I have learnt so much from your content. Thank you for the tips, experiments and "a ton" of great examples. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Theres a natural boggy wet kinda area next to our house & I always discard cat poops from the garden into the bog, what I've noticed is that the taros that gets poop on them grows really massive 😂😂. I'm 160cm & they get as tall as me
I've seen Taro grown in containers that have been placed in a water source and have done very well. An old milk bottle or nursery container would work just fine. Maybe ill give it a go myself.
The wild taro that just grow up in my yards can grow as big as your thigh. I prefer the ones your size, but some of my neighbors like them so I just let them take those whenever they want (they're just growing there on the ground by the banana trees, I never planted them, they're already there along with the bananas when I bought the land). I just sometimes harvest the leaves as snacks for my fish (I have two cement fish ponds in my backyard). Btw I love the way the elegant classical music playing as you're prying the dirtiest looking muds, LoL. Ironically enjoyable to watch. 🤣👍
Love that you have a go to see what happens and then share your project and outcomes. It's invaluable to gardeners and the reason we need to keep supporting you on Patreon. Learning from you saves me months and years of treading the same path to make the same mistakes myself and I also benefit from your knowledge, wins and best practice. Like Birdies beds - what a back and knee saver they have been. Worth every cent. Thanks big fella!
I would make it run a little bit. Like make it a overflow with some pump to recicle that. It will also help with the water quality on top. Doesn't have to be much. Slow overflow will help. I think it will improve the harvest quality.
You are a delight to watch! Love your enthusiasm with gardening. I had no clue taro and arrowhead were bog plants!! I love taro chips. Happy gardening 👨🌾
When I was eating gluten free and corn free arrow root was super important as a substitute to corn starch that I wasn't allergic to, it's in some Asian dishes as a powder and changes the flavor if you don't have it. It was really exciting to see Chinese Taro, I live in Hawaii but I'm only starting to dig deeper into varieties and uses, I really enjoy eating taro I like the taste and find it really agrees with my system and makes me feel energized. By the way I love the way you grow and cook in the same video, it's really special to close the loop with things grown and cooked in the same garden/farm. Thank you for your videos they are my favorite garden videos. 🍲
I never knew Arrowhead was edible......it grows in my pond.....and up into the ground along the spring feeding the pond.....perhaps I'll dig some up and give them a try sometime.
Love to follow you in your experiments and learn about so many different ways to get gardens started. I'm also in a warm climate (Fla) and am always learning what to grow in this sandy soil or how to better the soil in the raised beds. Thank you for all your tips/advices, HIGHLY appreciated.
Nice to see you Mark! Hope your house referb has gone well. My hens found that they loved my strawberry leaves, had to fence them off. I might just try and grow something like that here next spring. I would need to fence it also to keep the deer & chicken out. Great idea, Thank you for posting.
In Hawaii we call taro, kalo and everything from the leaves down to the corm can be used to consume but just be sure to cook it properly or else it will give you a itchy throat . Much love from Oahu, Hawaii
Growing up in American Samoa I really took taro for granted. To me, a BBQ doesn't seem complete without it. In Samoa we'd make a sort of spinach dip with the taro leaves and coconut milk, called palusami. Palusami is delicious with taro, but I think it's best with some steaming hot breadfruit roasted in a fire pit. Love the videos and the great insight and information you share here. Looking forward to the next one. Cheers!
i think the ducks and chickens were interested in the water plants called "azolla" its like little water lily fast growing, u can feed ducks,chickens,cows,pigs,horse, etc. its very nutritious!!
I saw duckweed (Lemma sp.), not Azolla. It is probably less productive because it doesn't fix nitrogen, but Azolla fixes nitrogen using a cyanobacterium (Anabaena?), which scares me because most blue-green algae produce rather nasty toxins like the non-protein amino acid, BMAA, which causes Parkinsonism (most famously in Guam, where the culprits were cycads and the wildlife that ate them). Duckweed is edible, though I would cook it to avoid nasty aquatic hitchhikers.
My Japanese wife dug and put some Taro Imo in the rice field we bought recently. We did nothing To my surprise yield was great. I think muddy water did the job. Next year I`m planting more. Your video about blueberries is great. Thanks, Mike.
