Garden success story

     Since this was my very first garden, I'll admit that I didn't know what I was doing. I planted a lot of different vegetables that I thought I'd like to eat, then crossed my fingers and hoped. When I gained a second garden plot later in the season, I decided to plant a long row of sweet potatoes, because I had heard that they like hot weather. 

     What I later learned is that you don't have to wait to eat the potatoes - you can eat sweet potato greens. In fact, they are one of the few greens that grow during the heat without during bitter (at least in my experience). So I ate sweet potato green salads, and then I harvested all the greens right before I dug up the potatoes. 

     I was a bit nervous about harvesting the potatoes, because experienced gardeners had warned me that you could have verdant growth above ground and yet no tubers.

Success! There were, in fact, sweet potatoes in the earth.

We harvested 5 buckets of greens (some for my neighbors, because even I can only blanch and freeze so many greens) and a crate full of potatoes. I forgot to weight the crate, but it was too heavy for me to pick up, so I'd guess that I got about 25 pounds. Now those potatoes are all sitting on my bedroom floor on a tarp. They need to cure for several months. During this time, the cuts heal, and then the enzyme do their magic to make the potato sweet. I'm looking forward to many batches of sweet potato gnocchi, topped with pesto (because my basil plants grew equally as well).