I Wet My Plants

A couple of months ago I started an experiment for growing my own sweet potatoes and so far it had been a positive experience. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to get the growth off of the seed tuber and into the ground. I started reading Ken Allan’s book, Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden, and still had no clue how to process them. I finally found an informative article here that explained what to do.

Before I go any further, for my own sanity, let’s get the terms down right. From what I understand a sweet potato seed tuber sprouts, then grows shoots that you cut off to root in water to make slips. There. Got it? It took me a while to figure it out as folks seems to use these terms interchangeably.

You can remove the shoots once they grow to a height of 8″ - 10″ tall. The shoots in this somewhat blurry picture were well over 18″ tall so I was good to go:

There were about five shoots growing on this seed tuber: three below the water line and two above. Here’s a close-up of what I was dealing with:

Lots of roots from both the shoots below the water line and the seed tuber. Holding the seed tuber firmly with my left hand, I found the base of one of the shoots with my right hand. I firmly twisted and pulled the shoot, disentangling its roots from the rest of the root system. Here’s a blurry photo of it:

You can kind of see where the shoot snapped off, leaving a yellowish patch on the seed tuber. Here’s the slips that I pulled off:

Whoo! Look at those roots! I’m actually a couple of weeks behind planting these slips out, mostly because I was too scared to wreck them. Here’s all the roots I was left with at the bottom of the seed tuber once I pulled off all the shoots that were below the water line:

The shoots that grew from below the water line already had nice root systems (see above). There were two shoots that had grown from the very top of the seed tuber and didn’t have a root system at all:

I snapped those shoots off and put them in a large tray of water to help them develop roots (apparently this takes a few days). I also put the other slips into the tray as well, ensuring that their roots were covered with water while the leaves and stem were dry:

I tossed the spent seed tubers into the trash. The next step is planting the slips in your garden. More on that later.

Earlier this year I offered to help put in a new flower bed in at a friend’s house.  She told me the colors she liked, I did a bit of research, got the seeds and grew them in cell trays.  Here’s a list of all the ones I started from seed:

• Aubrietia ‘Large Flowered Mix’
• Cerastium ‘Snow in Summer’
• Viola ‘Comedy Mixed’
• Forget-Me-Not
• Pinks ‘Old Fashioned Mix’
• Lavender
• Sheperd’s Scabiosa ‘Jasione Laevis’
• Coreopsis ‘Early Sunrise’
• Catananche ‘Coerulea’
• Chrysanthemum ‘Crazy Daisy’
• Echinacea ‘Purple Coneflower’
• Delphinium ‘Pacific Giant’
• Wild lupines

They were busting out of their cell trays and we finally put them into a new home this past weekend.  Here’s a shot of the location:

I picked up 6 bags of black earth and 3 bags of sheep manure and brought my spade and shovel as well as my watering can and all the flowers.  I placed the flower packets on the ground to get an idea of where to put the seedlings:

This isn’t a very good angle as the bottom of this picture is actually the left side when you are standing with your back to the road.  In this picture, I put most of the taller plants in the bottom left with a dip in the middle then back to some taller plants at the top left.  The two plants in the middle were mid-size with the plants on the right being shorter.

We used a garden hose to lay out the shape and then used the spade to cut into the sod.

Next we peeled back the sod, flipped it and stamped it down, a really difficult task due to the number of shallow tree roots:

Once that was done, we re-applied our mosquito repellant and started to spread the black earth, topped it with sheep manure and mixed it in:

I don’t know what it is about freshly spread dirt/manure that mosquitoes really like, however, I got a zillion bites that are still itchy.  This is how we left it before jumping in the pool:

Had a nice dinner and a few drinks then headed out to finish the bed off by filling it with flower seedlings.  This is how it looks from the front:

Overall it only took an hour to prepare the soil and then 15 minutes to plant the flowers (thanks in part to being eaten by mosquitoes).  It was a nice and quick project.

In mid-April I was given some Georgia Jet sweet potato seed roots from Ottawa Hortiphilia. Georgia Jets are the most productive variety for northern climates as it has the shortest growing period of 80 - 90 days. Of course I had no idea how to grow them and promptly potted them in soil with a drink of water.

