To tell you the truth, I haven't had much success with saving the root or tuber from season to season - of course you're looking to harvest them for food and I'm simply using them as an ornamental plant! I just hack off the top growth as it dies from frost, then dig up the tuber. Sometimes I don't get to it in time and it's rotted in the ground. I've grown some in pots and just thrown them in my unheated garage overwinter and had them come back the following year, then other times, they just rot. I do notice that at the end of the season when I dig them sometimes they've made small "baby" tubers to the side of the main ones. I live in New England where we get cold, snowy winters so maybe we just don't have a long enough growing season for many new tubers to develop off the main plant. You're in a far warmer zone than I am! I know the roots are edible, obviously since I'm buying mine in the produce dept. of the grocery store! But I have no idea about the stalks or leaves. If you grow batata from the grocery store, let us know what the leaves are like! Those plants are expensive to buy so if I can get those for pennies from the grocery store compared to dollars for a plant at the garden center, that would be a score! Sorry I couldn't help more, but as I said, we grow it here as an annual, ornamental plant for the most part. Lisa

I love The After Dinner Gardening book - so fun! Our kids always dig seeds out of their fruit and dry them in the kitchen window. We have more stuff coming up now. We actually have a lime tree and a lemon tree that are in the ground outside and made it through winter - both from seed! And a tiny baby loquat that's still only about 6" high. I think another lemon or maybe an orange is growing in one of my potted plants thanks to the 4-year-old. And I know for a fact she stuffed apple seeds in another indoor plant. Last year I found a bizarre looking round red ribbed squash at a South American grocery store. I just planted those seeds around the yard, and I'm really hoping some of them will come up. After Halloween last fall, the kids and I garbage picked the Arboretum for fancy pumpkins from their patch. We got a few strange ones - white, blue, chocolate brown... Those seeds have all sprouted out back and the enormous vines are everywhere. Fun stuff - I love it.

Indeed I have requested the J.L. Hudson catalog, along with a myriad of others. Actually, it was recommended by someone else that I should get it. I have been hovering around Central Florida Farms and A&B Tropicals, too. Some of these places are just too expensive for my pocketbook, though. I just get lucky sometimes by browsing around the local nurseries in OKC. Every now and then they come up with something unusual in the greenhouse that can be grown outside as well. I have some friends in the horticultural world who own commercially run nurseries that I check in and out with occasionally, too, and I can always got to the Botanical Gardens sale in April-May. Sometimes they have things that no one else has any idea what they are looking at. That doesn't mean they won't buy it just for the sake of buying it, though, so I still have to be willing to just kind of slide thru and in front of someone and say, "oh, just look at that......wouldn't you know I've been trying to find that for THE longest time!" (in my best throaty Valley Girl voice) and snatch it up quick! One look at the little old woman, and they back off. They have some of my old friend, Kathlyn Calvert's begonias growing there in the greenhouse. She grew such wonderful plants. I did a piece on her in The Begonian many years ago. Another friend, now deceased, did the photos. She took the Nationals in Dallas, the first year they were held outside of California ever in begonia history. Speaking of California restrictions, I really think they'd like to recede from the states altogether; quite a different breed there. Never been there; never WANT to go there. Have never wanted to go West. Always want to go East. Love Boston, the Northeast, the Eastern seaboard, and the gulf. Nothin' but young whippersnappers and upstarts West of here. I'd love to life on the gulf coast, but I would have to build underground, with enough room to move my plants indoors during a hurricane, and enough storage for food & water to last a substantial length of time during blackouts and water interruption. Susan

Rizzir -- to give you someone else's experiences on growing some of this stuff outside, and how long it takes to get some size on it the following year: I'm another inner-city Memphis dweller. I've planted a lot of lantana over the years, and while some of it has come back for me, some of it has not. I think it depends a lot on what variety it is -- some are more hardy than others. Of course, it also depends on the micro-climates in your yard. 'New Gold' has come back well, and come up early, for me where I have it planted on a south-facing slope. Other than that, while I guess most of my varieties have eventually come back from the roots, a lot of them take so long to come up that I find it's more rewarding to plant new 4" plants. Otherwise i spend most of the spring looking at bare beds with tiny little lantana sprouts slowly pushing up.... it really does seem to depend on variety, though. I have Hedychium coronarium in several spots, and in one warm spot in front of a south-facing wall, it came up quite early (as would be expected). In another cooler spot, though, it didn't come up until a couple weeks ago (early July). My Colocasias take their time about coming up. I have Black Magic and Illustris, and it was June this year before they came up at all. Illustris sat there for a couple weeks, then took off and started growing pretty well, but Black Magic stayed about 4" tall for literally a month. Finally in the second week of July it started to get some size on it, and it's growing in really nicely by now, but until then you wouldn't even notice it if you weren't looking for it. I know 2 other gardeners in the area who had exactly the same experience this year. I can understand why some people buy new plants in April every year at the local nurseries and plant sales -- they just don't want to wait that long for last year's plants to come up. A local friend a little north of Memphis tried leaving an Alocasia macrorrhiza outside this past winter. It started coming up at the very end of May/first of June, actually a week before any of her Colocasias. Her Colocasia Illustris came up in June, followed by her Black Magic -- but only 1 out of her 4 Black Magic plants made it (her yard prob gets 5-10 degrees cooler than mine). I luckily have access to some greenhouse space, so I take most of my stuff inside (alpinia, porterweed, shrimp plants, odontonema, jasmines, xanthosoma, acalypha, tabernaemontana, bananas, palms, etc.). Even though a lot of it may eventually come up from the roots, it just takes so long in some cases... This fall I'm planning to leave a few more test plants out, just to see for myself how they do. So, if you happen to have the micro-climate that'll support this stuff, lucky you! South-facing walls seem to work well... Otherwise, it can be a long, bare spring waiting for the ground to warm up enough for the semi-tropicals to start growing again. Of course, if you plan it right and mix in the right perennials and shrubs, you might not notice! :) (wow, didn't mean to make this quite so long!)