"One Small Serve" - homegrown food on a very small scale

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"One Small Serve" - homegrown food on a very small scale

Includes a series of free extra tips + free email support

Scroll to the bottom to comment

Given that we are very inefficient chicken keepers and get a lot more out of our flock than just chicken meat, and that we're just doing this exercise to see where it takes us, let's just halve that. Let's say $47.00 per roast chicken.

Then let's halve it again because our chickens, although they vary in size a lot, can be up to twice the size of the supermarket one. So now we're at $23.50.

(Our chickens are also twice as tough as supermarket ones -- we could put that down as a benefit measured in extra jaw muscles. True story -- the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art says that as our food has become more tender and we have had to work less and less at chewing it, our airways have shrunk and our faces have changed, and not towards the rugged outdoor look.)

Regardless of its chewing value, in dollar terms our chicken is still two and a half  times the price of the supermarket variety. 

The real value of a chicken 

I just tried to put a dollar value on a roast chicken from a back yard flock, but there's no way to factor in the intangible value of the multitude of other things that a home grown roast chicken is connected to.

Just to list some of the benefits our own family has experienced from raising our own chickens (obviously a limited view point but it'll do for demonstration purposes):

• Our deep litter chicken coop provides finished compost by the wheelbarrow load. And when we let them out to forage in the afternoons, the flock provides free farmyard/garden sanitation (manure spreading and insect control).
• When our children were small, caring for broody hens and clutches of eggs gave them meaningful biology lessons. Mama hens and fluffy baby chicks kept them occupied for hours at a time -- and not the way a screen does. And the still little forms that didn't make it out of the nest taught them that life comes hand in hand with death, and that sometimes outcomes are beyond our control. 
• Our chicken flock is also a source of meaning, purpose, and dignity for us. It enables us to put food on the table that we're proud of, that we've been intimately involved with, that we've grappled with the ethics of.
• Our chicken flock helps us feed ourselves in an "additive" way--with things like increased soil health and quality of life as by-products--instead of in an "extractive," industrial way.
• Our chicken raising experiences have helped us grow in our sense of responsibility and stewardship toward the land and lives that link directly to what's on the ends of our forks. 

One way to sum it up would be to say that a homegrown roast chicken on our table represents a journey from squeamish, and clueless (aka, easily led and largely dependent on others) towards capable, confident, and able to contribute -- even if its just by feeding ourselves a little more and relying a little less on unethical and unsustainable industrial agriculture.

Related reading 

Here's a page that links to all my other chicken-related posts, about keeping chickens (and their environment) healthy and happy and also about chicken behavior and what chickens have to do with calling in a kinder, more connected world.

"Regenerative Food Systems vs Industrial Agriculture: Why We Need More Hands in the Soil"

"One Small Serve" - home grown food on a small enough scale

Includes a series of free extra tips + free email support

This is an expanded version of an article that was originally published in the  May 2025 edition of What's On. 

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is a tropical, starchy root crop. For backyard food growers, it's an easy, low maintenance producer of nutritious homegrown carbohydrates.

Once a taro patch is up and running it's a self-renewing, sustainable food source. And it can handle going underwater -- so when there's a big weather event that cuts the supply chain and the supermarkets run out of rice and pasta, your taro patch will come to the rescue.

If you live in the tropics or semi-tropics, are interested in food self-sufficiency and perhaps already enjoying a sense of achievement about growing some of your own food but still relying on supermarket staples to bulk out your meals -- you need to get acquainted with taro.

Taro - a staple food throughout the tropics and subtropics

Taro is recognized as one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world. It has a fascinating history including its part in the story of the Polynesian Way-Finders -- these amazing seafarers crossed vast oceans in canoes long before modern navigation instruments, and they brought taro with them on their voyages across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii.

Taro ("kalo" in Hawaiian) became a staple food in Hawaii and has huge significance in Hawaiian culture.