I found out later that was the completely wrong thing to do. I emailed Ken Allan, author of “Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden”, who told me to stand the seed roots up in containers using toothpicks, fill with water to the 1/2 to 3/4 mark on the tuber and to keep in warm place (window sills are not good because they are cold at night). So I did that while I waited for his book to arrive. This photo, taken on April 17th, shows the correct way to prepare your seed roots:

I would move them to the windowsill during the day for warmth and then move them onto the dining room table at night so they wouldn’t get chilled. On May 1st, the seed roots looked like this:

Exciting!

Everyday I would check the water level, topping it up when it got below the 3/4 mark of the seed root. Sometimes I would change the water when it got kind of yucky-looking.  It wasn’t a very satisfying task until mid-May when I spied my first slip shoots:

You can clearly see two little shoots on the top left and right of the seed root. Woohoo! It was working! Over the past month, these little seed roots sent up so many slips they had to be given bigger containers to hold more water and give more room for some of the side slips. Here’s how they looked about 4 days ago:

They’re huge!  Now I have to figure out how to plant them!

The last few nights have dipped down to + 3°C and two days ago I got an email about the satellite garden. Apparently there had been ground frost and I should come out for an assessment. Here’s what greeted me:

Complete death of a Black Eel zucchini. Truly, if you were to look up “severe frost damage” this would be the picture. Everywhere I looked there was frost damage:

There were some survivors. The Peaches and Cream corn made it through okay:

As well as some of the frost-hardy veggies like Laurentian rutabaga:

Melody spinach:

Watermelon radish:

Detroit Dark Red beets, White Globe turnip and Cylindra beets:

And the Norland potatoes:

Almost everything else was a write-off: Citron watermelon, Moon & Stars watermelon, Black Eel zucchini, Smart Pickle cucumber, Jack O’Lantern pumpkin, Boothby’s Blonde cucumber, Bottlegourd squash and Canada Crookneck squash. All the curcubits.

So I decided to start some new seeds and fast-track them by pre-sprouting on my heating mat. They’ve all germinated in the last two days and I’ll keep them inside where it’s warm once they’re potted up to get them growing quickly.

This is my one ray of hope for tasty watermelon this summer. I just hope I don’t flub it up. Again. Gah.

I decided to help put in a new vegetable garden at my in-law’s house this year. I came up with a design of six 4′ x 15′ beds with mulched pathways in the shape of an “H”. Then we found a good, sunny location in the backyard and staked it out with twine:

We started calling around and found a good price on some blended garden mix of topsoil, composted manure and black peat from a local landscaping company.

Using a yard calculator from Earth Depot I was able to figure out we would need almost 10 cubic yards of garden soil to create a 16′ x 32′ x 6″ deep bed. We also needed some extra to fill in along the driveway. In the end, we got 15 cubic yards as a full load on a tandem truck at a cost of $346.50 with taxes and delivery included. Here’s a shot of all that dirt:

I was tasked with getting cardboard and found an amazing source from IKEA by dumpster diving in their Customer Cardboard Recycling bin and going into the warehouse and collecting empty boxes. At first I felt a little conspicuous searching up and down the aisles until I asked a staff person if it was okay that I take the cardboard. His reply was, “Definitely! Cardboard’s free”. IKEA cardboard is great as there is no dyes or paints on it and it has a minimum of tape and plastic. Also, you can usually luck out with a few huge pieces which are great for covering large surface areas.

Once we got all the cardboard together, we started to lay it down and wet it with water from a hose. Then we dumped the soil on top using a lawn tractor and trailer.

It took two of us about two minutes to fill up the trailer before heading over to the garden site. The pile slowly started to go down:

There was a good rhythm to it: load up the trailer, move it to the site, spread and level it, lay down more cardboard, water it, get more soil, repeat. Here you can see that we’re just over half-way:

We quickly ran out of our cardboard stash:

The next day I got more cardboard to finish off the rest of the garden. We also mixed in some extra sheep manure/leaf compost that we got on sale from a local farm store, spacing out the bags at regular intervals to help spread it evenly.

We let it sit for a week so it could settle in a bit and then we started creating the pathways. Instead of doing the “H” in the initial design, we decided that two pathways would be enough. After four hours of work we finally had the garden finished and planted with rutabaga, carrots (under the white board), beets, radishes and spinach:

I watered the areas where I had planted seeds:

It even has its very own sign - a tribute to a lone rabbit spotted earlier in the day:

In the upcoming weeks I’ll be planting 2 types of corn, 4 types of watermelon, 2 types of squash, 3 types of cucumber, 2 types of potatoes, asparagus and bush beans. Hooray!