Once again, a story at Mongabay inspires me to start a
thread.
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/04/farmers-turn-to-living-yam-sticks-to-grow-their-crop-and-spare-the-forest/?mc_cid=be9b9819df&mc_eid=00b1dee7e7
To me, this seemed intuitive -- of
course you can have yams climbing small
trees instead of cut sticks. Both of the "living stick" species mentioned in this story are familiar to me in the Dominican Republic: pigeon
pea is the one known locally as
guandule and is a pulse crop in itself, often grown in its own fields; and bitter damsel is the one known locally as
Juan Primero.
Guandules are legumes, so of course they fix nitrogen; but I had not known that
Juan Primero also fixes nitrogen (although it is not a legume).
So, who is working with similar ideas with yams?
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