Home Grown Sweet Potatoes

If you love sweet potatoes like we do, try growing some in your garden and you'll love them even more! They are a superfood, full of vitamins and fiber, and delicious. We slice and bake them like fries, or cube them for use in tagines and other stews.

Sweet potatoes are grown from rooted slips that grow from the parent sweet potato. If you have ever found an old sweet potato in your pantry with some long white roots coming from it, those are slips- or the first stage of slips. They are then placed in water to develop roots before planting. Last year, we bought two types: Carolina Rose (a long vining type) and Puerto Rico (a bush type). I waited too long getting the Carolina Rose in, and many slips died. I think I failed to keep the slips moist enough. The Puerto Ricos were purchased later and went in the ground right away. They all lived. I wouldn't exactly call them "nonvining" as the vines were about 4 or 5 feet long. By the end of the season, the vines took over the paths all around the bed. Oh well- it was worth it! We planted late May and harvested mid October. Here is what we learned so far. We are about to put this year's slips in, so I have sweet potatoes on my mind...

1) Plant on the later side.

We are waiting to plant our Vardaman slips this year due to a frost (!) warning for next week (May 15, in zone 6b). This is a very late frost but sweet potatoes are not at all cold hardy. I considered planting and covering them with sheets, but decided not to risk it and keep them in water inside for an extra week. I have heard the slips should be planted right away, and I don't know how long they can stay healthy in water. But I think the risk of putting sweet potatoes out in the cold is higher than keeping them in for an extra week. Next year, to avoid this problem, I plan to grow my own slips so they will be ready early June. Although growing your own sweet potatoes is certainly cheaper than purchasing them (especially organic ones) , it is a relatively expensive plant to grow. I got a good deal on local slips- $10 for 25. But we plant about 50 slips, so it adds up. This will be an experiment so if anyone has advice on growing slips, I'd love to hear from you.

2) Sweet potatoes are not demanding.

Water deeply for the first two weeks, and they will establish quickly. Don't worry too much if the plants look dead when you plant them. They are hardy, as long as it's warm and you keep the bed moist. After several days, you will see new growth and they will be filling out nicely in a few weeks. After that, they don't need much care and can handle periods of dryness. As an example, we had 5 extra slips last year so I stuck them in my front yard in an unused space. This is always risky because I can't easily get water to this spot and don't check on it much; in short, I neglect it. In any case, the sweet potatoes thrived out there and did as well as the ones that got prime space in the kitchen garden and were looked after daily. Sweet potatoes don't need a lot of soil fertility and do better without too much nitrogen, which can cause lush vine growth and small roots (the part we eat). The neglected plants produced at least as well as the ones that got lots of attention and the resulting harvest held up until we ate them in March. Another benefit of growing sweets: they are beautiful up until you take them out of the ground. The vines are so decorative and healthy looking and were the bright spot in our front yard. You can clip a few vines and root them in your containers (just stick them in the soil and water them) and they will look lovely.

Puerto Ricos, about mid July

3) Voles love sweet potatoes.

I have never seen voles until we moved into this house two years ago. They are cute little rodents that live under ground and eat roots, especially our bamboo and sweet potatoes. When I harvested our sweets last fall, I was shocked to see that a good third of them had vole damage. This year, we are going to try an organic vole repellent made from castor oil, but I don't have high hopes. If you have any ideas for dealing with voles, PLEASE share them.

4) Curing sweet potatoes is necessary for storage.

I have skipped curing in past years and they were fine for up to three months. However, they aren't very sweet until a month or two after harvest. Last year, we grew enough to store. We got about 80 sweet potatoes from 30 plants. If you check the web, you will find complicated curing procedures that are difficult for home growers to replicate (some variation of keeping the roots in 90% humidity and 85 degrees F for 10 days). Not so easy in the fall. Maybe we got lucky, but here is what we did and our sweets were still firm and delicious until we finished the last one in late March.

Wait until right around the first frost to harvest, preferably on a sunny day and when the soil is relatively dry. Cut the vines first. Dig carefully as the roots can be damaged easily with your garden fork or shovel. After digging, we let them bask in the sun for the day. We did not wash them but when we brought them inside, we did gently brush off any clumps of soil. Using a large kitchen knife- any knife will do- we sliced several holes in large black trash bags (so the roots don't get too moist), and put the roots into the bags. We then put the bags into cardboard boxes and folded the tops over to close them. We placed them right next to the furnace for a month. After a month, we opened the bags at the top and kept them in the basement at about 58 degrees.

If anyone has tips for good sweet potatoes, I'd love to hear from you!

Lessons from Gardens Past

When I was 16, I decided I wanted  a garden. My mother had just purchased her first home and she was kind enough to allow me to dig in her new yard. With the blind enthusiasm of an adolescent, I dug an ambitious first plot (about 10 by 10 feet) and planted corn, peppers, and tomatoes. The older couple who were our neighbors came over to check out my work, and the husband told me assuredly, "Ain't nothing gonna grow in there." My heart didn't exactly sink, because I was quite confident that I would prove him wrong. But he was right. In retrospect, my plan was doomed from the start. The plot I dug was situated between a tall blue spruce and the neighbor's hedges, so it was shaded for most of the day. And it was so far from the house that I had to water by filling watering cans. It was overwhelmed with weeds and nothing grew except one tiny green pepper. Somehow, I didn't lose my zeal for gardening, but I have made plenty of mistakes along the way. Here's some of what I have learned, and am still learning.

