Plant, Harvest, Process, Repeat

50 Chandler Strawberry plants, from Ison's Nursery

PLANT
It is too late in my area for planting most cool season crops, but this is the month to set garlic and shallots in the garden, and last night I planted a lot of little strawberry plants that had arrived (very well packaged) on Wednesday. There are still about 20 plants that need to be set into the garden, but the ground is mostly prepared for them. 

Planting is a very hope-filled activity, and it usually involves some serious work.

HARVEST
We still are bringing in hilariously large quantities of peppers from the garden, along with the first of  the cool season vegetables.We've brought in bok choy and winter radishes, and the first beets are almost ready to pull. The sweet potatoes, one of the remaining summer crops, will be coming out of the ground this weekend, too. This part of gardening for me is packed with amazement and joy; always, I think "wow! this really awesome food grew in my garden!", even when the day's harvest is just one radish.

Sweet Work

Do you remember the commercial in which a nicely dressed woman sips a cup of tea while chatting with friends and says, "I'm cleaning my oven!" I feel a little like that when I say, "I'm curing my sweet potatoes!"

For the past few days, they have been kept in the back of my car, first out in the sunny parking lot at work, and now on the driveway, taking advantage of the greenhouse-effect to provide the warmth that will help them convert starch to sugar and toughen that thin skin. In a week or two, they will be fully cured and ready to fill a basket on the kitchen floor, where they will be easily accessible for meals.

Chipmunks like sweet potatoes.

I dug up the sweet potato patch on Wednesday evening, and in spite of "sharing" with the chipmunks I ended up with 41.5 pounds of tubers. That isn't as much as it should have been, but the chipmunks were hungry.

The weight doesn't include the ABC (Already Been Chewed) tubers, and there may still be a few good tubers left in the ground that will turn up in the next couple of weeks as I prepare that space for garlic, shallots, and onions.

Meanwhile, we are beginning to bring radishes and little bits of kale and lettuce into the kitchen. As the seasons change, our meals change, too, to reflect the different harvests that our garden provides. It's always a little sad to have to let go of the fresh tomatoes and peppers, but we have plenty of those dehydrated, stored in jars, and more in the freezer, for when we need them.

I hope that other gardeners are enjoying the change to cooler-season crops!

The Seven Kinds of Sweet Potato Amy Likes Best

Does anyone else love the book "Harold and the Purple Crayon"? We must have read that book aloud to our kids -- along with a couple hundred more of their favorites -- about a thousand times. One of my favorite lines has always been about "the nine kinds of pie that Harold likes best." When I was setting up my little sweet potatoes to start slips for planting in May, I was reminded of the pies.

I know that seven isn't the same as nine, but it still seems like a lot. I had managed to save six half-gallon cartons for starting them in, but I had to rustle up one more long, shallow container at the last minute.

Five of Amy's sweet potato varieties, making slips for planting in late May.

Two more sweet potato varieties making slips for this summer's crop.

To be honest, I haven't even tasted all of these yet, so I don't know if they are my favorite in terms of flavor, but three were given to me by a sweet-potato-loving friend. We had met through the Extension office, when he was looking for a variety called Alabama Nugget. I told him about a place in Alabama that sells a pretty large assortment of sweet potato varieties, but mostly to small farms, so they are sold in bundles of 100.

My new friend is retired, so he just got in his truck, along with another friend, and they drove to the farm in Alabama. Since everyone involved loved sweet potatoes, it was easy to make more new friends, and the farmer and his (grown) son were very helpful.

My friend has been out to the farm in Alabama a few more times, and he has shared with me what he has learned along with some different sweet potato varieties that he is hoping will come close in flavor and texture to his favorite, but lost, Alabama Nugget.

Of course, Beauregard is one that most people know. It grows big and cooks up soft and sweet.

Purple Delight is much drier, almost like a dry Irish-type potato, and it is hardly sweet at all. It is a great addition to a mixed pan of roasted vegetables. The tubers grow almost straight down, and they are long enough that when a plant is harvested, if you get it up without breakage, it looks kind of like a purple octopus.

Porto Rican Gold is the heirloom from my friends Jack and Becky; it's the one that Becky's family grew commercially a hundred years ago in this county. The family has perpetuated the line all this time, but Jack and Becky are the last in their family to continue to grow it. I shared it with my new friend, so it would have a better chance of continuation.

