My first sweet potato harvest for 2016

This is my first sweet potato harvest this year. We picked them today.

This batch is in a 10-litre metal bowl. It's around a fifth of the full harvest, we think.

The harvest is not as big as the 2015 one, but it's good enough. I'm planning to store most of it for the rest of the year.

S Is For Sweet Potatoes

The largest sweet potato from Saturday's harvest

On Saturday we harvested a batch of sweet potatoes from the garden. It was a very big harvest, by our standards... enough potatoes to last us three to four months. That is, as long as my nephews, who've been crunching on the potatoes raw, don't succeed in winning the Man vs Sweet Potato war:)

I used to eat sweet potatoes if I had to, but they were not something that I would choose to put on my plate. However, I started growing them because Mma loves them and they were  another source of starch for the family.

Then I had my first home-grown sweet potato and I enjoyed it so much I expanded the crop to a bigger patch the next season.

And the wonderful thing about my sweet potatoes is that I haven't had to do anything but keep the patch watered and weed-free, not even to replant, since first crop.

Growing sweet potatoes


Site selection: Sweet potatoes like warm sunny areas, and while they do very well in well-composted soil, they can also grow in poor soil well enough.

You can grow sweet potatoes in a separate patch where they can regrow season after season (though there is a danger of disease in that option) or you can grow them in your main garden but out of the way so they have room to stretch out. They make great ground cover, and I've seen several varieties of sweet potato vines that I want to get just for their ground cover and cascading window box potential.

Soil preparation: I planted my sweet potatoes outside the main vegetable garden. The soil initially had a good dose of cow manure and compost put in, but we let that seep in for months, as sweet potatoes don't do well in soil that has too much nitrogen.

The planting process: You can buy your slips, the green plantings coming out of sprouting sweet potatoes, from your local nursery. I got my slips from my sister-in-law, who had a couple of sweet  potatoes from a retail chain start sprouting.

We were very surprised, as we'd read that sweet potatoes provided by retailers were waxed to prevent sprouting.

Anyhoo, we cut off the numerous  slips when they were around 6 to 9 inches long and then cut and threw away the bottom inch from each slip, as that portion sometimes harbors disease organisms. We then planted the slips by burying them with soil coming up to the leaves.


Caring for the plants: From there is was only a matter of keeping the slips well-watered and weed-free and occassionally lifting the growing vines to keep them from rooting at the joints, as that allows them to put their energy into forming many undersized tubers at each rooted area rather than ripening the main crop at the base of the plant.  

Beyond that, it is recommended that you handle the plants as little as possible to prevent wounds in the plant that might be invaded by disease spores.

Also make sure that you don't over-water the plants, as the plants may rot. If the weather is a bit dry, no worries! Sweet potatoes can withstand dry spells in the weather.

Harvesting: You can start harvesting your sweet potatoes when  the leaves start getting yellow. Let the soil dry out for around two weeks before you start harvesting, as you want to be able to dig them out without mud getting into them and spoiling them.

Unless you're planning to let a new batch of sweet potatoes grow in that patch, make sure that you dig out all the tubers, even the thin roots deep in the soil.

I found washing the harvest to be very hard work, LOL, but once that was done, I left the tubers to dry in the sun for a couple of days before I put them away in a dry well-ventilated place in my pantry.

I wish I had a proper storage area for crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes and pumpkins.This weekend I realised while I was cleaning the sweet potatoes how ill-equipped I am to deal with the harvests that my garden is generating. I'll just have to make do for now, though.

Serving suggestions: Sweet potatoes taste great eaten raw, especially when newly picked from the garden.

I also like to boil them and leave them on the table for everyone to grab as a snack, cut them up and stuff a roast chicken with them or even put them with a mix of carrots, onions, robot peppers and a dash of herbs in my lazy roasts.

That's when I just rub a chicken with a garlic/ginger/herbs mix, put it in a roast dish with a bunch of fresh vegetables, sprinkle some black pepper on them, cover the dish with foil and put it in the oven to slow roast for a long time while I attend to other things.

My favourite recipe though is the baked  sweet potato. I wash and cut full potatoes up into thick slices, sprinkle them with a dash of salt and peri-peri and a spoonful of olive oil, then put them in an oven to bake at 180 degrees Celsius (around 350 degrees Fahrenheit, I think) for around 20 minutes or until they are soft but not mushy. Sometimes I then turn the oven to grill for 5 minutes or so, just to crisp them a little bit.

Our First Harvest of White Maize/Corn

Today I harvested our first batch of maize/corn. It's still a bit puny, but it will grow bigger, especially with the rains coming more often as they have been of late.

I'm looking forward to more of this in the coming weeks. Nomnomnomnom!

5 Tips For Successful Succession Planting To Keep You Well-Fed Throughout The Year

Today's beetroot and carrot harvest

Vegetables and herbs from the garden have slowly become a regular part of our meal, to the extent that we have now started to take for granted that "of course, some things we just pick!"

It's so nice to just walk outside to pick fresh parsley, basil, thyme, chilli, chives and mint when I cook.

It's almost like going into the pantry or opening the fridge to take out some ingredient, not a big deal at all.

Yet it IS a big deal, because I used to spend a lot of money on these herbs every month.


