My daughter has been gardening for a neighbor and she dug this up from her garden. The lady said she thought it was a "California Oak Heart", whatever that is. At any rate it was about 3 feet down and had one large root coming out of the big end. The other damage is from the shovel digging it up. Any ideas? We live in coastal California amid the California live oak trees.

Dee, do you have the Wild Cucumber / Marah / Cucomonga manroot growing there? That looks like the root / tuber of one....

Wow, that's an interesting thought. I just collected some seeds from wild cucumber last month! They are huge seeds and I decided not to offer them for sale as they are considered invasive everywhere except the southwest. Thanks for thinking of it, if the bugger re-emerges I'll think twice about keeping it. The wild cucumber here just goes everywhere; up the trees, over the bushes, along the ground. It's easy enough to remove if it crawls into my garden but I pretty much let it do it's thing in the forest, it flowers and I'm sure the pollen is important to the wildlife.

The biggest manroot ever. They are called "Manroots" for a reason. Find something that resembles a weird cucumber vine with prickly friuts. Marah fabaceus is listed as occuring in Arroyo Grande.

I don't think I have ever seen a root that big. I tried to grow one in a hanging basket one time. It soon became apparent that a hanging basket was insufficient to the task.

I looked at some pics and I think this has got to be a "Manroot". There wasn't anything alive on it when she found it. The things larger than a football. We decided to bury it but maybe I'll dig it up and display it for the neighbors to guess what it is.

Dee, this one was dug on the edge of our property 6 weeks ago...I'm fighting the Wild Cucumber constantly...it's about 2' in length.....

Even my friend who's lived around here forever didn't know what it was, she took one in to a garden club meeting to hopefully find out and no one there knew either. Apparently everyone fights them, but no one has dug one up to see.....LOL.....Also known as the vine that ate San Pedro....

I'm amazed. I've lived where I'm at for 20 years and I just recently found out what the wild cucumber vine was. We usually see them high in the trees and only even notice them when they bloom. A couple of them have been growing closer to the house and that was what got our attention. The seed pods are strange and the seeds are huge for such a delicate looking vine. I like the garden club idea, I may have to offer this to my neighbor that goes to our local gardenclub.

I had one cucumber vine that kept popping up on my Fallbrook property beneath a pine tree. I kept fighting it, it kept popping up again, but I did manage to keep it from expanding from that spot. Had no idea at the time that there might be a root / tuber of that size that I should have dug out. The new owner of the property has most likely done nothing about it and I'm pretty sure they may be a healthy population of Wild Cucumber there by now 2 1/2 years later.