The Annie Hall is paler fleshed, drier in texture than Beauregard, but with a different flavor. I like it a lot, but it is not a very productive variety. Last year I only had enough to eat two of them.

The others -- Covington, Alabama Red, and Calvert/Cape Hatteras -- are all new to me. I'm looking forward to growing them!

To start the slips, I have placed the tubers in a mixture of sand and compost that will be kept moist. There already are plenty of little sprouts showing, so I am hopeful that I will have enough to fill the garden. The sweet potatoes have one of the larger spaces in my yard's rotation this year.

Anyone looking for more detailed growing information might try the Organic Gardening article "Sweet Potato Growing Guide."

Elsewhere in the garden, other established crops are doing well. The long bed of allium family crops that were all planted last fall still looks good.

Multiplying onions, garlic, shallots.

The cilantro is making everyone happy. Joe loves it, I love it, my six pet bunnies love it!

Fall-planted cilantro is large and leafy in spring.

And of course, the lettuces are looking good and adding nice color to our meals. There had been radishes in the spaces between the lettuce plants originally, but we've eaten most of those. Luckily, I've started more here and there throughout the garden. We eat a lot of radishes. There were some thin slices on the sandwich I made for yesterday's lunch.

Lettuce!

More lettuce! And inter-cropped radishes!

Hope that everyone else's gardens are growing well!

Good Food and Thankfulness

This week, my mind is more focused on "eating good food" than on "growing good food." Of course, it's hard to have the first without the second! All the gardeners fully understand that backward-sounding order, but plenty of other people forget that behind most good food there is thought, and work, and care.

I have been very fortunate in being able to grow good food in my yard. The food is fresh, and our meals are varied. All those vegetables probably contribute a lot of vitamins and minerals to our daily intake. The garden sparks conversations with my neighbors, building my local community. I am thankful for my garden, the good food it provides, and for the physical strength to manage it. Not everyone has the time or a sunny enough or large enough spot to grow their own food.

Not that long ago, much of the western part of the county was an agricultural area. The Old Guys still talk about how Cobb County and sweet potatoes used to be like Vidalia is, now, with onions -- viewed as the prime source of the sweetest and best produce. The fields were plowed using mules, and farming involved a lot of physical labor.

The sweet potatoes that grow in my yard (four varieties this year!) are also some work, and this year the chipmunks ate what I consider to be more than their share, but when we eat the sweet potatoes I was able to harvest, I know how they were grown (organic methods). I know that one variety is part of a line that stretches back more than 100 years in this county. I know that it is easy enough to grow this staple crop that other people can do it, too.

If enough other people give it a try, our whole community can benefit.

Chipmunks in the Sweet Potatoes

One night last week when I headed out to check the garden, I saw two chipmunks racing out of the sweet potato patch, with their tails at an unusually saucy, jaunty angle. The little critters looked way too happy to me, so I pulled back some vines in the area they seemed to have come from.

Chipmunk excavation in the sweet potato patch.

The rascals had been mining the garden! I found numerous excavations, all right at the bases of plants, so I decided to dig up all the sweet potatoes at my first opportunity.

That chance came on Sunday, and it turned out that the chipmunks had eaten pretty nearly all the sweet potatoes from the end of the garden nearest the creek.

There were a few, very small Porto Rican Golds and a few small sweets from the Annie Hall area. There won't be enough of the Porto Rican for me to eat any, but I might get to eat one of the Annie Hall.

Another chipmunk entrance to the sweet potato mine.

In better news, there seem to be plenty of the Purple Delight and plenty of Beauregard at the far end of the sweet potato bed. I haven't weighed the harvest yet; I know there will be less total weight than I had hoped for, but at least I didn't get totally "skunked" (or, in this case, "chipmunked").

The chipmunk discovery meant that I harvested my sweet potato patch a couple of weeks sooner than usual; typically, I don't dig the sweets up until sometime in October. If anyone out there is worried about running behind schedule in harvesting sweet potatoes -- don't worry -- you aren't! I am just early.

Hope all the other sweet potato patches have managed to escape the notice of the chipmunks!

Garden Update

September peppers.

There haven't been many photos in the blog lately, because I've had camera "issues." At this point, those issues are mostly resolved, so I finally went outside in daylight to take some pictures for a simple garden update.

