| Sweet potatoes are an easy crop all around. They were easy to plant, easy to grow (you do nothing to them for months other than maybe water them), and easy to harvest. They softened our cement-hard soil while they grew, so it was fairly easy to dig them up.
Here you see a plant I dug up. The green leaves are edible (a popular food in the Philippines, I learned). You can see a very ugly, dead-looking thing that looks like a rotten sweet potato. That's the sweet potato I sprouted way back when, which I planted to grow this plant. And you can kind of see the roots that are long, skinny sweet potatoes.
Here's a better picture of the sweet potatoes growing from the rotten-looking sweet potato that began this plant. These guys probably coulda used some more time in the ground.
A few more potatoes. The kids helped harvest these.
How did I know they were ready? Well, I didn't. And some of them weren't. But I was curious so I dug one up and found a bunch of sweet potatoes. And I'd like to free up the bed to grow something else there soon. As I kept digging, I realized some of the plants really needed more time. Besides, we can't eat so many sweet potatoes immediately, so we might as well store them in the ground, still growing. I was going to let some of the smaller plants stay in the ground, but then I dug up a diseased plant. Uh-oh. That was it. Time to yank everything else out of the ground before any more potatoes get sick.
Yuck, diseased potatoes. More on this below.
At any rate, we've got more sweet potatoes than we can eat in a long time - even after we toss out the diseased ones - and our soil is nice and soft!
Yay! Nice soft soil. OK, so it still isn't rich, black loam. It's the same heavy clay it always was, just easier to dig and with slightly more microorganisms living in it.
About Diseases of Sweet Potatoes
I looked up this site about sweet potato diseases. I think our problem is black rot. Apparently it stays in the soil for 4 years or so. And it can spread while the potatoes are in storage. Here is what we are doing:
While harvesting:
- Washing off all the sweet potatoes in the same area where we dig them.
- Washing off all garden tools with water before using them in other parts of the garden.
- Tossing out any crop residue instead of composting it (although it goes in the yard waste bin for municipal composting, which I imagine is so hot that it'll take care of any fungi hanging around.)
- Tossing out any diseased material immediately.
- Washing our hands with soap after working in that area of the garden, before we go work in other parts of the garden.
With the harvested sweet potatoes:
- Eating them as fast as we can.
- Keeping the groups of sweet potatoes we harvested separate from one another. One group was already sitting in the same pile with the diseased plants before I figured out what the problem was. We'll eat those first and keep them separate from the other sweet potatoes we harvested.
- NOT using these potatoes as starters for future crops. (The info sheet says the potatoes can get sick while in storage. I'm not gonna risk a future crop by using them as starters.)
For future sweet potato crops:
- CROP ROTATION. No more sweet potatoes in this part of the yard for four years. Period.
- Look up which other crops are susceptible to this fungi and then don't plant those there either.
- Purchase disease-free slips to grow sweet potatoes next year. These can be found at the local nursery and probably online too. I got the sweet potatoes we used to grow this crop from the farmers market, and I bet that's where the fungi came from.
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