Top Ten Best Belowground Edible Plants

Some plants stay alive during cold and dry seasons by storing starches, proteins, and other nutrients underground in roots, rhizomes, or tubers. Many food crops are provided by these belowground storage organs, including the world’s fourth most important food source, the potato, which is a tuber.

Root vegetables include carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, mangel-wurzel, black salsify, and radishes. Below the ground, they grow as a swollen root in a variety of shapes. Leaves grow directly from the aboveground shoulder of this taproot, and there is little or no aboveground stem, only leaves.

By contrast with root vegetables, rhizomes and tubers grow from leafy plants with aboveground stems. Potato plants are leafy, branched green plants with small white flowers. Plants that grow rhizomes and tubers also grow the normal kind of root. Rhizomes often form unusual shapes, such as the knobby underground part of ginger, and are actually roots merged together, usually growing vertically downward in the soil. The word rhizome derives from the ancient Greek for “mass of roots.”

Tubers include potatoes, sweet potatoes, oca, and yams. A tuber is a short, thick, round stem or root that grows underground, usually as an offshoot from the main stem of the plant. Tubers contain all the necessary parts to produce a new plant. If you leave a potato in a kitchen drawer for too long, for example, it will sprout.

One other belowground food deserves a mention: peanuts. Peanuts are not actually nuts but the seeds of a legume, a plant in the pea family. Peanut flowers grow in clusters on the stems, just above the ground. After they are fertilized, a short stalk at the base of the ovary forms, pushing the seed into the soil, where it develops into a mature peanut pod.

Key to Plate
1: Potato
Solanum tuberosum
Plant height: up to 3 feet/1 meter

2: Winged yam
Dioscorea alata
Tuber diameter: around 2-1/2 inches/6 centimeters
Tuber cut horizontally
Winged yams were domesticated in Southeast Asia and the Pacific but are now eaten in many tropical countries.

3: Beet
Beta vulgaris
Plant height: up to 61/2 feet/2 meters in flower
Root diameter: around 4 inches/10 centimeters
Root cut horizontally

4: Oca
Oxalis tuberosa
Tuber length: up to 3 inches/8 centimeters
Tuber
Oca is a crop plant that originated in the Andes, in South America.

5: Radish
Raphanus sativus
Root length: 3/4 inch–3 feet/2 centimeters–1 meter

The radish is an edible root vegetable that was domesticated in Europe in pre-Roman times.

6: Carrot
Daucus carota
Root length: 51/2–10 inches/14–25 centimeters

7: Black Salsify
Scorzonera hispanica
Root length: 8 inches–3 feet/20 centimeters–1 meter

8: Turnip
Brassica rapa
Root diameter: 2–8 inches/5–20 centimeters
Root

9: Peanut
Arachis hypogaea
Stem height: up to 28 inches/ 70 centimeters
Pod length: 1-1/8 –2-3/4 inches/3–7 centimeters

10: Ginger
Zingiber officinale
Shoot height: up to 4 feet/1.2 meters The rhizome of ginger comes from Asia.