The summer crop that is still coming in strong is the peppers. All varieties across the whole bed are doing well. The tomatoes, even the ones planted latest, are mostly limping along. I'm bringing in a few tomatoes each week, but not great piles of them like I would normally be harvesting in September.

Buckwheat cover crop, ready to be mowed down.

The buckwheat that was planted across the top of the spinach-beet bed is doing great. Soon, I will be mowing that down (or Joe will, with the weed-whacker), then turning it under to get the space ready for a winter cover crop.

Some animal(s) out in the yard have been treating the rows of spinach and beet seedlings like a personal snack bar, and I may, as a result, end up reseeding all those rows. This is an annoying turn of events, but not a total surprise. A creek borders our yard on one side, which means we have plenty of drop-in "guests" of the four-legged, furry persuasion. The creek is like a natural highway that connects parks and fields in the area. My yard is just a scenic-turnout that happens to also include a couple of fast-food establishments.

Cabbage-family snacks for rabbits.

 The cabbage and broccoli plants have established nicely and have begun to really grow, but the little green stick front-and-center of the photo to the left is the remains of another animal snack -- kind of like a broccoli-sicle stick instead of a popsicle stick.

However, I have another nine-pack of broccoli to plant, and it is enough to replace all of the most severely munched plants, with some left to plant further down the bed.

Healthy horseradish.

The horseradish, that we don't even really like to eat, is looking pretty amazing. The friend who gave me the chunk of root with which to start my plant said that the flowers would be lovely, but I haven't seen any flowers yet. I've had the plant for at least three years, so I'm thinking that I might not get to see flowers.

The plant is getting too big for its pot, and I'm expecting to re-pot it this coming spring, dividing the root to share and to make some horseradish sauce. Maybe I'll find a recipe for sauce that we like!

This year, most of my plants were in the ground, but I have seen horseradish so healthy that it threatened to take over whole yards. Mine is going to stay in a pot.

Over in the side yard, the sweet potato vines seem to be contemplating some kind of take-over. They have flowed into the next bed and across the newly-laid centipede-&-nutsedge sod that the water department put down after replacing the neighborhood water mains.

This year's sweet-potato glacier, slowly creeping across the yard.

In the picture to the right, a few okra plants can be seen along the left of the photo; they are holding their own among the vines and producing just enough okra for us to include some in a meal every few days.

It will be time to dig up those sweet potatoes very soon. I'm planning to manage that sometime in the first week of October. The slips were planted back in May, which means the plants have had PLENTY of time to make sweets for me by now.

Carrots to the left, winter radishes to the right.

The carrot and winter radish bed looks pretty good. There are still some places in the rows where carrots didn't come up, and it isn't too late to drop in a few seeds in those gaps. We are getting rain today, so it will have to be on another day, but I am thinking that there is still time for a few very late carrots.

The last seeds in won't yield mature carrots until sometime in the spring, but that's okay. I will have harvested plenty of other carrots by then, from the earlier-planted seeds.

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

Crazy Busy Planting Weekend -- and I'm Still Not Done

No pictures yet, but I was able to get most of the rest of the garden planted in summer crops over the long weekend.

On Saturday morning, before working on our own yard, we went out to the farm on Dallas Highway where we usually volunteer, and we weeded (a lot) and planted a couple dozen tomato plants and a couple dozen pepper plants in some of the raised beds.

Then, just when we thought we were leaving for the day, our farmer friend (Charles) said, "when you come back after lunch you can plant the rest of the tomatoes down in the field." So we went back after lunch, and with the help of one other guy we planted two 150 foot rows of tomato plants. In other words, we started the planting-weekend with a bang.

I didn't really start on my own yard until the next day, because I was kind of wiped out after that, but  planting in my yard included:

Half of the sweet potatoes (Beauregard, Purple Delight), the parching corn (Supai Red), this year's round of the melon de-hybridization project (Amy's Kennesaw Sweet Canary), a few of the "dwarf" butternut squash that I planted last year, watermelon (Luscious Golden), cucumbers (Burpee's Picklebush, Straight Nine) to replace ones that didn't come up when they were planted before, one more tomato plant, and some flower seeds. I also started some flower seeds in Jiffy Pellets, because I will need a lot more flowers for our bees.

After the corn is up and  looking good, I plan to plant peanuts in the spaces between. I still have some sweet potato slips to plant (Nancy Hall, Porto Rican Gold), and I'm expecting to harvest the onions and garlic within the next two or three weeks, which means I'll be planting the Tarahumara Popping Sorghum soon, too. When the shallots come out, I'll be planting more zucchini in their space.

