New Article on the History of Chayote (Mirlitons) In North America

Here is the first article to be published on the history of Chayote (known as Mirlitons in The South) in North America.  You can grow them many places in the U.S. if you pick the right variety.  The article explains why varietal choice is important. We also provide methods for encouraging early flowering and frost protection of the faq page of our nonprofit web site, www.mirliton.org. The link to the article is:
https://www.mirliton.org/the-history-of-chayote-mirliton-in-north-america/

This is my first year attempting to grow chayote. It was recommemded by a member here.  Another case of "i never knew thst existed " which Permies forum has been great for.

I bought 3 at a local store. I ate one. It seems very versatile. I planted one in a pot to hopefully transplant. I put another in a paper bag to plant when it "sprouts". I hope one of these two succeeds.

wayne fajkus wrote:This is my first year attempting to grow chayote. It was recommemded by a member here.  Another case of "i never knew thst existed " which Permies forum has been great for.

I bought 3 at a local store. I ate one. It seems very versatile. I planted one in a pot to hopefully transplant. I put another in a paper bag to plant when it "sprouts". I hope one of these two succeeds.

If you bought them at a grocery store the probably won't grow in Texas.  Look at out garden blog for a Texas grower in Houston at www.mirliton.0rg

Chayote is grown widely in Hawai’i, it is even found growing wild. It must have been brought by the Portuguese, because the Hawai’i name is pipinola, which when I looked it up I found out is a translation of the Portuguese pepiniero, their name for chayote.
It is mostly used in soups here because it takes on whatever flavors are in the soup. Also the vine tendrils are stir fried. I’m just learning about the tubers and I think they have a lot of possibilities, most people don’t know about them. I bet the wild ones get huge tubers when they’ve been growing for years.

Wayne (and others new to mirliton), there is some good info in a thread from last year. https://permies.com/t/102154/Mirliton-squash-vines-Louisiana

People who may be interested in small animal fodder: I can personally vouch for the vines and foliage being delectable for my rabbits and I've also seen goats and cows chomp them happily. I keep two growing in my garden (here they are chayote) specifically for this purpose.

I would love to grow chayote. I first experienced it when i lived in Nepal for 8 months. The plant was very versatile and could produce new fruits every year. The fruits would start to sprout on their own and it seemed awesome because you could eat the root and the fruit. I also believe you could eat the new leaves.

Does anyone have a source for some seed in Canada?

"I would love to grow chayote. I first experienced it when i lived in Nepal for 8 months. The plant was very versatile and could produce new fruits every year. The fruits would start to sprout on their own and it seemed awesome because you could eat the root and the fruit. I also believe you could eat the new leaves.

Does anyone have a source for some seed in Canada?

Yes, people eat the leafs and tendrils as greens in many countries.  And the subterranean root (chayotera) which begins to grow after one years is cooked like a potato. It cannot be grown that far north.
https://www.mirliton.org/photo/various-mirlitons-and-tubers-chayotera-metairie-uptown-new-orleans-and-mirliton-tuber-chayote/

quote context: http://pllqt.it/3WGJA5

I have been wanting to try out Chayote for several years now. I decided that this is the year to experiment with it. So I searched far and wide for a source… The only place that I found any for sale at all, would only do pick-up sales. In a too far away state. No shipping. Big fail.

Then I happened on it at, of all places, Walmart. Who knew? I got all kinds of excited! Yay, perennial food! So I went about researching how to get the things to sprout. Happiness screeched to a halt. These things may have trouble sprouting if they were refrigerated. These were found in the refrigerated section. Bummer. I set them aside, in my refrigerator. A week passes, I need more room in the refrigerator, so I pulled them out and put them up on top. Fast forward 2 weeks…




I pulled them down to try out a recipe and look! Those white thingies are roots! Yehaw!!!



So I went back to the pages that I had bookmarked and read through them again. Then I thew them in a pot of soil.

Two good pages. They have some overlap in information, but if you scour the comments in the second link, there is additional info in there.

https://www.mirliton.org/

https://harvesttotable.com/how_to_grow_chayote/

All chayote that you purchase at grocery stores or markets are imported and grown mostly in high altitude regions.  All imported chayote will sprout, grow roots and send up a vine. Almost none will fruit in North America.  Worse yet, by planting produce as a garden vegetable, you risk introducing deadly plant diseases  such as mosaic virus.  Imported produce is not tested for plant disease since the USDA assumes that it will be consumed, not planted. I can only suggest that you wait until a seed provider of our heirloom mirliton (chayote) variety can be mailed to you, which will be soon.   Please read our article "The History of Chayote (mirliton) in North America" on the problems of imported chayote.

hi lance, i’m curious about some specifics. you say in the first post in this thread that chayote can be grown in many places in the u.s. with the right variety. i looked (admittedly, scanned) through your article, and didn’t see much of the specific information i was hoping for: what are those places (i.e. hardiness of those ‘right’ varieties - the article mentions louisiana, florida, texas, and california, but are those the only appropriate places?), and what are the varieties? am i right to assume that the louisiana heirlooms mentioned in the article would not be appropriate somewhere 1 or 2 hardiness zones colder? do the louisiana varieties go dormant for winter?

I am not questioning the wisdom of Lance's advice about growing from supermarket seed, in climates where the New Orleans local variety is better-suited.  It mirrors what I always try to do anyway: grow anything from seed stock that's as well-adapted to your local bioregion as you can find.  Growers in the coastal tropics and sub-tropics have been working for hundreds of years to adapt these high-altitude tropical plants; if your climate is very similar to theirs, why not grow what works for them?