I was thinking..oooooh..Rice! I planted a little box, just to see who it does here. 5 inches of soil and water. It has grown like crazy. Now, to be fair, I got no rice because, the Sand Hill Cranes loved my little box bog. 😆It even got slammed over from hurricane Ian..And it's now right back up. So, I know I can grow rice here, in Florida. I just need a bigger area, and a way to keep the 5 foot tall lake chickens out of it. 😆😂Thanks, Mark.
When I was little I've noticed taro growing in canals (erm, those narrow open drainage at the side of streets) and creeks. I got trust issues with it at the time because of that lol but I absolutely love taro especially in sinigang. If I don't have sweet potatoes, I use taro in curry too. Dried taro leaves are awesome cooked in coconut cream/milk. Add dried salty fish or chopped fried pork belly in it as well as some bird's eye chili and you're golden.
Hi Mark! I really enjoy watching your videos. Here in the Philippines, we cook the entire taro plant with coconut milk. Just peel the stem and dry it out in the sun for about half or whole day before cooking so that it will not get mushy.
For arrowhead, we generally would thinly slice it and deep fry them into chips.
Reading all these comments is interesting. I always only associated taro with the Pacific islands. I never knew it grew in so many places.
watching from south Brazil. 🇧🇷👊
Growing up in South Africa our Zulu farmers would spoil us with hot cooked taro. The name there is amadumbe. Fabulous memories
The leaves are edible as well. In Hawaii we place Fish, Pork & Taro or Sweet Potato in the large leaves, wrap in Banana Leaves and steam. Its called LAU-LAU. Really good.
That's what I love about gardening, you can experiment so much🥰.
Not only is Mark a great gardiner, he is also a wonderful violinist, beautiful Mark, beautiful.
Didn't know that!
Lol... Thanks Mark! 🙂👍
TH-cam needs to add a laugh button 😂
@@wretchedrue7859 YES! A measly thumbs up just doesn't convey the hilarity!
I grow tarrow and arrow head in my swale in front my house. It completely takes over and provides good coverage for the small animals to make a home with. I have tons of lizards and frogs that sing all night long. Great plants but I don't eat them their just for landscape.
Great stuff! 👍 🙂
it's a good backup if you ever need a quick side dish! x)
Not so sure. The swale they grow in has sewage discharge going to it. They grow well but I don't know if they would be safe for consumption with the media they grow in. The plants are mainly for helping with the natural breakdown of the sewage and they also make nice landscaping.
@@supertech104 oh, that piece of context makes a difference...
@@supertech104 people have used human waste for fertilizer for generations; they use it in Asia today, which is okay as long as you let it break down naturally or heat it to temps high enough to kill any pathogens. They're trying it in Africa now and nobody's dying~
I grew taro in containers. 1 per container. Similar growing material but not flooded. Instead I put the pots in a larger non draining container and kept that full letting the water wick up which I believe allowed for better oxygen with adequate moisture. It turned out pretty well. Whenever a sucker got to about 3 inches, I removed it and repotted it in an another identical set up. In a few months time, my overall crop quintupled. This of course was due to the climate here in Hawai’i and the serendipity of the correct variety for this type of growth. I still don’t know what variety it was. Hawai’i has over 200 known traditional varieties itself.
I love it when you do these little experiments. Keep up the great videos!
Me, too.
Yes! He amazes me with his experimental projects! So inspiring ✨️
I didn't know taro was a bog plant. I LOVE taro everything
Yes, I don't think it's necessarily a "bog" plant as it is mostly cultivated in normal fertile soil (particularly commercially) but I saw Taro growing in water during a farm stay in Vietnam back in 2016 so ever since I wanted to give it a go. Cheers 👍
I didn't either. I didn't know you could eat them either. Maybe we have something different that looks like them. I'll have to check on that, my husband should know. His Mom taught him a lot about this sort of thing.
@@sharonc1858 there are also apps that can sometimes tell you what plants are. You download the app, point your phone camera at it and… it tells you what the plant is. Although sometimes it doesn’t work or it gets it wrong. I use SEEK, but there are many out there.
