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sweet potatoes

Plant, Harvest, Process, Repeat

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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.


PROCESS
For the peppers, “process” means chopping up for either the dehydrator or freezer; for the bok choy, “process” means chop-and-stir-fry for the evening meal. For winter radishes, slice thinly and sprinkle with salt to eat with crackers and either cheese or hummus.

Based on comments and questions in my inbox at work, I will not be the only gardener in Cobb County curing sweet potatoes in the back of a car this year. Taking advantage of the greenhouse-effect in a car to achieve the high temperatures that work best (covering the sweets with a towel or newspapers to keep the sun off) is all the processing that sweet potatoes need. I bring my basket of sweets into the house at night, when temperatures are lower, and then set them back in the car to cure in the sunny parking lot at work during the week. After a week or so, I quit driving them around the county, letting them stay in a basket on the floor of the kitchen until we have eaten them all.

Processing food for storage or for eating can be a very creative endeavor (as when Joe thinks up new combinations of vegetables to ferment for pickles or sauces), and it can be stunningly tedious. Soon, we (well, mostly Joe, since he does a lot more of this than I do) will tire of chopping vegetables into small pieces for the freezer and dehydrator. Luckily, we get a break from that with the cool season vegetables, which we usually eat the same day they are harvested.

REPEAT!
The truly amazing part of gardening is that we get to keep going, in a pattern that rings the year. The good food keeps on coming into the kitchen for us to enjoy! Of course, I’ve left out the boring weeding-part and a bunch of other maintenance work involved in the space between “Plant” and “Harvest”, but the work is part of the whole, sweet cycle. I hope everyone else is enjoying this time in the gardening year!

Sweet Work

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.