This week I also picked a lot of cucumber, spinach (sold most of it), carrots and beetroots (preserving most of it for future use).

We're also planting more carrots, spring onions, beetroot, spinach and turnips. This is part of our monthly succeession planting, so we always have food growing and ready to harvest at any given time.

Here are some the things I keep in mind when I do succession planting:

Succession Planting: Harvesting Beetroot, Chilli, Carrots and Cucumber & Planting More

This week I’ve been very busy in the garden. I harvested a 10-litre container of cucumber, around 1kg of chilli peppers, a 10 litre container of carrots, another of beetroot and a enough green beans for two family meals.

We also continue to sell bags of spinach. I also planted more cucumbers, baby marrows(zucchini), spinach, onions, beetroot, chives and three packs of flower mixes. I plan to do more planting in the next couple of weeks.

My main aim in starting a garden is to produce almost 80% of our food supply. The biggest challenge making sure that we have a good supply of vegetables every week, all year.

I notice that our supply is not consistent, and we tend to go through a feast or famine situation, and I’m unhappy about that. So I’m going to plant more often/every month, so I always have things growing/ready for harvest.

Last night it rained, so today was cool enough for vegetable soup. The soup was easy to make. I used 8 whole potatoes, 2 herbed onions and 2 packs of herbed carrots from my frozen stash from the Spring crop, a teaspoon or garlic and ginger mix, dried parsley (from last summer’s crop), 1 pack of tomato paste and 2 packs of cream of mushroom soup, all boiling in 2 litres of water until the vegetables were soft, the water reduced and the mixture thickened. I added paprika for seasoning.  I used a big pot, so I had enough for lunch for everyone and I'm goin

Drought, Pollusion, Food Prep and Fashion

source: www.gardeninggirlusa.com

As I mentioned on my writing blog, I love spending time in the garden, but I’m not in love with the way I feel like a frump while I do it.

So, in lieu of Christmas shopping, I spent some time online looking for fashionable gardening wear.

I liked the look and feel of the clothes by  Gardeninggirlusa. Unfortunately, they have Autumn fashion, and summer is just starting here. Shorts and vests in dark colours would work best for me. The pants on the left look great, but so not practical! Their boots rock though. For any season:-)

I also checked out Land Girl . I really liked their clothes: simple and practical. Definitely the kind of clothing I'd wear in the garden.

And now that we're done with my frivolous views on gardening and fashion...

My Mid-November Onion and Cabbage Harvest

Over the weekend, I'm going to clean the onions, cut, saute and freeze them in small meal-sized packages. They should last me months.The  cabbages I'll just clean, cut and freeze.

From Garden To Table

Look at what I picked for lunch yesterday.  Nice to be able to just go get what i need from the garden, no? The green beans were soft and sweet and so nice!

Inching Our Way To Mid-Season

We are now approaching the end of the first month of Autumn, inching our way towards mid-season. We are still harvesting plenty of spinach, onions, parsley, basil, thyme and chilli, with the occassional green peppers and roma tomatoes.

But I can see that I will need to stagger my plantings much more effectively to allow the vegetable harvests to be staggered throughout summer and autumn, and not have one big batch at a time and little left for the rest of the season.

Kelebogile, the part-timer gardener who helps me with the heavy lifting, prepares the soil for me to transplant seedlings

Preparations for Autumn/Winter planting are underway. So far, the following seeds have sprouted:

• Peas
• White beans
• Broad beans
• Carrots
• Spinach
• Beetroot
• Swiss Chard
• Roma tomatoes
• Onions (3 types)
• Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes
• Butternut
• Cucumber
• Coriander
• Cabbage
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Nasturtiums
• Sweet peas (climber and bush)
• Wildflowers
• Allysium

We've begun transplanting tomatoes and cabbages, and will transplant or thin the rest as and when needed. I still have more seeds to plant - some for later crops of the vegetables named above, and some for new vegetables we have never planted before.

I am very happy with our progress though, and I feel that the food we harvested in summer and early autumn is contributing heavily towards my family's food security.

Then there are the unexpected bonuses: like today I was in the garden, picking some red jalapeno chilli to bottle for future use and street food vendor who regularly buys chicken from us came by and found me in the garden. On impulse, she decided to buy a whole bundle of jalapeno chilli to use on her food. It wasn't a big sale, but i've enjoyed some regular sales even though i don't advertise at all, as i don't view my gardening as a business. But  the money goes into my seeds funds and at the rate it's growing, it should buy me some nice seeds for Spring planting. The garden being able to pay for seeds would be very nice.

P.S Food Police: For the past week, I've been very consistent with meals, eating when I needed to, even when I didn't feel like it. Today's dinner sucked though: I was in the mood for lasagne, and SIL was going to town to do her own family's grocery shopping. So she volunteered to bring me a pre-packaged meat lasagne frrom Checkers Hyper.  To say it was bad is a kindness:   the mince tasted like bad soya and there was very little of it. There were two sheets of lasagne in that one boxed serving. MAYBE! The rest was the sauce, which kinda tried to make up for the lack of substance in the meal. Someone remind me why i bought this pre-packaged stuff, when I could have made my own lasagne/ or at least, bribed SIL into cooking it for me?