@@sharonc1858 some can be eaten some cant. Best way to know, is to plant taro from the grocery store
@@Selfsufficientme you might want to try water lotus. They make an edible root and beautiful flowers, then edible seeds
I have planted arrowroot and taro in containers much smaller than your but had an better yield . My personal suggestion is plant them on ground and water occasionally,it doesn’t have to be muddy . Much love from India 😊
Here’s a big fat Taro & Arrow thumbs up Mark, you bloody champion 👍
Lol... Thanks mate 👍😁
Gardening is all about successes AND failures Mark (and we all know you’re not afraid to show your less successful experiments, it’s one of the reasons we all watch you ) , I’m sure you’ll find a way to get better crops of this nature in the future. I have complete faith in you , great video as always 👍🇬🇧🇦🇺
We cook taro leaves as well.
In a pot cut taro leaves finely fry off gently with onion and add coconut cream to cover and simmer for at least a hour to avoid an itchy throat
Second, on top of tinfoil use the taro leaves like wrapping paper and enclose onions, a thick coconut cream and corned meat. Wrap tightly to avoid spillage and bake at 180 for an hour and a half.
Both are delicious. Your welcome 🙂
Sounds fantastic! Thanks for sharing your recipes and methods for cooking Taro. Cheers 👍 🙂
Yes, cooked properly it's better than spinach!
To add to what @Nanny Prep already said, in the Philippines, one of my favorite dishes was taro leaves, taro root, onion, garlic, cooked in coconut milk. For protein you can add any fish, chicken, etc. My favorite is with dried fish. It rehydrates from the coconut milk, delicious served over rice.
Lol, sounds like Fijian dish 😉
@@Selfsufficientme just a concern for those who may be sensitive to calcium oxalate--it is water soluble from the plant, but that just puts it into the water/liquid portion***it does not stop being calcium oxalate because it was cooked😥get a kidney stone--then you'll know
**the liquid must be tossed to removed the calcium oxalate from the final product
Haha had a good laugh at the taro hand grenade moment. Great content as always. Didn’t even know you could do something like this. Thanks!
Thanks Daniel! Luckily, it didn't explode... 😁
Hey Mark glad to see you're not getting bogged down with planting Tarrow and Arrowhead. Great video thumbs up.
A big thumbs up for the music added. Love your videos!
a BIG THANK YOU for all these positive vibes 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Thank you! 👍 🙂
I love taro. You cook it in coconut milk and add some palm sugar and a pandan leaf. We even cook the soft stems and eat them as vegetables.
I really appreciate your positivity and creativity. I've had many disappointments this year with my garden. But I'm going to try and adopt your attitude more and keep pushing forward
It's been a weird year, true enough!
I csn relate. I had a bumper crop of tomatoes and cukes but everything else just sucked. I live in north central Ohio and we can get all 4 seasons in a week.
I have some very happy and fat critters running around. Lol. I don’t mind sharing. Did anyone know foxes eat blackberries? Or squirrels love strawberries? I told them they’re fine until society collapses and I get hungry for meat. Till then we have a peace treaty.
@@erroneous6947 I feed my swamp rabbits for the same reason. I put a low fence around what little garden I had left so I might have *something* to harvest, but they got all the squash and peas/beans. When SHTF, they can go in the pot, leaving a few to roam for later. As long as they don't bother the chickens, I'm cool with it.
Yeah, foxes aren't known as omnivores, but they are like dogs/wolves in that they are more omnivorous than you might expect. It's still fun to see them eating berries, though.
Squirrels are a problem in some areas and Brunswick Stew is a well known way (in Georgia/South Carolina) to keep them in line.
I'm sure you can keep your peace treaty going even when you start culling, as long as you don't get overenthusiastic and wipe out your local population.
I'm using a lot of the enthusiasm for learning, trying, doing I get here along with the "Just try it" attitude from David The Good and seeing what happens. I figure that the worst case is I get something to eat, learn a lot about my garden and what I might want to try next, and learn more about what I really want to grow.
Looking forward to see the next harvest of Taro
Aloha Mark! Next taro harvest, when you cut the stem off, cut off a little of the corm with the stem. Leaving about a half an inch of corm on the stem and then replant like that. Also, when you harvest, hand clean the roots off if you can. You keep more corm on, more to eat! 😁 🤙🏾
I was gifted black taro by a friend after losing at least half my garden in the Lismore floods.
Chucked it in a shaded, raised bed cos I didn't know too much about it and was sort of treating it like monstera and it is still going really well (probably with the amount of rain we've had).
Now I know I can divide it and grow it almost anywhere.
Taro does look at lot like monstera! Also a lot cheaper to grow, i have grown several plants from store-bought taro :)
nice experiments ! more ! MORE !!!
