CHINESE yam, otherwise known as the cinnamon vine because of its perfumed flowers, is a vegetable for the patient gardener.

Its edible, starchy tuber takes at least two years to reach a harvestable size, and the harvest itself can be a bit of a performance — which we’ll come to later.

But I think it’s worth the effort. Not only is it a very tasty and satisfying vegetable, used in much the same ways as potatoes, it’s also an attractive perennial garden plant, with glossy, heart-shaped leaves from late spring until autumn, which climbs very readily, especially on wire fences.

There’s one more test of your patience, I’m afraid: you may need to dig around a bit online to track down a supplier of bulbils or young plants.

Those nurseries and eBay sellers who do offer Chinese yam tend to do so at this time of year, having dug up and divided their existing plants in the autumn.

At the time of writing this, both plants and (less expensively) bulbils are available mail order from the Agroforestry Trust (www.agroforestry.co.uk), so that might be a good place to begin.

The search isn’t made any easier by confusion over the name. Both its common names are sometimes applied to other plants; the botanical name by which it is usually listed is Dioscorea batatas, but there seems to be some ongoing taxonomical sparring over this. Good luck.

Here in Somerset, I’ve always found Chinese yam to be completely hardy, though some reports suggest it may be marginal in the colder areas of Britain.

In any case, the new shoots that appear in late spring are tender, so I start new plants by planting them in pots and keeping them somewhere frost-free until about May or even June.

This vegetable will thrive in open ground, in rich soil in full sun — but the problem with that is that its tubers, which can reach a yard long, tend to grow straight down, so digging them up intact is more or less impossible. The solution is to plant your Chinese yam into large containers. Something the size of a half-barrel is ideal. And if you’ve been looking for a use for an old dustbin, you’ve just found one.

Keep the surface of the soil or compost weeded until the plants reappear each spring, and water in dry summer weather. Other than that, you’ve nothing to do until the foliage dies back.

Harvest takes place in winter, and is an unsubtle matter of tipping the whole pot out to get at the tuber.

Propagation is easy, so you won’t need to faff about on the internet in future years. Bits of tuber left behind, deliberately or accidentally, will often regrow.

Cuttings can be taken from spring shoots; whole small tubers can be replanted, as can the topmost third of a mature tuber.

Finally, pea-sized aerial tubers, produced abundantly in the leaf axils, can be sown as if they were seeds.