If you ever feel like giving up on your garden, read this jicama story. It’s a tale of persistence.

In April 2023, I planted maybe 15 jicama seeds in one bed at Gardenerd HQ. The plan was to grow it over our long warm and hot seasons, and harvest 6-9 months later. Only 2 seed emerged, but I nurtured those seedlings all season.

By the end of the season one had died off, but the other sat there, with a vine only a few inches long. I excavated the soil and saw that the tuber was only the size of a ping-pong ball. Disappointing, but I covered it up and kept watering it.

After a few more months, I forgot about it, and went on to plant crops of lettuces, squashes, brassicas, and lima beans in the seasons that followed. Sometimes the vine would die back and reemerge, but I never pulled it.

CUT TO: November 2025

More than 2 years later, while loosening the soil (and digging out invasive roots) for fall planting, I discovered this:

There it was, just biding its time. It was sizable and multi-lobed but I didn’t care. It was ready to harvest.

It looked a little bit like the Millennium Falcon, but once we washed it off…

It was the real deal. But would it be fibrous? Would it taste good? Only one way to find out.

I cut the smaller lobes off, peeled and sliced them. Then grabbed a lime for the taste test.

The color was perfect. The flavor sublime! Call me biased, because it took 2 + years to grow this thing, but it was the most satisfying jicama I’ve ever had in my life. Sweet, crunchy, and not at all fibrous.

The moral of this story is that nature (if not humans) are persistent. Don’t give up on gardening just because something doesn’t work the first time. This experience has motivated me to plant jicama again and again until I get it right. Maybe it will inspire you to try something that didn’t work the first time in your own garden. Next time, it just might work!

Do you have a story of persistence? Share it in the comments below.