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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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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.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Partial Sun · Shade
- USDA zone
- USDA 8–10
- Soil
- Loam
- Moisture
- Well-Drained · Moist
Vertical layer
Herbaceous- Soil pH
- 5.5–7
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 2–4 ft
- Mature spread
- 2–4 ft
- Plant spacing
- 18 in
- Root type
- Rhizome
- Spread pattern
- None
Keep exploring
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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