Epic Chayote Vine

This little apartment garden in our neighborhood is one of my favorite examples of an edible landscape. Its main, perhaps only, feature is an enormous chayote (Sechium edule) vine that snakes across the (north!) facade of the building.

If you’re interested in growing chayote, here’s an old Mother Earth News article.

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5 Comments

  1. Thanks for posting this Erik. My local Vallarta has these in stock. I think I’ll grab a couple and sprout them for my Spring garden. I grew Chayote years ago. They are very easy to grow and are disease and pest free. You just need lots of room!!!

  2. I would kill for a plate of those greens sauteed with some garlic and butter. Yum. One Vietnamese place in Seattle has it on the menu for $9.95.

  3. What?? I can eat the greens?? Sadly up here in the bay area of California, my chayote vine didn’t get enough sun and so never fruited. I imagine the 40ish nighttime temps that we’ve been having lately will soon kill it off. But now I know that I can eat the leaves…muahahahaa!

  4. My aunt had a chayote vine that gave out 15 chayotes a day easily!!, she doesn’t have it any more because the plant’s four years were up (and the plant had overgrown her yard). Up from what you might ask, well a chayote plant can live longer but after four years the plant’s tuber is at its prime, if it is a good plant the tuber can weight about 34 pounds and let me tell you they are a priced delicacy and very expensive at the farmer markets, besides if you just sow one chayote in a pot (crack up) half way down, a month before you dug the tubers up (and thus killing the plant), it’ll be big enough to replace the one you rooted and start giving out chayotes about four months later, that is if all the conditions are ideal.
    Though I have to say that vine on that house looks perhaps too awesome to tuber it.
    BTW the whole plant is edible seed, old leaves as tea, tender leaves in salads; shoots, these can be eaten in all sorts of ways, even just as a snack when walking by the plant, the good thing is that if you snap a tip/shoot the stump will give out two more; flowers in salads or stuffed and of course the fruits and the tuber which actually unlike the fruit is a little starchy, very delicious.

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