Besides Hawaii, taro feeds millions of people in all tropical and subtropical regions, including Africa, China, Japan, New Guinea, all Pacific islands, the Caribbean islands, parts of Central and South America, and some regions in the United States³.

How to tell taro apart from other plants with "elephant ear" shaped leaves

All taro varieties have large, heart-shaped leaves on long stems coming from a thick, starchy base called the corm (the corm is the part you eat). The leaves, leaf stems, and corms vary in colour and size between the different varieties, but the general shape of the plant and the leaf is always similar.

In particular, taro leaves have a closed in "V" at the top of the heart shape. 

Have a good look at the taro leaves below...  

...and then compare them with the leaves in the next picture, which is a picture of "cocoyam" (Xanthosoma sagittifolium).

What did you see? 

Look at the top of the leaf. See how the "V" at the top is closed in on the taro leaves, and  open on the cocoyam leaves? 

To the best of my knowledge all taros (Colocasia esculenta) have this closed in "V" at the top of the leaf.

Also to the best of my knowledge, plants whose leaves have the open "V" include some that are edible and some that are poisonous. The plant pictured above -- "cocoyam" (Xanthosoma sagittifolium) is one of the edible ones.

Having said all that, the safest advice I can give you about identifying taro if you're still unsure is to do what I did:

Get your taro (and any other plant you're going to eat) from someone who is eating it regularly. That's the one way you can know for sure that the plant you have is edible.

Taro's many "common" names and its one Scientific name

Plants have "common names" - often a great many different common names for the same plant, and scientific names - one scientific name for each plant.

Common names arise from local dialects and uses. If you're unfamiliar with the dialect, the uses, or the plant itself, common names can be misleading. 

Scientific names are hard to learn, say, and remember, but they're more reliable than common names because (generally speaking) one plant can't have more than one scientific name. 

Everywhere I look on the internet, I see confusion about the names of plants with "elephant ear" shaped leaves. Maybe one day I'll have a go at untangling it all and writing a post to try to clear up some of the confusion, but for this post I just want to make it clear that I'm talking here about "taro," also often called "dasheen" or "eddoe" along with dozens of other common names, too numerous to list here. 

Lots of common names but only one scientific name: Colocasia esculenta. 

(More on "dasheen" and "eddoe" in the next section.)

Two types of taro: "dasheen" types and "eddoe" types 

Taro varieties can be loosely divided into two main types -- 

"Dasheen" types, or "wet-land taro," which are large to very large. They need very moist soil and are even happy to be periodically inundated. Dasheen types of taro produce a large central corm that you eat, and lots of baby offshoots for new taro plants.

"Eddoe" types are smaller than dasheens and can tolerate drier conditions. They produce small side cormels that you can eat all year round.

(If you really want to nerd out on taro types and names, you might be interested to know that "eddoe," Colocasia antiquorum, and "taro," Colocasia esculenta, were originally described as two separate species. But many later botanists consider them all to be members of a single, very variable species, the correct name for which is Colocasia esculenta⁴.

Within these two types, dasheen and eddoe, there are literally hundreds of varieties of taro to choose from in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the world. Ask around in your local food growing community and be guided by local knowledge to find the ones that suit your area and your needs.

Growing conditions for taro

All taros like moist soil, and the large dasheen types are happy to be water-logged. If you have a wet area that you're not sure what to do with, plant some taro there.

If you don't already have a wet area and you want to make one, choose a spot and dig down at least 20 cm deep, line your hollow with lots of newspaper to slow the drainage, and fill/refill with compost or good quality soil. Once the taro is established, it and the soil microorganisms will start to change the soil so that it retains moisture more easily. 

As well as consistent moisture, all taros love compost or well rotted manure and some extra potassium. To provide potassium, you could use ash from your fireplace, banana peels and leaves as mulch, or a potassium rich fertilizer.

Taro grows in partial shade to full sun. The larger varieties will shade out other plants, so it does need space.

