A neighbor who dropped by for some chicken feed said, "So, I see you've mastered sweet potatoes." Not that I know of. I would consider it mastering the cultivation of sweet potatoes if I had accurately predicted, ten years running, whether our crop would be a plentiful or poor one, and if I had corrected any problems that arose before they became destructive, such that the majority of years an ample crop was procured. At the beginning of this season, when I committed my beautiful, lovingly tended little sweet potato slips to the soil, I was hopeful that conditions would be to their liking. However, it was a bit of an experiment since I had never interplanted them with sweet peppers on such a scale before (20 plants each or so), nor had I ever interplanted them with okra at all. Also, I was worried about voles, since I've heard horror stories about people going out to harvest their much-anticipated tubers to find only chewed-up nubs under wilted vines. As it turns out, the sweet potatoes made a lovely (and stunningly productive) living mulch and understory for both species, but especially the okra, and I saw only one tuber that had only slight evidence of chewing by some rodent. We just dug over two hundred pounds of sweet potatoes from two forty-two foot double-cropped rows.
The peppers were planted every 2 feet with a sweet potato plant between each, and the okra were sown on 18 inch intervals, again with a sweet potato in each hill. Despite being planted closer together, the sweet potatoes with the okra row made bigger tubers and a thicker carpet of vines than those planted with the peppers. I chalk this up to mostly shading...the peppers make a more formidable shade. But it could also be that I planted the okra row first, and used my oldest and most vigorous sweet potato slips there. I am impressed that the sweet potatoes seem fully compatible with either species. I don't know the variety we use, since we bought anonymous slips a few years ago at the farmer's market, but I'd be willing to hazard a guess towards "Beauregard."
For those interested, we prepared the soil thusly: A generous helping of autumn leaves over the whole area in late autumn, several applications of clover-heavy grass clippings in spring (about a two-inch layer each time), followed by a thick hay mulch. Pepper and sweet potato plants were set out into small circles of exposed soil scraped through the decomposing mulch layers, and okra was seeded into similar circles. The sweet potatoes were never watered individually...the assumption was that they would get the water they needed from proximity to the well-watered peppers and okra. This summer, watering was only necessary for the first half of the warm season. Most of that soil has not been tilled at all for at least 2 years, and when we dug the sweet potatoes we saw the benefits of that: every clod unearthed was riddled with invertebrate (insect, worm, etc.) tunnels, which make perfect passageways for the rapidly expanding root masses that garden plants need to be able to develop in order to thrive.
So...a success. It feels good. The tubers have been gently washed and are now "curing" (hanging out in a really warm spot for a few days) in the three-season room in the in-law quarters. There is no sweet potato like a sweet potato harvested before the weather gets really cold and then properly cured, or so I read. Last year I cured some so hard I cooked them with a space heater! We're going about it more gently this year. But I must say, the ones that didn't get cooked were the most fragrant and sweet autumn vegetable I can remember eating. I guess the ones I'd had up until then had mostly been treated pretty poorly...perhaps even refrigerated, which is a terrible thing to do to a sweet potato.
That's what we did with our sweet potatoes, and this is how they turned out. I can't take much credit for it, but I think we've learned a few things that will come in handy in coming years. I'm talking about vegetables, but I could just as well have been talking about our daughter who recently turned nine, and who just today underwent a calm and low-key ritual at our church celebrating the developmental passage that the tenth year is for most children. Raising children is, in my experience, in many ways like gardening: you take advice, read the books, get to know your context; then with no time to lose you move ahead with what seems best to you, monitoring how things are going as best you can and making adjustments as seems wise, and eagerly awaiting the results.
We celebrated today's ritual with a round of Chipotle food, consumed as a picnic in JMU's arboretum, and by moving "Kali's tree" (the tree we planted in honor of Kali's first birthday) to it's sixth and hopefully final home by our front walk. It's fitting, since the tree, a jujube (Chinese date), was collected as the progeny of a tree we had enjoyed by our front walk at our first apartment on Hamlet drive. We are looking forward to the fall when we can again stoop and collect the spongy little fruits on our way into the house!
Today was a good chance to reflect and take stock, and realize that without us ever "mastering parenting", we've got a pretty nice bumper crop of nine-year-old on our hands who has been growing imperceptibly each passing day, and just like as time went by this season I would root around at the bases of the vines and feel encouraged by what I felt, every so often we get little glimpses in Kali of a yield beyond our hopes.
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