During the late winter I made a post about sweet potatoes we had left over from Thanksgiving that had started to show the first signs of shoots. I detailed how I tried to get them to grow into slips. Well, this post is not about those because the sweet potatoes ended up rotting when we forgot to change the water they were in for a few days. Another oops. One out of many.

Instead, this post is going to be about sweet potato slips that we purchased. Not only did we purchase them late, they remained in their little 3 inch pots for far too long, drying out too much and becoming quite root bound. They didn't die but were close to it.

I struggled very hard this season to get ANYTHING planted out but eventually got them planted after painstakingly separating the slips. That involved slowly ripping apart the 2-3 slips per 3 inch pots. The next obstacle was finding a place to plant them. I was behind in getting anything planted in a reasonable fashion. One of the main reasons for that was a lack of prepared planting area.

I have not yet posted about the spiral garden. That will have to wait. However, part of the spiral garden includes a handful of straw bales that were prepared and planted in last year, which were reamended in the fall and again in the spring. One of them was unused so I planted the last of the store bought slips in it.

I have never grown sweet potatoes before. The truth is I am not a huge fan of them. I lean towards savory foods, to be honest. The main attraction for me of growing them was two fold: ground cover to reduce weeds and edible greens. Below are a few pictures of the harvest and growth progression of this one vine in particular. The other slips that were planted in the spiral are still growing in the other area of the garden, which is not in straw bales.

Going in reverse order mostly because I want my picture of the harvest of this one plant to be the picture that shows up on my post's thumbnail. I got roughly 5 pounds worth of sweet potatoes. All but one of the 12 roots were 8 inches or longer and 1.5-3 inches in diameter. Some of these were actually bigger, but I broke the tips off while trying to dig them out, even though I was being as careful as possible.

#### For full transparency, I will say that these straw bales had already been used for one season so had shrunk from their original size about a third since last year. Maybe only about a foot deep. Now, when these straw bale planters were made, weed cloth was laid over the grass, then the straw bale on top. What happened was the potatoes grew so well, they grew beyond the weed barrier into the clay soil beneath. Sure, I could have totally ripped the straw bale apart, dug down into the heavy clay to fetch the left over bits. I declined to do that since this straw bale was situated above the approximate location of our propane gas line. I had no idea this sweet potato plant would grow so well, or so deep. I am not going to dig down to get the rest of them and am not worried about them re-growing because come winter, it will be too cold for them to survive. They are not perennial here in my zone.

Anyway, I am dang proud of this success. It's about time. I've been really struggling this year to keep my spirits up about this homesteading endeavor. When you have successes like these, though, it makes you want to keep on truckin, so the saying goes.

Ignore the grass seeds invading my {UNTIL NOW} weed free spiral garden. A week ago I was scrambling to get late summer/fall seeds plopped in the garden. One thing I will admit is that I can be an impatient person. Gardening is one area this manifests regularly. I noticed the sweet potato began putting out flowers. Beautiful trumpet like flowers. No surprise seeing how they looked just like morning glory flowers, to which they're related. The surprise was I didn't realize they WOULD flower. I thought only the ornamental varieties did.

So, I asked the oracle. In my online search I read it was uncommon. Some people thought it was a great thing because it was so rare. That although the seeds had a very, very low chance of producing good sweet potato tubers, the one off possibility was exciting enough to them to try. Other sites were saying to snip the flowers off, lest the plant stop putting energy into the potatoes. That was easy to understand since many other plants are the same way. I do believe these would have gotten a lot larger if I would have left them another month or two.

Although I wasn't growing these specifically for the potatoes, I was curious. I've had so many obstacles and failures the past 4 years trying to grow food here that I wanted to see just how successful this attempt would be. Especially in the straw bale because the vine looked so, so happy. Being behind in planting the fall seeds, impatient with waiting to peek in the bale for what bounty lie beneath, as well as doing the regular pruning already, I dug those puppies up.

Here we are a few weeks ago. I had been pruning the vines about once a week. They were growing wildly in all directions due to the heat. They are heat loving vines, after all. This picture is just before dusk after a nice pruning. I understand why people grow them ornamentally. They are a beautiful vine.

