Plant · P-360

Konjac

Amorphophallus konjac

Konjac's underground corm is the reason to grow it: dried and milled into flour, it yields glucomannan, a soluble fiber that swells to roughly two hundred times its weight in water and is used as a household thickener, a noodle base, and a sellable crop. It takes two to three seasons to build a corm worth digging, and the raw corm is dangerously toxic until it is thoroughly cooked or fully dried. The single large leaf goes dormant by early September and does not return until early summer. Unlike many of its yam-like relatives, konjac tolerates real winter cold as long as its bed drains well, since wet cold rots the corm faster than the cold itself kills it.