made with speech to text, so there might be hilarious or annoying typos.
Well I can't continue writing the actual identification guide until my computer decides to stop being annoying, so anyways, here's some tips for growing Apios americana, aka hopniss / American ground nuts, cinnamon vine, and many more names.
Finding a plant to start growing... In the wild.
----Collecting Tubers:
Tubers can be dug at any point of year, including when the plant is dormant. Identify where the vines come out of the plant, and start digging a few feet away from that. You don't want to harm the plant that you have found, you just want to clone it.
So you are looking for small tubers, little itty bitty babies. They will all be able to grow their own new plants, but won't harm this one unduly. Spending on how old the plant is in general, even small tubers might be pretty big.
Store these tubers in a bag with some water and dirt until you can plant them at home.
----Collecting seeds:
You can look for ripe seeds, depending on every single individual plant, from the end of September through October into November and December. Every single plant flowers on a different schedule, so you will have to get to know the plants in your area, or get lucky.
Fresh seeds should be kind of rounded to square shapes, because while they are in the pod they are pressed to each other's sides, which gives them two flat sides. They should be brown, in the pod they are in should be tan, to dark brown with spots.
The seed pods will naturally twist open after long enough to drop their seeds to the ground, so if you are only finding open seed pods, look on the ground below them. Sometimes the seeds will get stuck in these pods, and you can take those too.
Do not take every single seed you find, unless you plan on personally replanting 90% of those in suitable wild places before you even return home.
The only time you should ever be harvesting the whole entire plant (all seeds and tubers) is if you know that it is in danger of immediate permanent destruction, like It has been announced that they're going to put a parking lot there or something.
Dried seeds will be slightly darker in color and wrinkly. This is normal and fine.
It is best to collect seeds in some kind of bag that will let air flow through, like an organza bag or something similar.
----Option 1: Planting them in the ground:
Hopniss likes water. It loves water. You do not want these to be super dried out for extended periods of time, or they will be unhappy.
If you want to plant them in the ground, next time it rains, look at your yard, and look at where puddles form, and which way the water generally runs. You should be planting hotness in the ground at the lowest point in your yard, so that it will have access to the most water possible.
If your property has a creek running through it, or a pond, plant it at the edge of that, and you will have a very happy plant.
----Option 2: planting in containers
The same concept applies to growing it in containers. You want to keep as much water as possible in the container at all times.
You can do this one of two ways: with a plant pot that has holes in the bottom, keep it in a tray or a bowl of water.
If you can't or don't want to do that, shove a bunch of leaves and pine needles into the bottom of the container first to help slow the rate at which water leaves through the drainage holes.
The second option is finding a container that does not have holes in the bottom already, and adding small holes towards the top or middle, depending on how deep the container is.
A 5 gallon bucket from Walmart or pretty much any hardware store at all works fantastic. They're usually food grade, which means it is safe to eat the plants that you grow in them, and buying one of these is usually cheaper than buying a plant pot of the exact same dimensions.
It is better to have more water than less, so if you are using a 5 gallon bucket, drill your holes above the halfway point. Make small holes so your dirt doesn't come flooding out. Pencil size is usually good enough.
For bonus points, you can put the holes all on one side, and put other plant pots nearby so that they will catch the water that comes out of this.
You could probably even get away with a plant pot with no drainage holes at all, as long as you had a way to stop it from overflowing all the dirt onto the grass If it gets too full.
Whether you are growing it in the ground or in containers, it will want something to climb, which can range from a trellis, bamboo poles, to a bush, to a tree, to sunflowers, certain species of milkweed, corn, or literally anything like that.
Hopniss can grow from full sun to full shade, but will flower and fruit best with more sunlight.
Planting tubers and seeds is pretty much the same, Plant them as deep as they are wide, and mulch well with a lightweight mulch, like leaves or wood shavings from the pet section. Water them in well. When the seedlings and or tuber shoots have emerged, you can add heavier mulches if you want.
The tubers, flowers, immature seed pods, and dried seeds are all edible.
If you see what look like pill splotches forming on the leaves of your plant, do not be dismayed, celebrate! It is likely a moth so rare it doesn't even have a common name yet, Anarsioses aberrans! Like milkweed is the host plant for monarchs, legumes are the host plant for A. Aberrans, which includes hopniss. They are a leaf miner moth, which means that instead of the caterpillar sitting on the surface of the leaf to eat them like monarchs do, the itty itty tiny little caterpillars live inside a single leaf and eat the middle part of the leaf.
You do not need to spray them or do anything to hurt them, you should be happy, because I have only found two plants out of almost 10 that have hosted this species. They will not harm the plant, and if you're lucky, you might even get to see one of the itty, itty bitty tiny adult moths.
Anyways, there's that. You can look at the map on Inaturalist.org to see if any wild plants have been found near you, but even if they haven't been observed on there yet it doesn't mean there aren't any, it probably just means no one has uploaded them.
As for finding seeds or tubers online, good luck. You can sometimes find them on eBay, Etsy, and specific seed selling websites. Not very often though so, good luck.
Edit: I found one really nice seller for live plants that uses Home Depot as a go between: https://www.homedepot.com/p/national-PLANT-NETWORK-1-gal-Apios-Americana-Ground-Nut-Perennial-Plant-Ruddy-Red-Flowers-HD1760/329650701
I forgot to mention how the plants are eating, and Tumblr keeps eating my replies on my own post, so:
The tubers are peeled and boiled like potatoes, then you can mash them, and eat them like mashed potatoes, or, lots of people enjoy frying them into chips. I have seen one person mention mashing them then dehydrating them to make a kind of flour.
We haven't eaten any of the tubers yet ourselves because they're all very young still, and at this point we're more concerned with growing them than eating them yet. Especially cuz the city keeps chopping all of the wild plants we've found before we can collect seeds.
The immature seed pods can be eaten raw or used like any other green bean, And apparently it tastes like really good snap peas.
Haven't found any specific recipes for the dried beans, probably because most people are saving them for growing or selling because they're so hard to find.
If you find any other good sellers for live plants tubers or seeds, please feel free to add them on!