You should definitely try growing true yams if you haven't already. Dioscorea alata should love your climate.
Next time, add some watercress in your taro bed. You can put watercress in your salad, nice peppery like the rockets. Not bad taro harvest for a small bed. Yes, plant in the garden beds too. It will taste a bit different taro grown on dry land and mud. It's not the stem, Mark, it needs a basal plate. on it. We usually grow taro that way. Plant some taro around your duck pond or areas that flood in your tree area. Good to see ya, matey :)
Thanks for all that info Mary on growing Taro and also great idea about watercress! 👍🙂
Another great video ,its all about the learning not the total harvest although a big harvest never hurts either.👍
I've yet to eat any of my elephant ear, I usually just leave it in the ground, sometimes it rots, sometimes it comes back. I've had 6+ patches before, and had years where only a single patch came back. This year I separated them all and even dug it all up before the freeze or heavy cold rains. Elephant ear(tarot) is one hell of tough plant, practically a weed with how durable it is in my experience.
I grew sweet potatoes for the first time this year. We love the leaves better than lettuce in the heat. Will definitely grow more next year!
I will try Taro & see how it does. Never had much luck with potatoes.
Thank you for being here and sharing your experience with us.
Cassava is good up there too Mark,
Taro is SOOO nice boiled with coconut cream, and the stem's and leaves can also be eaten , BUT MUST BE COOKED PROPERLY , as it has a strong acidic (could be like arsenic) substance in the green parts of the plant , so needs to be cooked out . once it is it is very nourishing flavor ,green vegetable .
Thanks for the extra tips on cooking! Yes, I'm yet to try cassava - I must grow some... cheers 👍 🙂
@@Selfsufficientme cassava is the best
CaOxalate. Unless perhaps it is in contaminated soil, there shouldn't be arsenic.
These plants are both top of mind here in the far northern USA. We can treat taro/elephant ears/colocasia escualenta as a summer decorative plant, you dig them after a frost takes the leaves and store the tubers - really similar to dahlias. My tubers last year roughly doubled total volume just our short growning season.
The locally indigenous 'arrowroot' is harvested around now in the autumn, just before the freeze. The plant that grows here is also called wapato - sagittaria latifolia is most common specific species. It gets a little bigger than what you harvested, and is various shades from white to purple!
Sagittaria latifolia is the variety I have in my pond! It hasn't done particularly well, I think the spot my pond is in is perhaps a little too shady
Cassava is a staple right throughout the Pacific , it is also called Tapioca !
You can grow from cuttings , just poke them into a mound , as the usa will says , they are the best.
I like the creamy yellow one , but the white one is also nice .
I have cassava..
I thought that I had watched all your videos until you mentioned that duck one from a year ago, I was shocked. We can't have that now can we. I'll be doing a thorough check after this to make sure I don't miss any
The cinematic shots at 3:37 could've been out of a movie... Cheers Mark looks like the Aussie garden is going well
I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. looking forward to watching it.
Your show is never disappointing. Thank you. I'm always learning something
We have taro growing all over the place in Florida and I never knew you could eat it. Its actually invasive. I pull it out of the ditch every summer. We call them elephant ears. Some get massive and others are small. Huh! Learned something new today Thanks Mark
Can't grow rarrow but that is my favorite piece of music. Brought tears to my eyes.
Taro leaves. Coconut milk. Seasoned. Boiled to a porriage. Add some citrus juice. Yum. Guam dish
Thanks for showing that experimenting is a part of gardening!!! 👍🏿
Thank you Karen! 🙂👍
For growing the taro, you might want to treat it like a bi-annual crop. The ones that grew on my parents property were like yours the first year. The second they became monstrous. If you have the room might be worth a two year crop rotation.
I remember being fed those white& purple things. Didn't know they were taro
It’s really nice to see what you do with what you grow! Everyone has had a small harvest of something. Mine usually goes in a stir fry.
We does plant it in a drain where it does get rain water in the back and we does harvest the leaves and cook it
Hey Mark! Just wanted to pop in the comments to mention how much I appreciate your content!!
If you want a taro variety that produces a large singlar tuber you can certainly find them because the plant is highly veritable in size; growth habit and even taste. I have a variety that tastes like vegetable soup(celery) and a variety that tastes like sweet potatoe.