Joe and I also worked on the "foundation planting" area that had been destroyed last summer when the tree smashed the house. The soil there was VERY compacted clay; breaking that up and mixing in the compost and other amendments required some seriously hard work. At the sunnier end of that bed we planted the bay tree that has been growing in a pot for the past few years, three perennial, purple-flowered Salvia, and a couple of Coronation Gold Yarrow.

The hard work will all be rewarded later in the summer, when the flowers are beautiful and we are enjoying the harvest, but right now I am a mass of sore muscles. Of course, I am also very happy to have accomplished so much.

Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well!

Garden Update

Does anyone else have sore muscles today from all the garden-work yesterday? I amended and planted two and a half beds and set up the bird bath, and then I bumped up some of the remaining plants into larger pots.

The two completed beds are the two nearest the front door. Now, instead of weeds, the long curved bed has three eggplants, thirteen pepper plants, and some gladiolus bulbs to go with the bee balm that was already there, and the smaller bed shaped like a big slice of pie has six Swiss chard, seeds for zinnias and pickling cucumbers, and the birdbath. When Joe got back in the late afternoon from kayaking on the Etowah River, he was amazed at how different the front yard looked!

The "half" part of the two-and-a-half beds is one that is supposed to get tomatoes planted in it later in the summer, based on my newly-created rotation scheme, but it got a couple of Amish tomato plants early. I need for the Amish tomatoes to be separate from the rest to avoid any further cross-pollination.

Last year's Amish tomatoes looked pretty different from the tomatoes of the first couple of years, and I am hoping that the older seeds (saved from one of the earlier years with this variety) that I used this year will produce plants that are more similar to the original variety. Keeping them in a bed across the yard from the rest should lessen the cross pollination problem.

Other activities for the day included admiring our new bees and cleaning my bunnies' enclosures. My friend Cheryl stopped by to pick up some plastic nursery pots because she needed more of the 3-gallon size (I had plenty under the house) and she brought some bunny salad - which included some wheat plants - from her yard for Moonpie, Tiny, Burrito, and Holstein. They seemed to enjoy the different salad!

I'm expecting to plant most of the rest of the summer garden over the next couple of weeks, completing a little bit each evening after work. The sweet potatoes will be last, because they need reliably warm soil to do well.

A "Good Year" for Chipmunks

If I had been purposely growing chipmunks this year, I'm pretty sure I could say that I had a bumper crop. I am not alone in this. At least part of the problem was the drought. Chipmunks (and squirrels in some people's yards) all figured out that the gardens were watered and full of moisture-laden produce, which they proceeded to munch on.

The situation could have been worse. In some yards, chipmunks (and/or other pestiferous mammals) took one or two bites out of nearly every tomato produced. At least my tomatoes were spared!  Here in my yard, it turns out that the chipmunks pretty much stuck with the sweet potatoes.

Today was fairly warm, and we've been without rain for several days - all good for harvesting sweet potatoes -  so I dug the sweets up this afternoon. Every plant had at least one big potato with significant munching damage.

It's hard to complain about the approximately 22 pounds of good sweets that I was able to put into the basket to bring in, but  I couldn't help thinking (somewhat wistfully) of one really spectacular year for sweets, years ago, when the plants averaged something like 6 pounds each of total production.

Is it like that for everyone? Do we all look back, with a little regret or longing, thinking about that one really great harvest year, even though the current harvest is absolutely fine? Twenty-two pounds of sweet potatoes will take us pretty far into the winter; it seems like "sour grapes" to complain, but there was that one year...

The sweets I brought in still need to be set up for curing. That typically involves either our small space heater or a small lamp with an incandescent bulb (they get nice and toasty), but I'm not sure yet how to set that up in the new arrangement of my house. Everything is just a little bit different.

One way or another, it will get done, because curing the sweets in a warm place does amazing things to the flavor, but the exact set-up is yet-to-be-determined.

Here's hoping that everyone else had a great year for sweet potatoes and a less-than-good-year for chipmunks!

Keeping Track of the Harvest: March

I weighed most of the produce that was brought into the kitchen from the yard in March, and these are the weights in kilograms (what my kitchen scale does best - obviously the instrument wasn't made in the USA!).

