Alien parasitic tuber.

[maxjohnson]

This is the craziest (or scariest) thing I've ever seen. I went to this nursery more than a year ago and the owner gave me a ginger plant. It has small tubers hanging from it from a root string, which was peculiar to me. I tasted a bit and it tasted bad. He is from Uganda so I thought it's something different.

I put it in my garden, now I went to dig up my ginger and turmeric. First off, I realized it was a galangal, not ginger. There are stringed tubers attaching itself to both the galangal and my turmeric rhizomes and spreading itself toward other turmeric plants 2-3 feet away. It seems to be acting as a parasite and leeching the nutrients off the rhizomes of other plants and proliferating itself. It do not have any above ground growth, surviving solely by attaching itself to the turmeric/ginger underground.

I got a bit alarmed and dig up the soil in that area and removed them as much as I can.

I broke the tuber in half, it's white starchy inside with not much of a smell. Tried to look it up, the closest thing I find is the 'apios' genus, and similar looking to hopniss, but I'm sure it isn't. I doubt it is edible, but fortunately I didn't got sick from it when I first tasted it.

Please don't ask me what was on my mind, I had other plants from the nursery so I thought this one was okay.

Notice in the photos the hairy tubers are attached by a string onto the turmeric rhizome. The big tumeric lump was from a 6ft tall plant, it was supposed to be a much bigger rhizome, but the parasite tubers seems to be taking nutrients away from it.