Yam leaves, easy to grow, great for sinigang

My wife bought some yam leaves to make sinigang. Sinigang is a Filipino fish soup she makes using salmon heads or whatever is available. It is strongly flavored with tamarind. Healthy and inexpensive this dish has a very different taste from the usual soups offered in America.

The yam leaves come on stems. After cutting off all the leaves she up the stems in a jar of water. They almost instantly sprouted more leaves and roots. Their vigor surprised me. We planted them in our vegetable garden and they established themselves very quickly, all but the one dug up by a fox. Cut the ends of the plants off for more leaves and the plant will respond very well by producing many more branches.

The shoots in the photo below were pruned from 6 week old plants, leaves completely stripped for use in another batch of sinigang, and placed in water for about a week. We haven't dug up any plants yet and I'm wondering how big the yams are. I'll update this post with results when we dig one up.