Sweet Potatoes
Terra Nossa is now selling sweet potato slips for the 2012 season.
Growing sweet potatoes at Terra Nossa
We are always trying to push the limit at Terra Nossa and we all love to eat sweet potatoes. When we found a source of certified organic “slips” from Mapple Farms in New Brunswick we were so excited to try them. We tried 2 varieties – the Georgia Jet which is orange fleshed and the Tainung 65 which is creamy fleshed. We will continue on with the Georgia Jet because we found if very productive and very sweet tasting.
We saved some tubers and started our own slips. In March we “planted” tubers in soil we put in some bins inside our living room. In about 3 weeks green shoots started coming up, we let these get about 6” tall and snipped them off. We then put the cut slips into jars of water, in days they sprouted roots. We soon had jars covering all the kitchen counters.
Once the warm days or more importantly nights seemed stable we were ready to plant them outside. We had made raised beds and used our organic mulch to cover the beds ( which really helped to warm the soil) and is a huge help to keep the weeds under control. We planted them about 1 foot apart and off they went. The vines are so pretty, I think they would also make a great hanging plant.
Sweet potatoes are light feeders and because we had planted them where the chickens had roamed before we did not give them any additional fertilizer or compost.
We harvested them the 3rd week of October and were surprised to find that some had went down as far as 2’. We ended up with about 800 lbs of sweet potatoes. Of this about 200 lbs were perfect, 200lbs were ok, they were very large up to 5 lbs each and ugly and cracked with a bit of wire worm nibbles, but perfect for sweet potatoes fries and roasting. We fed about 300 lbs to our pigs, they loved them and have about 100 lbs to pick over for starting slips.
It was the curing that ended up a bit of a challenge. In order to store sweet potatoes over the winter they first need to be cured. This involves keeping them at a high heat 80-90 F for 10 – 14 days. Luckily our garage is heated and so we turned up the heat and turned it into a sauna for our sweet potatoes. The humidity was very high. They cured successfully and we have been enjoying them all winter.
We will be increasing the amount we grow for 2012 because they sold out so fast.
