Plant · P-272

Tannia

Xanthosoma sagittifolium

Tannia is grown mainly for its leaves rather than its corm here - the growing season is not quite long enough to reliably finish a full-size corm, but the young leaves and petioles, cooked like spinach, come in reliably from midsummer on. Every part contains calcium oxalate crystals that scratch raw, so nothing is eaten uncooked; cooking or drying destroys the irritant completely. Its leaves also make an unusually good livestock feed for a root crop - high protein, low fiber, and comparable to good pasture for cattle, sheep and goats. It tolerates shade well enough to work as an understory planting beneath a fruit tree, though it has to be lifted and stored over winter like a dahlia, since it is not frost-hardy.