In frost free areas you can plant taro year round. It may slow down or go dormant in the cooler months, and it will explode in warm, wet conditions.

In the image above you see "dasheen" type taro, or "wetland" taro, probably growing in Hawaii where taro is an important food crop.

Planting and growing taro

One of my favorite things about taro is its perennial, self-renewing nature. In the act of harvesting some to eat, you can also propagate more.

Taro connects your garden to your kitchen -- the more taro you take to the kitchen, the more you have in the garden. 

Planting, harvesting, and replanting dasheen taros

The thick, starchy, hard corm at the base of a large dasheen-type taro plant has lots of little "eyes," each of which will produce a new taro plant. 

You can twist the baby plants off when they're about 15 cm tall, and plant them in a new location. Or you can let them grow right where they are and as they become more crowded they'll push the large, original corm up out of the ground so it's easier to harvest for eating. 

Lift the largest corm out and settle the others back down into the hole it leaves. Twist off and plant any little baby taros that have formed from the eyes of the mother corm -- even if they're still tiny, most of them will grow. 

Planting, harvesting, and replanting eddoe taros

Eddoe-type taro plants also produce small side cormels from the mother plant, but in this case you can eat the side cormels all year round (leave a few if you want your taro patch to grow larger) and leave the mother plant to produce more.

Growing new taro plants from the top of a corm

You can also grow new taro plants of both types by replanting the top of the starchy corm after harvesting the bottom section for eating.

When you replant the top of a taro plant, cut off all the leaves to reduce moisture loss. It'll grow new leaves after it has enough roots to draw water for them.

In the image above, you can see two taro tops that have been cut off the top of a corm, ready for replanting. On the right, you can see a small corm with a little "eye" sprouting into a new baby taro plant.

Spacing your taro planting

When I'm planting a dasheen taro patch I crowd the plants together in a tight clump of 3, then enough space to allow for compost and mulch between the clumps, then 3 more.

Eddo types can be spaced out a bit more, leaving room around each mother plant for lots of cormlets. 

How will I know when to harvest?

It can take up to 7-12 months after planting before your taro patch is producing lots of corms big enough to harvest. From then on, so long as its moist and well fed and you keep replanting as you go, your patch will be perpetually productive in frost free zones. 

Preparing your taro for cooking 

Ok, so you've harvested some taro -- you have in hand a muddy corm, possibly very large if it's a dasheen (the ones in the pic above are very small; I was impatient to try some), with roots sticking out all around the bottom and leaves growing out the top.

Cut off the top, including about 2 inches of corm (like the two on the left in the pic above), and replant it.

These have been scrubbed and allowed to dry. To the bottom left, you can see a top that could be replanted:

Scrub the remainder under running water, removing the roots and debris, then rinse, peel thickly, and keep rinsing as you go. It can be slippery, and may be slightly irritating for some people - so keep rinsing your hands as well as the taro. 

Cleaned, peeled, ready to cook:

Once it's well peeled, cut out any brown bits and it's ready for cooking. The simplest way to begin is to chop into chunks and boil until it's easy to pierce with a fork. Discard the cooking water.

Now you can do anything that tickles your fancy, from eating it as is with butter and salt (yum), to mashing it and using it as a flour replacement in a cake recipe (google "taro cake recipes" for ideas), to freezing it for later use.

You can also bake or steam taro, or slice and fry it to make chips or crisps.

The well known Hawaiian dish, "poi," is made from steamed/boiled, mashed, fermented
taro -- sour but nourishing and said to be very good for invalids, babies, or those with
compromised digestion.

One Small Serve - an eBook

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This article was originally published in the  November 2024 edition of What's On.

In this post I'll share why sweet potatoes are a super crop to grow at home, some ideas for protecting them from bandicoots and rats, and why it's a good idea to eat the leaves as well as the tubers. 

The sweet potato plant (Ipomoea batatas) is a climbing and ground covering vine that forms swollen roots - these are the sweet potatoes themselves. You can also eat the leaves and vine tips -- more on all of this later.

