Fri Mar 24 07:00:00 PM EDT 2023
With our current situation(The President of the United States declared there would be global famine as a result of the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, banking collapse, etc.) I decided that I should grow some food. My first attempt was to grow at home one of my favorite and most recognizeable staple crops, the humble potato. I had a bag of russet potatoes which are delicious and familiar which had started to sprout in my cupboard.
I decided to plant them since they were no longer good to eat. To my delight they began to sprout. I watched them grow over time and I was excited as they grew larger, looking very vigorous.
As you can see I spared no expense, using only the finest planters money can buy. Gardening doesn't have to be expensive. The lower the barrier to entry the better, don't be afraid to use what you have.
What resulted after a few months were 5 large, beautiful leafy green plants. This was the most success that I had achieved with gardening so far (or so I thought).
When it came time to harvest I was so excited to see what I would get. I had imagined being able to supplement my grocery bill with the bounty of my own porch. What I was met with were 3 of the smallest, saddest potatoes that I had ever seen. They were even smaller somehow than the seed potatoes which I had planted to begin with. On the other hand, they were delicious roasted in the oven with a bit of olive oil.
What happened? The problem was that I was trying to farm the plants which I wanted with no regard for the climate in which I live. In fact, after so many months of cultivation, I learned that white potatoes require frost or the threat of frost in order to produce large tubers. When it gets cold the plant will take the sugars that it produces using sunlight and convert them into starches in the tubers that will survive the winter and can produce new plants in the spring. The problem for me was I live in South Florida where there is no frost so this just wouldn't work for me.
My first exploration into annual crops that suit my climate is the venerable sweet potato. The sweet potato grows like a weed where I live. If there is no frost during the year (as is the case for me) the sweet potato will just continue growing and growing forever. Getting started is also extremely simple. A sweet potato obtained from a grocery store can simply be placed in the dirt and watered and it will produce vigorous vines. This is exactly what I did.
The first vines and leaves to emerge had a beautiful purple vein with green leaf. The rate of growth was surprising to me. Even on my North facing porch which never sees direct sunlight, in just a couple weeks the plant really exploded. These pictures were taken 2 weeks apart.
The sweet potato is a perennial in this climate so the root will just get bigger and bigger each year until harvested. The leaves of the sweet potato are also both edible and nutritious. They have a taste similar to kale if that is something you enjoy, I like to put it on my burgers or into a salad. What's more, propagation is extremely simple. The vines can be cut into ~1ft sections that can each be planted. It is helpful to cut off the bigger leaves to reduce the amount of water that each slip loses before it establishes its roots.
Each slip that's planted will produce its own new sweet potato plant that will produce brand new tubers. So one root bought from a grocery store could result in potentially limitless sweet potatoes in a short amount of time. This is exactly what I have done with sweet potato vines now taking over my porch.
Here you can see some freshly planted sweet potato slips. They may look sad now, but in a week or two they will perk up.
All of these sweet potato plants which are growing all over my porch were started from the same plant that grew from a single sweet potato that was planted ~2.5 months ago.
My plants have now grown the length of my porch. So to optimize the sunlight harnessed by my plants the only way to go is up. For this reason, I built a makeshift trellis.
The trellis is extremely simple, all it does is give the vines something to climb on to get more light. What I have done to maximize the sunlight the plants get with the space that I have is move the trees and shrubs to the front (closer to the edge of the porch) with my vining plants at the back of the row. But with the vines reaching up to the trellis they will still get plenty of sunlight. The goal is to maximize the plant coverage for the plane of sunlight which is accessible when all you have is a porch.
That's all for now!