Lesson 1: Site the garden carefully 

We all have heard that location is everything in real estate. The same holds for gardens. Site your garden where the plants get as much sun as possible (6-8 hours per day). But that's not enough. Keep your garden close to the house and to an easy water source. The more you see the garden, the more likely you will be to attend to it, and to enjoy the daily happenings you might otherwise miss. And water location is critical. If you site your garden where you can't easily water and have to drag a 100 foot hose- or worse, buckets of water-  it's more likely the garden will be neglected. Finally, if you have a choice, surround the garden with some kind of enclosure to protect your plants and provide a microclimate. Below, my second garden was sited next to the garage and surrounded on the other two sides by a fence and a hedge. This kept wind damage down and really warmed up the soil near the garage.

 Lesson 2: Mulch

This one I learned from my first garden as well. I didn't mulch my plants, so it meant lots more watering and weeding. Since then, I have dutifully kept a thick layer of mulch over my plants, even those in containers. For a while, I paid for mulch by purchasing bags of cocoa hulls each year. But we have a dog now, and apparently cocoa hulls can be toxic to dogs. I recently figured out that I don't have to pay for mulch. We use composed rabbit manure (see my Compost page on this blog) as a mulch and it does a fabulous job of keeping weeds down, holding in moisture, and adding nutrients and organic matter to our soil. I also use pine straw from needles collected in the fall to mulch our strawberries and blueberries. That's a great, free mulch for acid loving plants. And several times over the summer, I toss a few large trash bags of fall leaves onto my lawn before I mow. I rake them to a thin layer and shred the leaves while mowing;  the leaf/grass mixture is collected by the bag on my mower. I use that fluffy mixture as mulch. We also use layered newspaper covered with a more attractive mulch (usually rabbit compost) around many of our beds. The newspaper is good for keeping weeds controlled and eventually breaks down and adds organic material to the soil.  I do buy a bale or two of straw each year, mostly because it works so well for garlic, but the rest is free.

Lesson 3: Build raised beds

Another lesson from the first garden was that having the garden flush with the ground created much more work. Weeds creep in more easily as the lawn tries to re-establish itself. And raised beds define paths clearly so it is easier to move around without disturbing the beds. After my first garden, it was another 20 years until I had a property and time to garden seriously. In the meantime, I moved around a lot and gardened out of containers. When I finally got to plan my second garden, I made raised beds a priority and will never do anything else. Although I prefer to enclose my beds with 6 inch tall wood frames, several of my beds are simply raised by piling the soil 6 or more inches. That's less tidy looking but gives me more flexibility in case I want to move the bed. When making raised beds, be sure your paths are not too narrow. One mistake I made in my second garden was using only 1 foot wide paths. This made getting around with the wheelbarrow difficult, so our new garden has mostly 2 foot wide paths, although we made the area in front of the compost bins 3 feet since the wheelbarrow spends a lot of time there.  Below, 7 raised  framed beds are down the center of the garden.

Lesson 4: Feed your soil

In the above picture, the bed in the foreground was topped with a few inches of composted rabbit manure in preparation for planting. This will break down over the season and provide lots of nutrition for the soil, which will feed our plants. We use mainly compost to fortify our soil, but also use small doses of organic fertilizer and rock phosphate. Good soil makes a profound difference in the health of the plants, allowing them to be grown intensively and to defend themselves better against pests and diseases.

Lesson 5: Be patient

This is the latest lesson and a good reminder that there is still a lot to learn. This year, I grew onions from seeds for the first time. I have planted onion sets with success around St. Patrick's Day for many years, so thought I would be safe planting my seedlings out March 29. But I ignored the weather forecast, and we had two nights in the 20's the week after I planted them. Most withered away and died. The plants were hardened off, but another week of patience on my part would likely have saved them. On the other hand, the parsley and lettuce that were planted at the same time seemed to die but bounced back and are now fine. Next year, I'll pay more attention to temperatures and not just the planting dates in the gardening books. In addition, I try to get as much information as I can from local growers, who have a better sense than the garden books of the conditions and timing for planting.

Comparing Bamboo Fertilizers

We decided to do a comparison of Milorganite and Scott's Organic Choice Lawn Fertilizer for our bamboo (which is technically a grass!). We chose three Harbin Inversas and three Bissetii and randomly assigned one of each variety to receive either a cup of Milorganite, a cup of the Scott's Organic Choice, or no fertilizer. The before pictures are below, taken March 17, 2013.

Bissetii Before: (left-to-right)  No fertilizer, Organic Choice, Milorganite 

Harbin Inversas Before: (left-to-right) No fertilizer, Organic Choice, Milorganite

We don't know whether fertilizer makes much difference for bamboo. Some of the healthiest bamboo we have seen are growing wild in huge groves. It's such a hardy plant and our beds are supplemented with composted rabbit manure already. But after the winter, our plants are looking pretty beaten, and we wondered whether they might recover faster with the help of some fertilizer. 