Sweet potatoes can be very easy to grow, once you overcome a few challenges. 

One such challenge is that the tubers can be hard to find if you allow the vines to sprawl out across the ground. Another is that rats (particularly a native rat that burrows up from underneath where we live in North Queensland, Australia), and bandicoots love sweet potatoes as much as people do. 

But please don't give up! Sweet potato plants are really, really worth the effort to grow yourself and this article I'll share some tips that might help.

But first, why are sweet potato plants so worthwhile? The answer in a nutshell is "nutrition plus calories."

Sweet potatoes - nutrition AND calories

Did you know that you can eat the tips and leaves of the sweet potato vine as well as the tubers? 

Sweet potato roots and greens combined give you a calorie and nutrient dense food from one growing space. Usually you get either calories or lots of nutrients, and you have to combine different plants to cover these two bases.

In the image above you can see sweet potato greens on the right (and okinawah spinach on the left).

Nutritional qualities for sweet potato tubers and greens combined

So long as you eat the leaves as well as the tubers, sweet potato plants can yield significant levels of Vitamins A, B, C, and K, as well as Thiamine, Niacin, Zinc, Folic Acid, Calcium, Riboflavin, and Iron.

Sweet potato plants are also mineral rich, providing significant magnesium, copper, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium. The tubers (especially the orange-fleshed varieties) are a good source of beta-carotene for healthy vision, and tryptophan, an essential amino acid that supports healthy sleep.

They also have a low glycemic index rating, meaning they're easy on our blood sugar balance.

The possible outcomes of regularly including sweet potato tubers and greens in your meals include improved artery and heart health, healthier eyesight, reduced inflammation, reduced risk of diabetes, cancer, and neuro-degenerative diseases, stronger bones, and healthier skin.

Cooking tips for sweet potato greens 

Cook sweet potato greens any way you cook any other leafy green. Use the more tender, newer leaves, or add older leaves earlier to whatever you're cooking to give them a bit more time. 

Sweet potato greens taste bitter, so add a dash of vinegar to them and serve them alongside the sweet tuber to encourage your people to eat up and get the health benefits of the bitter taste.

Advantages of growing sweet potatoes in containers

Sweet potato greens and tubers can be produced in containers in a smaller space than you might think, and container growing has a few advantages for the home gardener...

Larger, impossible-to lose-tubers 

Sweet potato vines grow roots where-ever the leaf nodes come in contact with the soil, and some of these roots will swell into tubers. So a sprawling, ground covering vine will produce lots of tubers, but they'll be relatively small and hard to find.

Containing them in tubs and training the vines up a trellis means less tubers, but it also means more sunlight-harvesting leaf surface (up on the trellis) per tuber. So although your tubers will be fewer, they'll impossible to loose track of and they'll also be bigger, sooner.

Rat and bandicoot proofing

By using containers with full bottoms or setting them on concrete or a hard surface, you can foil the native rats that burrow up from beneath⁶. You can also use containers that are too tall for a bandicoot to climb into (see pics below).

Easier to start again in case of soil-borne problems 

Sweet potatoes are relatively pest and disease free but what problems they do have are often soil-borne -- so growing in containers enables you to contain the soil they grow in, and start again more easily if you need to. 

In some areas, common advice is to rotate your sweet potato crop with other crops annually as pest/disease control measure - this is also easier if your sweet potatoes have been contained rather than wondering around all over the place. 

We placed these sweet potato containers (above) on concrete to foil the native rats that burrow up from underneath, and on the edge of the porch where our dog lives, to foil the bandicoots. This worked as far as the rodents go, but our crop of tubers was small and disappointing. 

We decided we need a trellis to keep the vines up off the ground, and bigger containers. Scroll on to see a picture story of our next iteration...