Radish, winter 1.55kg
Carrots 0.2
Collard greens 0.75
Chicory 1.1
Kale 0.75
Onions, green 0.1
Swiss chard 0.25
Dill
cilantro
mint

There aren't weights for the herbs because they were harvested in small enough amounts that they didn't register an exact-enough weight. Also, a lot of the cilantro and mint went to the momma bunny. Moonpie loves cilantro!

The March total harvested was 4.7 kg, which converts to 10 pounds, 5 ounces. The running total for 2012, Jan. + Feb. + Mar., is 25 pounds, 10 ounces.

There actually were even more winter radishes, but some had begun to bolt in the freakishly warm weather, and the roots were getting tough, so those went straight out the back door to the compost heap (well... a few little pieces went to Moonpie).

I am not expecting much for April. So far, we are bringing in herbs and little bits of spinach and lettuce - for sandwiches - that haven't been weighed, and we're rooting around in the freezer and cupboards for the last of last year's preserved foods. I would hate to get to July, when the summer garden produce is pouring into the house, and run across a leftover bag of something in the bottom of the freezer!

In the planning department:

I have saved a few sweet potatoes from last year's harvest, and those are sprouting nicely. I'll be snapping those sprouts off and putting them in damp potting mix later today so they can begin rooting. It won't take long! At this rate, the outdoor garden soil will be toasty by early May, and I can get those into the ground. They will be almost my last summer crop to go in. I also am starting a few tomatoes to plant at the end of June, to keep the harvest coming.

The garden seems to have survived the past couple of colder nights. The thermometer on the front porch was showing 35 degrees F yesterday morning, but we are back to a forecast for warmer days and nights.

Gardening for the harried

In the summertime, the traditional Southern garden staples - tomatoes, peppers, squash, green beans, cucumbers, and okra - all need to be picked and processed (either eaten, frozen, canned, fermented, dehydrated, or given away) on a schedule that is all their own (constantly!); the plants need to be kept watered, which in a drought can be a huge chore, and the plants need to be checked for pests and diseases fairly frequently. Sometimes, those pests and diseases require some kind of immediate action on the part of a gardener.

If that gardener has about a million other responsibilities at the same time, he or she can go nuts trying to keep up.

As a gardener with a job, family, friends, and volunteer work (and the blog!) all needing to be fitted into my daily life, I can understand when some people just give up on the garden, which can be seen as that “last straw” for a person who already is struggling to get everything done.

I am lucky in having family and friends who are happy to help when my schedule gets overwhelming, but not every gardener has that backup. For even the most harried of gardeners, though, there are food-plants that can be grown with a bare minimum of work on the part of the gardener.

For the truly stressed-out gardener living here in the South, I would choose the sweet potato as the easiest-to-grow garden crop. In my area, there is a big window of opportunity for planting, stretching from around May 10 to June 10 or even later. For a gardener who has trouble finding time to plant, this is a great gift. It is likely that somewhere in that four or five weeks, a planting day can be found.

Sweet potatoes will be plenty productive with just one side dressing of fertilizer that can be applied anytime within four to seven weeks after planting. The big window of time, again, is great for busy gardeners who can’t always manage to get the gardening done in a tighter time frame.

The plants don’t have to be watered two or three times each week; one really good drenching once every ten days to two weeks is enough for astonishingly good production.

The crop is relatively disease and pest free, and after the vines have spread across the garden, very few weeds survive the dense shade created by the leaves. Not having to weed is another great gift to the busy gardener.

The harvest window for sweet potatoes is as big as the planting window. As long as the plants have been in the ground for around 110 days, they just need to be dug up before the first frost. If I get my sweet potato slips into the ground in late May, I can dig them up anytime from the last week in September to the last week in October. If one week is too busy, I can wait for the next one.

I keep my harvested sweet potatoes in a wicker laundry basket in the kitchen. There is no canning, dehydrating, fermenting, or freezing necessary to preserve the harvest. The spuds are handy to use whenever I want them, and they keep for months without any extra effort on my part.

The harried gardener who has planted sweet potatoes will have plenty to smile about all winter long: a harvest of healthful food from his or her own garden, and it required hardly any work at all!

Other root crops are also easy-on-the-gardener, but not quite as easy as sweet potatoes. Potatoes, onions, and garlic all are time-savers in terms of their being harvested all at once and not requiring elaborate processing in order to “keep” for several months, but those crops need a little more tending.