Boiled taro and scrambled eggs is my favorite breakfast
Taro leaves are yum cooked with lamb , onion , tomato & coconut milk in like a little parcel
Taro loves to be a bit crowded so you could easily stick a ton of or even all of the shoots back in the original bed. I also recommend using taro as an edible ornamental since it’s at least in my opinion it’s quite an attractive landscaping plant. I recommend a variety called ‘Illustris’ which has beautiful multicolored leaves but is also almost as productive as regular edible taro.
Thanks for the hint! I love eating pretty plants. It makes it lovely to be out in the garden. I'll go looking for some starts!
I’ve grown taro a lot growing up and I was always taught they need about two Shakas of space between each other.
I remember when you planted those. It's cool to see how they did!
Taro n arrowhead? Now I have to research what they are😄 thx
Finally ... been a long time waiting for your post plus still waiting for your renovation reveal.
I'll post a reno update on my second channel soon but progress has been slow... 👍🙂
Really like the new music in this vid! Very calming
I LOVE taro! Cool plant to grow.
PS love the music choice. Instrumental version of the flower Duet from Lakme. ☺️
💡I like the way you are experimenting with the Taro by attempting different propagation methods as well as having it in the "full sun" and believe that your next crop of Taro will do much better.
Thanks Richard! 👍🙂
Thanks for sharing your knowledge Mark, I have learnt so much from your content. Thank you for the tips, experiments and "a ton" of great examples. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thanks for your support Miguel! All the best 👍 🙂
I usually dislike music played in videos, but yours doesn’t overwhelm your talking and is pleasing.
Theres a natural boggy wet kinda area next to our house & I always discard cat poops from the garden into the bog, what I've noticed is that the taros that gets poop on them grows really massive 😂😂. I'm 160cm & they get as tall as me
I've seen Taro grown in containers that have been placed in a water source and have done very well. An old milk bottle or nursery container would work just fine. Maybe ill give it a go myself.
The wild taro that just grow up in my yards can grow as big as your thigh. I prefer the ones your size, but some of my neighbors like them so I just let them take those whenever they want (they're just growing there on the ground by the banana trees, I never planted them, they're already there along with the bananas when I bought the land). I just sometimes harvest the leaves as snacks for my fish (I have two cement fish ponds in my backyard).
Btw I love the way the elegant classical music playing as you're prying the dirtiest looking muds, LoL. Ironically enjoyable to watch. 🤣👍
That bog garden would be great for water chestnuts 🌰 always great seeing your experiments
Love that you have a go to see what happens and then share your project and outcomes. It's invaluable to gardeners and the reason we need to keep supporting you on Patreon. Learning from you saves me months and years of treading the same path to make the same mistakes myself and I also benefit from your knowledge, wins and best practice. Like Birdies beds - what a back and knee saver they have been. Worth every cent. Thanks big fella!
Hello Eileen
Water chestnuts love the bog method
Love your choice of taro harvesting background music Mark.
What a nice start to my day, great video as always, thank you ❤️
I mean, that's the important bit isn't it? You try something and learn stuff from it. That's why I love gardening :)
You could use the bog for growing duck weed, it is a great extra food for chickens.
I love cooking the taro leaves too
Hi brother!! Thank you for everything!!! They are helping our family to grow our own food GRACIAS!!! We love you mark with self sufficient me !!
Thank you Mark, I am always getting an education about what y'all grow down under! THANKS!!!
Time to grow marshmallow! Such exciting results!
I would make it run a little bit. Like make it a overflow with some pump to recicle that. It will also help with the water quality on top. Doesn't have to be much. Slow overflow will help. I think it will improve the harvest quality.
You are a delight to watch! Love your enthusiasm with gardening. I had no clue taro and arrowhead were bog plants!! I love taro chips. Happy gardening 👨🌾
When I was eating gluten free and corn free arrow root was super important as a substitute to corn starch that I wasn't allergic to, it's in some Asian dishes as a powder and changes the flavor if you don't have it. It was really exciting to see Chinese Taro, I live in Hawaii but I'm only starting to dig deeper into varieties and uses, I really enjoy eating taro I like the taste and find it really agrees with my system and makes me feel energized. By the way I love the way you grow and cook in the same video, it's really special to close the loop with things grown and cooked in the same garden/farm. Thank you for your videos they are my favorite garden videos. 🍲
I never knew Arrowhead was edible......it grows in my pond.....and up into the ground along the spring feeding the pond.....perhaps I'll dig some up and give them a try sometime.