Setting up the containers and trellis

Above -- a 44 gallon drum with the top removed (keep the rim, for structural integrity) and holes drilled in the bottom and around the sides near the bottom. We were going for a balance between good drainage, which is really important for sweet potatoes, and rat proofing. 

(The garden hose is not relevant; please excuse my mess...)

We placed the barrels in a trench for stability and also to try to encourage free movement of moisture, nutrients, and small soil critters between the container and the surrounding soil, while hopefully still having the tops too high for bandicoots. 

We filled the barrels two thirds full with our local soil which is acidic and very free draining, both of which sweet potatoes appreciate. Then we topped them up with the heavily composted garden top soil that we had moved aside when we dug the trench. 

Next will be a thin layer of composted chicken shed litter and a thick layer of mulch on top.

We started with a sturdy trellis like so (might be a bit hard to see against the background). We hope this is big/high enough -- time will tell.

Growing conditions

Sweet potatoes like well-drained, loose soil, slightly acidic.  Potting mix is fine. Loose soil is important for drainage, for your tubers to be able to expand as they develop, and for easy harvesting.

For a crop of big tubers, you'll need plenty of sunlight. If open sunny spaces are limited, arrange for  the vines on the trellis to reach up into the sunlight. For greens only, a shadier spot will be fine; the leaves will be bigger and softer if grown in partial shade.

Sweet potatoes need about 2 to 4 months of warm weather, reasonable sunshine, and consistent moisture to produce decent sized tubers. In tropical areas, you may be able to grow them year round. 

If you're after greens only, you can use a small container. If you also want tubers, you'll need space for 5 to 10 large tubers per plant and lots of sunlight.

Starting off

Sweet potato plants can be started from "slips," which develop from sprouts on a sweet potato tuber. Or, you can take cuttings (runners) from an existing plant and use those. 

Start slips throughout spring and early summer. Cover a sweet potato in soil or just leave it in a undisturbed spot well away from direct sunlight,  and wait for it to sprout. (There are also tutorials available online for starting slips with chunks of sweet potato and in water, if it's of interest; that's a bit fiddly for me.) 

When the sprouts are about 15 cm in length and have little roots of their own, twist or snip each one off, bringing its roots with it. Trim off the leaves on the bottom third or so and plant it carefully up to its arm pits in soil.

If you're taking cuttings from an existing plant, choose runners that are robust and growing strongly (avoid older woody ones or thin new flimsy ones). Cut them into pencil-length cuttings, remove all the leaves, and plant them upright. Submerge the bottom one third to one half of the cutting in the soil. Or you can use longer cuttings, leave a leaf or two on them, and lay them down with only their leaves exposed. They will root at each leaf node. 

The pic above shows a trimmed sweet potato runner ready to plant. Zoom in to see the roots already starting at one of the leaf nodes.

Keep your baby sweet potato plants consistently moist and safe from scorching in direct sunlight until they're big and strong. Depending on how easy it will be to do this, you might want to get them big and strong before putting them out in their final postilions, or plant them direct where they are to grow. 

Harvest

Harvest leaves and tips once the stems are at least 30 cm or so long, a month or two after planting. If you’re using leaves from a crop intended for root harvest, limit harvesting to a couple of  times a month. If you only want greens you can harvest more often.

Harvesting tubers: Search for hard mounds indicating swollen roots just under the soil surface. Either tip the container out or burrow into it with your hands and pull out your treasures. After harvesting, lay your sweet potatoes in the sun for a few hours to dry, so the the skins can start to "cure" -- to harden against injury, mold, etc. Continue curing in a warm dry place for a few more days and then store in a cool, dark, dry place. Do not refrigerate.

Sources 

Nutritional information about sweet potato tuber and greens from"Sweet potato leaves for family nutrition: Overview of research"and "Sweet Potato Nutrition Facts and Health Benefits."

Tips on propagating sweet potatoes from cuttings are from Gardening Australia. 

The original version of this article was published in the September 2024 edition of What's On.