That said, the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good.  If you live, as I do, in an interior climate, probably too hot (sometimes) and windy (most times) and direct-sunny (often) and cold (every winter, briefly) for the New Orleans varieties or for the imported tropical-mountain ones, the entire enterprise is likely to be marginal, and locally-adapted cultivars impossible to find.  Our Joseph Lofthouse is a pioneer of the best solution to that problem.  Landrace everything applies here, it seems to me.  

In Zone 7b Central Oklahoma I would not expect this vegetable to flourish, but if I did want to try (and I might) my strategy would be to source a few viable fruits from as many different places as possible.  Nobody can advise on which of the existing cultivars is most likely to bear up under these marginal conditions, and in any case probably none of them are ideally adapted.  But by maximizing my genetic sources, I maximize the chance of getting a few successful plants which can hybridize each other and allow me to select better and better genetics for my conditions over time.  

Even that long road has to start with a first step.  And if we cannot readily source grown-in-USA Chayotes in parts of the country where they don't already exist (as has been my experience) then planting a succession of supermarket chayotes seems to me to be a perfectly-reasonable first step.  I can get Walmart chayotes right now for $1.20 apiece.  Buying some in the next month, getting them sprouted indoors, and keeping them until ready to plant outside in late May when the 80-degree temps arrive strikes me as a perfectly reasonable experiment.  Meanwhile, pursuing more complicated sourcing of other cultivars can proceed.  

As for the Chayote mosaic virus, I don't see it as an issue.  Lance's excellent article says:

Even if the chayotes imported from Costa Rica grew, there was a real danger they would introduce devastating new diseases such as chayote mosaic virus (ChMV), for which there was no preventative or cure.  Discovered in Costa Rica in 2011, the mosaic virus has recently ravaged chayote growing in Taiwan, Brazil, India, and other countries. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the USDA debated the potential threat that imported plants posed to North American crops; it temporarily halted plant imports and established disease-screening and pest-screening protocols. Chayote mosaic virus had never been detected in North America, but the disease is transmitted in the chayote through both cuttings and the fruit itself (it’s a seed-transmissible disease).

The takeaway for me is that it's never appeared in North America as a problem.  Nor is my bioregion likely to ever be an important growing area, so my experiments can't mess things up for anybody but myself.  And if I don't succeed in growing Chayote in my garden, what care I if there's a chayote-specific pathogen?  It won't last long!  Plus, anyway, as a philosophical matter I don't tiptoe around plant diseases, hoping against hope that they won't find me.  I do my best to use robust organic gardening methods with as much genetic diversity in my garden as I can manage, and my solution to plant disease when it manifests itself as a problem is to select against it or import more robust genetics in search of resistance.  The cited devastation in other countries is not granular enough information for me to worry about; does it mainly affect commercial monocrops, perhaps?  I don't have enough information to worry about it, so I won't.  Finding a variety that will grow here at all is a much bigger and more interesting problem to me.

Dan Boone wrote:That said, the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good.

Exactly. I have looked for the Chayotes on Lance's site. Perhaps I have not timed my looking to correspond with availability. I did unexpectedly find this fruit.

Below we have the Chayote in a pot. We are expecting rain for it tonight.



Chayote with the cat excluder applied.



And the cat to be excluded.

That Chayote Mosaica is not a problem in North America is because no one is planting grocery store produce as chayote seed.  Please help protect our North American landraces (in Louisiana and California) by only planting varieties historically grown here. We have to accept the fact that we have no right to grow any plant in the world.  

In general, even if you plant imported chayote, you won't get any fruit.

Lance, I assume you don’t include Hawaii when you warn about not planting  imported fruits. I see chayote (called pipinola here) producing from sea level to 4000’ elevation (maybe higher, but I don’t know of anyone growing higher). Lots of rain doesn’t faze it, but dryness will impede it. I’m at 2400’ and have adequate rain, thus my pipinola is lush. I’m  currently growing 5 different varieties but am phasing 2 out due to prickliness of the rind.  I started my first plant from am imported fruit I bought in the supermarket, not knowing any better. Since then i acquired the other varieties locally.

Pipinola is so common here that it is often used just for livestock feed. It’s considered poor man’s food, thus it has a stigma attached to it. Regardless, we eat it regularly. It makes good pickles too. And one heck of a good mock apple pie. Apples are super expensive here, so pipinola (along with frozen apple concentrate) makes a darn good cheap apple pie.

I haven’t tallied up my harvest numbers for last year yet, but I’m sure I harvested well over 1000 pipinola fruits. Needless to say, I produce a lot of the stuff. And it doesn’t take all that many plants to produce that large harvest. Amazing plant!

That's a good practice to use local varieties which have been developed in Hawaii for more than two centuries.  That prevents introducing new diseases.  Chayote was popular with Europeans living in hot climates because it was an acceptable substitute for apples.   On our International Recipe Page https://www.mirliton.org/international-mirliton-chayote-recipes/ there is a recipe for Jamaican cho-cho pie that uses lime, allspice, and cloves that produces a wonderful flavor apart from traditional apple pie. Hawaii would be excellent place to grow chayote since the climate is cool enough to avoid many plant diseases that beset us in Louisiana. Please keep me posted on your experiments with varieties and I always appreciate photos of your local crop. I'm at lance@mirliton.org

Lance Hill wrote:That Chayote Mosaica is not a problem in North America is because no one is planting grocery store produce as chayote seed.  Please help protect our North American landraces (in Louisiana and California) by only planting varieties historically grown here. We have to accept the fact that we have no right to grow any plant in the world.  

In general, even if you plant imported chayote, you won't get any fruit.

You do know that Mexico IS North America right? a photo above showed supermarket chayotes with a "Product of Mexico" sticker on it. And Here in Mexico, chayotes grow at all elevations. There are many different varieties, the tastiest are spiny in my humble opinion.