G'day Chris, I'm not sure if all arrowhead varieties are edible so make sure you check before cooking them up 👍🙂
I love taro. In Africa they call it cocoyam and grow it in drier soil, but it's the same plant. It's one of the hardest plants to mess up I've had.
I appreciate the use of the flower duet as your background music. Lovely melody to soothe the tension of "what'll it be like?!"
I live in the high desert. For plants that like a lot of moisture, I put them in a wicking bed so they are easier to keep moist.
Love to follow you in your experiments and learn about so many different ways to get gardens started. I'm also in a warm climate (Fla) and am always learning what to grow in this sandy soil or how to better the soil in the raised beds. Thank you for all your tips/advices, HIGHLY appreciated.
👍👍Awesome stuff mate, I really appreciate you sharing your journey 👍
Thank you Phil, cheers mate 👍 🙂
You're a great teacher Mark 👍 I keep learning from your videos
Thank you Tamara! I appreciate you taking the time to give me such positive feedback 🙂👍
I love the ASMR when you chopped the taro and arrow heads with light relaxing classical music background!
Nice to see you Mark! Hope your house referb has gone well. My hens found that they loved my strawberry leaves, had to fence them off. I might just try and grow something like that here next spring. I would need to fence it also to keep the deer & chicken out. Great idea, Thank you for posting.
I have these in my yard and never knew that these have eatable root. ❤
In Hawaii we call taro, kalo and everything from the leaves down to the corm can be used to consume but just be sure to cook it properly or else it will give you a itchy throat . Much love from Oahu, Hawaii
Growing up in American Samoa I really took taro for granted. To me, a BBQ doesn't seem complete without it. In Samoa we'd make a sort of spinach dip with the taro leaves and coconut milk, called palusami. Palusami is delicious with taro, but I think it's best with some steaming hot breadfruit roasted in a fire pit.
Love the videos and the great insight and information you share here. Looking forward to the next one. Cheers!
Taro leaves are awesome. Search for "Laing" (La-ing) recipe.
4:44
The perks of having hens... 🤣 They're so silly they always made me laugh.
i think the ducks and chickens were interested in the water plants called "azolla" its like little water lily fast growing, u can feed ducks,chickens,cows,pigs,horse, etc. its very nutritious!!
I saw duckweed (Lemma sp.), not Azolla. It is probably less productive because it doesn't fix nitrogen, but Azolla fixes nitrogen using a cyanobacterium (Anabaena?), which scares me because most blue-green algae produce rather nasty toxins like the non-protein amino acid, BMAA, which causes Parkinsonism (most famously in Guam, where the culprits were cycads and the wildlife that ate them). Duckweed is edible, though I would cook it to avoid nasty aquatic hitchhikers.
@@Erewhon2024 maybe ducks like it too. coz ducks likes to eat snails,slugs and other tiny insects right?
So beautiful
Love the sound of your quail
Love all your videos. Can't wait for the next one!
My Japanese wife dug and put some Taro Imo in the rice field we bought recently. We did nothing To my surprise yield was great. I think muddy water did the job. Next year I`m planting more. Your video about blueberries is great. Thanks, Mike.
I was thinking..oooooh..Rice! I planted a little box, just to see who it does here. 5 inches of soil and water. It has grown like crazy. Now, to be fair, I got no rice because, the Sand Hill Cranes loved my little box bog. 😆It even got slammed over from hurricane Ian..And it's now right back up. So, I know I can grow rice here, in Florida. I just need a bigger area, and a way to keep the 5 foot tall lake chickens out of it. 😆😂Thanks, Mark.
5 foot tall lake chickens. Lol. Funny.
When I was little I've noticed taro growing in canals (erm, those narrow open drainage at the side of streets) and creeks. I got trust issues with it at the time because of that lol but I absolutely love taro especially in sinigang. If I don't have sweet potatoes, I use taro in curry too. Dried taro leaves are awesome cooked in coconut cream/milk. Add dried salty fish or chopped fried pork belly in it as well as some bird's eye chili and you're golden.
Arrowhead root thinly sliced and fried into chips/crisps lightly salted is delicious.
Yum! 👍🙂