I won't go into it now because it is such an in depth discussion, but you can see a nice section of the spiral garden during the best part of the summer growth. There are multiple sweet potatoes in this shot. The lighter yellow variety is used as an ornamental, even though it is also supposed to be edible. I double many people who grow it know that, though. The two types were quite stunning together. I had to prune each of them multiple times. Soon after this picture I yanked the two yellow leaved sweet potatoes to start preparing for fall planting.

This was about a month after they had been in the straw bale. I had already pruned off the damaged leaves from the stress of being planted so late. I did that at the time I planted it. This vine seemed to be very thankful to let it's hair down. To reiterate, this is only sweet potato slip planted in this straw bale.

This was what the sweet potato slips looked like immediately when I brought them home in their 6 cell 3" pots. I spent a good amount of time scouring through all of the plants for sale for the best, healthiest, looking plants. This was before they got really stressed out due to my failure to get them planted. I'm glad I picked such strong plants from the start. They endured some hard times prior to planting, that's for sure.

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That's the end of this short and sweet post. If you found this post enjoyable, please consider upvoting, resteeming, following, and commenting! Thank you kindly for reading...

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ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHT 2018 BY ME, @phedizzle. Hope you enjoyed them!

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Here are previous posts of mine:

STORIES:

BAREFOOT IN THE BOONIES: EXPOSING MY ROOTS (introduction post)
BAREFOOT IN THE BOONIES: Chapter 1
BAREFOOT IN THE BOONIES: FAMILY OWNED: Chapter 1 Section 2
BAREFOOT IN THE BOONIES: ABANDONED BASEMENT: Chapter 1 Section 2
BAREFOOT IN THE BOONIES: REWIND: GROWING UP WITH TURNTABLES

2011 GARDEN:

2011: DESIGN AND BUILD
2011 BACKYARD TRELLIS, PERIMETER, & VOLUNTEER
2011 TIRE PORTION OF THE GARDEN
2011 BRASSICAS-TIRE GARDEN
2011 DWARF ORCHARD

RECIPES:

SANTA DELIVERED SHROOMS-SHITAKE OYSTER SCRAMBLE
SWEET CINNAMON POPCORN
MOCK ALMOND JOY--CHEAPER AND HEALTHIER
HANGRY TERIYAKI
RASHES--WHY I SWITCHED TO THIS COMMON DIY LAUNDRY SOAP AND HOW I MAKE IT
SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH FORAGED FINDS: FIRST FOOD FORAGE OF 2018
WHAT'S FOR DINNER? BEETS ME! FIRST GARDEN HARVEST AND RECIPE

POEMS:

WATCHING THE SPRING WAKE UP
SHE IS DYING
WEEPING WILLOW
LIGHTS OUT BABY ROBIN

PLANTS AND ANIMALS-EDUCATIONAL:

GRASS IS OUR FRIEND
LITTLE BLUESTEM--BENEFICIAL AND BEAUTIFUL
BEHOLD THE BEAUTY OF THE FALSE INDIGO BUSH

WALK ALONG WITH ME:

WALK ALONG WITH ME 1
WALK ALONG WITH ME 2--WINTER 2017/2018

2018:

WILD TURKEY TAIL AND REISHI MUSHROOMS
HUGELKULTUR BED STARTED BUT THERE IS A LOGISTICAL OBSTACLE.
2018 CURRENT HAPPENINGS: FOOD FOREST EXPANSION
WILD EDIBLES AROUND THE HOMESTEAD
GRANNY SMITH APPLE FINALLY GOT SOME LOVE
PICKED MY FIRST PINT OF WILD NATIVE BLACK RASPBERRIES
TRANSPLANTING WILD PURPLE GARLIC PART 1
ORCHARD: PLANNING, PREPPING, AND PLANTING
WILD PURPLE GARLIC TRANSPLANT UPDATE
ZONE 2 OF THE FOOD FOREST
COMFREY: ANOTHER QUINTESSENTIAL PERMACULTURE ADDITION TO OUR FOOD FOREST

CONTESTS/REVIEWS

Chronic and Coffee MSP Review--25 SBD contest for the best MSPWAVES Radio Reviews
VOICES FROM THE MOUNTAINS Review--25 SBD contest for the best MSPWAVES Radio Reviews

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