Sweet Potatoes, my Favorite YUM!

I love sweet potatoes in all their delicious incarnations: baked, boiled, roasted wedges, pie, curry, bread, gnocchi...you name it, I have  tried it.  Last year my heart was a bit broken over the sweet potato harvest. Sweet potato vines truly sprawl all over and take up a lot of room. And they will do this even if voles have eaten half of the sweet potatoes from underneath. This is exactly what happened last year. Despite my lining the base of each garden bed with fine garden cloth, the voles found a way in. This year that bed is the tomato bed and each tomato is planted in its own individual cage, after trying to figure out how the voles got in the bed and stop them!

Because of the problem with sweet potatoes sprawling everywhere, I am trying something new this year, that is planting them in garden bags. These bags are about 25 gallons each and are filled with a combination of potting mix, coir, coffee chaff, and compost. I know people have grown white potatoes in these kinds of bags before, as well as other garden crops. I did some reading and found that it is possible to grow sweet potatoes in them, though I have no idea what the yield would be like. Stay tuned for an update when we get closer to October!

...and the winner is....

This season I tried two methods of starting sweet potato slips, suspending whole sweet potatoes in water versus planting a sweet potato in a flat on a heat mat. The winner is...the flat method! As you can see above, this is the current state of growth using that method, versus one tiny slip from the ones in water (no pix of those because I planted them in pots to get them to do something!) So, in future seasons I will use this method or some of the other "in soil" methods suggests by readers.
Also, see how nice your lettuce can be in you properly space the plants? (Dope slap to self). For years, I broadcast seed in a bed and got lots of lovely baby greens, but wanted to get some larger heads, so I transplanted stragglers into rows and had great success!
Happy gardening!

Sweet Potato Update 2010

I am experimenting with two methods to produce sweet potato slips this year:
1. The traditional suspend in water method (see photo above) and
2. I cut a sweet potato in half, lengthwise, and buried it in soil less mix, cut side down, and watered it.
Do I have a winner? Well one of the water grown potatoes rotted and was tossed and neither of the other two have sprouted. The sweet potato buried in soil sent up it's first sprout yesterday! (in less than a week)
It may be that this is because #2 is planted in a seed flat that I easily placed on a heat mat (sweets love their heat), but I don't think I can really do that with the ones suspended in water. Next year, I will start all of them using method #2.
Happy gardening!

Ladies and gentlemen, start your sweets!

How to start sweet potatoes

Last year I had good success with starting and growing my own sweet potatoes (which I served for Thanksgiving dinner!). I started them in the traditional way, show in the photo above. Take a sweet potato, put four toothpicks in it (perpendicular to the potato), suspend the rounder end in a jar of water, and put in a sunny window. When the sprouts (called slips) are about 6 inches long, you can either cut them from the plant and directly plant them into the garden, 2 weeks after last frost (they need really warm soil, as the are a tropical vine) or you can pot them up and let the roots form.

I am also going to try another method this year- split a sweet potato in half lengthwise and bury it, cut side down, under some light soil in a plant flat, under light on a heat mat. This way the roots will form well and the slips should be well rooted. The time to do this, in order to plant at the end of April/beginning of May, is NOW! You can use sweet potatoes from the grocery, though might want to order or buy certified disease-free potatoes or even the slips themselves from a nursery.

Visit my garden pod cast by clicking on the Pod Bean button on the top left of this page and...as usual, happy gardening!

Sweet (Qualified) Success

Sweet (qualified) success

I wrote a while back about my vole problem, how the voles were eating my sweet potatoes- I described digging them up, to find beautiful potatoes, completely eaten from underneath! This year I planted my garnet sweet potato slips in a trench that I had first lined with hardware cloth (fencing) to keep the voles out. I dug down a foot or more, lined the trench (sides too) with hardware cloth and back filled it, mounding the amended soil over the top to make a raised bed. The slips grew well and…voila! When I harvested them the weekend before Thanksgiving, I had intact sweet potatoes. It was not an unqualified success, because I didn’t get a lot of sweet potatoes, and they varied in size from pretty small to large, but this was my first experiment and I planted only in a small bed. I will definitely use this method again next year, in a larger area and be better about feeding the plants to increase harvest. We will eat the tubers pictured above at our Thanksgiving feast!

Happy gardening!