Hello my people, friends and everyone, how has it been with each and everyone of us, good to know we are still waxing stronger homesteading 😂. It's a known fact that in homesteading community, We feed ourselves, our families and the nations at large from time to time through our harvests and farm produce. kudos to all of us homesteaders.... hehehe 🤣, we are the best.
It's quite obvious that nobody survives in life without quality food, good a thing we are the suppliers of all kinds of food or a special kind of food...yeah. Ok.... I know some of us speciise on vegetables, fruit crops, root crops, cereals, nuts and as many as we can lay our hands on. It's a hard work but we're still enjoying it, more often at harvest times. If your crops yielded perfectly fine.
Today i will love to showcase the journey of yam tubers as we all know it's a root crop feeding hundreds and thousands of people around the world wherever this crop is known and appreciated.
Yam is very popular and a staple food this side of the world... Nigeria to be precised, mostly the Eastern part of Nigeria... The Igbos.
This tribe of mine loves yam tubers, they have special festivals, ceremonies and festivities for and about yam only apart from other crops. In this part of Nigeria, they know and call yam.. "The king of crops". The ceremony about yam is observed yearly village by village in Igbo land. It's s time to jubilate about yam and how fruitful they have yielded to the farmers. Thanking God for everything about the harvest. Anyway, that is for the part two of this article.
Yams are planted yearly, between the months of March and April. The method is simply by cutting
your yam tubers to small sizes.
Mould your ridges. Some ridges are moulded in form of pyramids, some like ordinary ridges, some are planted in some empty cement sacks as i did and showed us here earlier. Planting of yam seed
As the rains starts to drop, yam tubers will start to spring up.
Don't forget that the distances between the planting of each yam tuber is one meter to each other. And the depth into the mould is 10 centimeters. Do not push it deeper than this so that the yam tubers will not assume being buried to die.
Within sometimes, the yams will spring out so also are all the weeds springing up trying to submerge the yam crops. All you need do at this time is to weed the grasses out from hindering the yam plant from yielding plantiful as you have wished them do. Mostly two times before the harvest time.
Remember, after weeding just apply your fertilizer creating a bumper harvest. It's noticeable that yams respond fruitfully when organic fertilizers like animal manures are applied mixed with the loamy soil where they're planted on. As the planted yam tubers grow, the farmer needs to add more sand on any of them that is exposed to the sun to avoid drying or dying.
New yams are harvested mostly from July for consumption. You know, majored yams to be harvested when the foliage and the leaves turn yellow or dries up. These does not include particular tubers intended to be used for next season planting.
These sets are harvested like from October to like December better still January next year for a perfect and suitable seedlings for planting during the planting season.
Economic hardship in my country Nigeria has become terribly unstable and unpredictable that this year since July 2024, new yams were harvested hmmmm... You can't believe it that a tuber of yam costs from the ranges of $2--$4 US dollars per a tuber of yam in the market.
This is a never heared or seen cost of living / food scarcity situation/economic hardship and inflation. The country is suffering terribly. Many can't even afford it and are unable to eat yams since the harvest of this year began.
Well, we are a people of hope, one day changes will be effected about the very high cost of living we are facing.
Thank you for coming around to my blog.
All pictures are mine. Let's keep being the best we can be.