“White” potatoes need more watering than sweet potatoes, and they will also need to be hilled-up and given a fertilizer boost at least once in their growing season. When white potatoes are harvested, they just go into a basket over which I will drape some towels to exclude the light. However, they are more prone to pests and diseases, which means they need to be checked fairly frequently while they are growing. If the gardener has to leave town for a week or two, this crop will need a minder, unlike sweet potatoes that will be fine on their own.

I have onions and garlic growing now, and there will be some weeding to do (some chickweed has started coming up between the plants), and they will need a fertilizer boost at some point, but otherwise the most they will need in terms of my attention is for me to remember to go out and harvest them in spring (onions) and early summer (garlic).

The harvest window is a little tighter than for potatoes, but onions and garlic left in the ground a week or two after the tops have fallen over and begun to dry will be fine, as long as the ground isn’t wet.

The onions I don’t eat right away will keep for quite a while if I’ve remembered to leave them spread out in the shade to dry for a couple of days before bringing them inside. Garlic is easier to peel if it’s been left to dry for several weeks, but that isn’t much of a drawback.

For gardeners who are not quite so harried, cool weather crops are a good choice (leaving summer to the sweet potatoes). In fall and spring, less time needs to be spent watering since there is usually more rain. Right now, for example, my yard is squishy with rain.

Cooler weather means that crops are growing more slowly, but weeds are growing more slowly, too, reducing time that needs to be spent weeding.

Even more helpful - a lot of cooler weather crops can be left in the ground and harvested when needed. The parsnips, carrots, beets, and winter radishes that I have growing now are good examples, and so are leafy greens like collards and kale. Most of the winter, I can go out and harvest what I need, when I need it.

There is some weeding to do, and the plants will need a fertilizer boost or two, but there isn’t as much “tending” as in the hot summer months, and the plants won’t go to seed until warmer weather returns in the early spring. That leaves a pretty big harvesting window, and if the plants are left for a week or two or three without any attention at all, they’ll probably be fine.

Broccoli plants will begin to flower if left unattended too long, and so will cabbages and cauliflower, so those cool weather crops probably are not great choices for gardeners whose other commitments make finding time for gardening more difficult.

Gardening does take some time, and for the most busy among us that can be a big problem, but for me it is worth the effort on a lot of levels. I like having produced some food for my family that I know is healthful; it helps that the food is cheap to grow; when I work in the yard, I’m getting exercise that I know I need; being outside is good for my vitamin D levels, and I like that the time spent outside has also been productive; sometimes, when I am having trouble thinking of what to make for supper, the garden supplies the inspiration – and ingredients – that I need; and my family eats a lot more vegetables than if we didn’t have the garden, because there is no way I’m going to waste the effort of having grown the food by letting it rot away unused. There are more reasons, but that’s probably enough for now.

In addition to enjoying the relatively easier-to-come-by fruits of the fall gardening season, this is a good time to do a little planning for the 2012 garden. The seed catalogs are starting to arrive and the yard-work is at a minimum (assuming the fallen leaves have already been moved to the compost). Thinking now about how much time will be available to work in the garden could help prevent some major stress and loss of crops in next year's garden.

Sweet Potato Harvest

Next weekend I'm going to be out of town, so I harvested my sweet potatoes today. The vines have been wandering all over the place in a very untidy way, but I will miss their exuberance.



After trimming all the wayward vines back to the edges of the bed, the garden plot where the sweets were planted looks pretty small. One of the neighborhood rascals (the oldest rascal) was helping, and she took this picture that shows the actual size of the bed, with me half-upside-down for perspective.



I had planted two varieties of sweets, Beauregard and Puerto Rican. Beauregard was slightly more productive in terms of total weight (12 pounds) and made fewer, larger tubers than the Puerto Rican (10.75 pounds).

This is the smallest sweet potato harvest I have ever had, and I would be disappointed, except that this year a much higher percentage of the tubers are an easily usable size and shape. Some years the tubers are all extremes, with some ending up the size of small dogs and all the rest the (very small) size that I save for sprouting in spring.

In the picture below, the Beauregard sweets are on the left and the Puerto Ricans are on the right.



While the oldest rascal was helping me dig up the sweets (she did a great job!), one of her brothers took pictures of the rest of the garden. This one shows some happy marigolds in addition to a little more garden chaos that I need to tidy up.