Milorganite (NPK= 5-2-0) from the words Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen is recycled biowaste from the Milwaukee sewage treatment system. It has been around since the early 1920's and is popular as a lawn fertilizer. It contains iron, which leads to faster greening, although not necessarily faster growth. It's the nitrogen that helps the growth, as I understand it. Some tests show Milorganite is free of pathogens; it is heat-dried at a high temperature. I am all for supporting this kind of recycling effort, although I have not used it on my vegetables because there is some controversy about the safety of it for edibles. However, if you spend enough time on the internet, there is controversy about safety for just about anything (tap water, manure, wood mulch, watering cans, hoses, rain barrels, you get the idea), even products that are labeled as organic. I read as much as I can stand, but most of the time there is no clear answer and I make a pragmatic choice.

Scott's Organic Choice lawn fertilizer was the comparison (NPK=11-2-2). It is not a synthetic product, so won't burn plants. It is low on the odor factor (Milorganite is stronger). It's made mainly from feather meal, bone meal, and blood meal. Our dog loves to get into it. It costs about the same per pound as Milorganite. We used it last year on the bamboo, but since they all got a dose, we don't know if it made a difference.




We will post the results of our little experiment after shooting season. Does anyone have any experience with these two products? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

What Gets Me Through the Winter

Thank God for the pile of garden books and seed catalogs that brighten the darkest corners of winter. On days when it's just too miserable to go outside-this is "never" for my husband, who can be found turning the compost or checking on the bamboo when the temperature is 10 degrees and ice covers the yard- I count on my colorful garden books to keep me going. I have read and re-read my favorites so many times that it's not really reading anymore. I am studying intently, hoping to absorb the wisdom and gardening experience of the dear authors who have become part of my garden psyche over the years. Here is a list of the best and most beloved of those books.

#1 Most useful and most used: The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, by Edward Smith. Ed is the gardening father or neighbor many of us don't have. Reading his book, I feel like I am learning from a master who also happens to be a humble guy who just loves digging around in his garden. This is the best book to start a garden with. Ed will lead you through understanding soil, compost, organic methods, and why tilling is neither necessary nor a good idea. I pull it out almost daily through the growing season to get advice on seed spacing, water and nutrient requirements, when to harvest, and how to cure the harvest for storage.

Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping is the best for lovely garden pictures combined with intelligent musings. Rosalind is a passionate advocate for improving the world through gardening, and she shares her expertise through gorgeous, lush pictures and detailed descriptions of a variety of gardens. Rosalind shows us how vegetable gardens can be beautiful front-and center, rather than relegated to the back corner of the yard. This practice of putting the garden far away from the house has always puzzled me; my garden has gotten closer to my kitchen over the years, where it is much more likely to be used, cared for, and enjoyed. Her perspectives on the wastefulness of lawns, conserving water, and spreading the word through community sharing and education make gardening a calling, not just a personal hobby.

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide by Barbara Pleasant and Deborah Martin. This book really expanded my understanding of different ways to achieve the same result: the black gold we all know is so important for our soil. I especially love the "comforter compost" idea and have been using it on beds that have been harvested for the year and for starting new beds. 

Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook, by Jennifer Bartley, and Taylor's Weedned Gardening Guide to Kitchen Gardens by Cathy Wilkinson Barash. I love these books for their photos and design inspiration. Bartley includes plans that bring out the inner landscape architect in the reader, and Barash has a great section on edible flowers.  

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle lacks the glossy pictures but makes up for it in a series of engaging essays that take the reader through a year of eating local. Kingsolver shares her efforts to grow food for her family and make good use of the resources in her local community. The recipes are really quite good and tailored to the harvest. She can be preachy at times, and I love that about her; she's earned the right through her tremendous efforts and serious explorations of what it means to garden when food is so widely available in prepackaged form.

My First Post

Greetings, fellow garden lovers! I know I'm in good company eager for spring on a cold day in early March with snow in the forecast. Blogging is brand new for me, but seems a pretty good substitute for being out there.  I have posted pictures of the garden as it evolved over the past two years on my Planning and First Year pages of this blog, and will document our progress and share what we have learned. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions!

So far this year, we have added lots of composted rabbit manure to the beds and started onions, parsley, and lettuce. The straw-covered beds are garlic planted last fall from our own seed stock (German White hardneck). There are tiny garlic shoots already- they started in the fall and never really died back.          

Below are 2 week-old lettuces (Black Seeded Simpson and Ruby).

I started onions from seed this year for the first time. They were planted in trays the first week of February and are now about a month old. When they reach about 4 inches, I trim them back to direct energy into bulb growth. Each tray contains about 75 plants (Copra and Red Bull, purchased from Fedco Seeds). I spaced them closely and will tease them apart gently when I plant them in two weeks. I will also grow some onions from sets this year so I can compare sets vs. seeds. Parsley is growing to the right (about a month old). Parsley takes some time to germinate. I had heard that pouring boiling water on the newly planted seeds helps; I did this and they came up in 10 days.