The two rascals were both great helpers! I am lucky that they live in my neighborhood.

Sweet Potatoes at PAR

We cleared out the last of the crops from the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden today. There were still winter squash and sweet potatoes. Pulling up the squash vines was a big job, but we found more than 40 pounds of good squash in the vines, and we have been getting 20 or so pounds of squash each week for a while now. That was a successful crop!

The big job of the day, though, was digging up the sweet potatoes. (Alert: lots of photos ahead.)

Even though we already had done a lot of work cleaning up the squash vines, we were pretty excited about the sweet potatoes. Here we are, just getting started:



How clean we all still were! We found potatoes of all shapes and sizes, and every single one was a joy to find.



There were quite a few "lunkers" under those vines.



And this plant came up like a string of sausages, which made us all chuckle.



Part of the fun is that digging sweet potatoes requires partners. The person digging benefits from having a "spotter" to help make sure that no sweet goes unharvested.



We did all slow down a bit, after a while. The digging was hard work! It was great that so many gardeners showed up to help.



After watching several of us make trips to the compost pile with armloads of vines, Gloria very wisely went to get a wheelbarrow from the shed. At first, moving the vines to the (Very Large) compost pile hadn't seemed like all that big of a job, but the vines were heavy. The wheelbarrow helped.



We completed the first pass through the area where the sweet potatoes had been planted, pulling vines and digging, and then we re-dug the entire bed to locate strays. We found some, but not too many. It was a good idea to have done the extra work though. Look how many sweets we found after we were finally done!:



After the digging, we sat down to sort. The good sweets were destined for the Center for Family Resources in Marietta, but we always have a pretty big pile of damaged sweets. The garden has a wireworm problem that we have been treating with beneficial (predatory!) nematodes for a couple of years now, and that has been making a difference. We saw the least wireworm damage this year of any year so far.

In addition to the wireworm damage, there are always some sweets that are accidentally skewered by spading forks, and there is always some damage from small mammals. In the end, though, we had more than 260 pounds of good sweets to take to Marietta. They filled the back of our fearless leader's car.



The squash had to go in the back seat, along with her garden tools. It is amazing that any gardener's car is ever clean, but this car was spotless before the spading forks went in.



Besides the squash and sweet potatoes, the garden still had flowers in it, and those had to be cleared out, too. Cathy took a minute to make bouquets from the zinnias and the sprays of purple seeds from the Jewels of Opar, so most of us had flowers to bring home.



The next-to-last job for the morning was to spread kelp meal and some more sulfur (the pH is still a little high...) over the entire garden. The very last job was to finish marking the sprinkler heads for the new irrigation system. A couple of gardeners had been busy locating those and driving stakes next to them so they would be easy to spot, but there there were a few left to mark.

Tomorrow, the garden will be tilled, and next week, we will broadcast seeds for our cover crop. Then, sometime in the next few weeks, we will celebrate!

Sweet Exuberance

This is what I see every day when I go out the front door:



The sweet potatoes are actually planted in what is about a 6x3 foot arc of garden to the right of the bird bath. As usual with happy plants, they've spilled out all over.

I have another week or two to enjoy the craziness, but I plan to harvest them a little earlier than usual this year. I tend to wait until the middle of October, but we've hardly had rain the last several weeks, and the watering has been taking some time. I would like to be able to limit my watering efforts to the fall crops, which would make my evenings after work a little easier.

Sweet Potatoes

“Without the sweet potato,” said Robert Odeu, “there would be terrible hunger.” Odeu is a farmer in Uganda, and he is quoted in the first sentence of chapter 27 of James Lang’s book Notes of a Potato Watcher.

Most of the book is about “regular” potatoes, but the one section is about sweet potatoes. As a result, since I am reading the book, even though it is way too soon to be thinking about sweet potatoes, here I am, thinking about them.

The hunger-stopping capabilities of the sweet potato that Odeu was referring to are partly due to its hardiness and productivity, and partly to its keeping qualities.

In my yard, sweets also are productive and not prone to die from diseases, and they also keep through the winter just in a basket on my kitchen floor, so I am aware of those particular benefits.

What comes out in the book, though, is that in other, non-U.S. parts of the world, people prefer differently qualities in their sweets than we do. Varieties like Beauregard that are popular here are orange-fleshed, fairly moist, and very sweet. In other countries, sweets that are more dry, less orange, and less sweet are more popular.

Part of this is a problem, because people in some of those places would benefit from the beta-carotene in orange sweets, but the dryness is attractive because that helps in storage; in some places, sweets are dehydrated for extended storage. The sweets are pounded thin for drying, then ground into a flour that is used (in many ways) in cooking. It would take a lot longer to dehydrate a Beauregard than it would a drier Ugandan variety!

This is relevant to my garden because I grow not only Beauregard, but also a Puerto Rican sweet. I got slips for these Puerto Ricans last year from my friends Jack and Becky. Becky’s family has been growing this particular strain in this county for 103 years. They were a cash-crop for Becky’s father.

However, when I have spoken with Jack and Becky about cooking these sweets, they’ve both emphasized that these are not like standard grocery-store sweets. I had already noticed that they benefited from added liquid after cooking, but Becky also said that putting them in the microwave to cook, like some people do with other sweets, just turns them into hockey pucks. I believe her.

The Puerto Rican sweets have good flavor, but they are definitely dry. They would probably dehydrate well. What this means is that I will be spending some time next fall, looking into dehydrating sweets. I don’t think I’ll be pounding them thin with rocks, Uganda-style, but the general concept is worth considering. Right now, though, I don’t have enough left to experiment on—only enough for another meal or two and to start slips for this summer.

Sweet Potato Weather Alert!

This message came to my email this morning:

Issued by The National Weather Service
Atlanta, GA
5:42 am EDT, Fri., Oct. 16, 2009

... FREEZING TEMPERATURES AND FROST POSSIBLE IN NORTH GEORGIA SUNDAY AND MONDAY MORNING...

A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN THE WEATHER PATTERN WILL TAKE PLACE ACROSS THE EASTERN U.S. DURING THE NEXT FEW DAYS AS A DEEP UPPER TROUGH DEVELOPS IN THE MID-ATLANTIC REGION. THIS WILL RESULT IN MUCH COLDER AIR SPREADING SOUTHWARD INTO THE SOUTHEAST U.S. TONIGHT AND SATURDAY. MUCH BELOW NORMAL TEMPERATURES WILL REMAIN IN PLACE THROUGH EARLY NEXT WEEK.

TEMPERATURES WILL DROP TO THEIR LOWEST LEVELS SINCE EARLY APRIL DURING THE WEEKEND. CLOUD COVER AND WIND WILL LIKELY KEEP TEMPERATURES ABOVE FREEZING SATURDAY NIGHT... BUT BY MONDAY MORNING CANADIAN HIGH PRESSURE WILL SETTLE OVER THE AREA ALLOWING SKIES TO CLEAR AND WINDS TO DIMINISH TO NEAR CALM. LOW TEMPERATURES NEAR 30 DEGREES ARE EXPECTED IN MOUNTAIN VALLEYS AND IN MANY RURAL AREAS OF NORTH GEORGIA EARLY MONDAY. WIDESPREAD FROST CAN ALSO BE EXPECTED... ESPECIALLY WITH WELL ABOVE NORMAL SOIL MOISTURE CONDITIONS CURRENTLY IN PLACE.

I know, I hate the all-caps presentation, too, but in this case the alarm might be justified. Sweet potatoes need to stay at well-above freezing temperatures, and what is coming this weekend misses that ideal by a huge margin.

Anyone whose sweet potatoes are poking above the ground, the way they do as harvest time approaches, should either dig those sweet potatoes up today or tomorrow, or mulch them heavily to protect them until a warmer day comes again. The picture below illustrates what I mean:





Around here, Fall temperatures can swing pretty wildly, so I don't expect the cold weather to last until April. Warmer days will be here in a week or so, but I am not going to wait, even though the ground is still very wet. Cold is even worse than wet, where sweet potatoes are concerned.

I had been hoping for great weather for harvesting the sweets, especially since this year I am growing two kinds. I wanted a bit of leisure so it would be easier to compare. However, this weather is what I have.

In the picture below, the differences in the leaves of the two kinds of sweet potatoes are easy to see. The heart shaped leaves are on the Beauregard plants and the deeply lobed leaves are on the Puerto Rican plants that were given to me by a friend.




When I have all the sweet potatoes safely out of the ground and in the house, I will spread them out in a single layer on newspapers to dry, with a small space-heater aimed at them to keep them warm. They need to dry and cure in a warm place for at least a week before being gathered back up for longer term storage.