Sweet potatoes are one of the most frustrating crops for me. They need a frost free site and slightly acid soil, so they grow really well here. This year I got a great crop, but only because I had six months without chooks. With no chooks to clear them, I had some fortress fenced garden beds that I had just let go, and a sweet potato vine found it’s way in and thought it was in heaven. Lovely composted, mulched soil and no wallabies.
It gave itself away by overrunning all the weeds though. Within a few months that little vine had covered the entire bed and yielded about 30 kilos of sweet potatoes.
The year before I got none. To quote my own post from that summer: “A wallaby got into the garden last night, and demolished my newly planted sweet potato patch. I spent my whole mowing session this morning devising recipes for wallaby – Turkish wallaby stew, marinated baked wallaby, wallaby kebabs….
I checked the fortress fence for holes, but I think it got in across the verandah through the house and into the garden! It’s not as if it is very hungry – after the recent rains I have trouble keeping up with the mowing – it just likes sweet potatoes better.”
So now I have a gate from the verandah of the house into the garden – which is a real nuisance – it was great to be able to nick in and out of the garden with hands full without having to close a gate. A few months ago I forgot to shut it one night and the wallabies gave the mint and the sugar cane a very radical pruning. Luckily it was before the asparagus got going or the language might have been even worse. They must check to see if it is closed every night! So now it is one of our evening rituals to check the verandah gate is shut.
But, on the plus side, no wallabies in the garden, at least for a few months this time, and I am daring to hope I can plant sweet potatoes. It rained heavily night before last, so I don’t have to water them in which means the bandicoots shouldn’t dig them straight back up again tonight. The bush turkeys get a few, but most grow a bit too deep for turkeys.
They’re not usually a perennial. Conventionally they are planted in spring and harvested in autumn. But when I’ve had a patch established before, I’ve just let it go and dug up a sweet potato or two whenever I want one. The’re too rampant for my fortress fenced intensive beds. I want to grow them as a semi-wild ground covering semi-perennial.
Sweet potato will grow from either a root or a cutting, so there are two ways to plant. One is to just plant a sweet potato you buy from the greengrocer. The second is to plant the vines. I have some vines that are growing inside a spiral where the chooks are going to go in a few weeks, so I’m using the second method.
It’s very easy. Just weave a little crown like the top picture and bury it with the vine underground and at least some of the leaves out. Like this:
That’s it. Try to convince it to stay in the area you planned for it and every few years, retire an old patch and plant a new patch to prevent a build up of nematodes. In March start looking for tubers.
I have one of my usual rounds of carrots and spring onions in the shadehouse ready to plant out, and I shall try to get them in this afternoon after work as well. The discipline of not putting planting off is one of the major benefits of the lunar calendar. It’s only a dozen little tubes of seedlings to plant, quite do-able after work, and just half an hour of garden work at the right time means I have continuity of supply – fresh carrots out of the garden and no need to bother with freezing.
And we have a pot of left-over chicken stew for dinner, already made. Red Leg the rooster has made three meals so far. Will be nice to have dinner ready to just heat up on a planting day.
We have sweet potatoes here too, but we only have a small window of growing for them with our weather. I used them in my courtyard garden last year and people wanted to know what the lovely vine ground cover was! Sounds like your wallabies are as naughty as my goats….yet another apple tree’s apples stripped yesterday . i am beginning to think that we need some sort of enclosed dome , because fences just don’t seem to mean anything to an animal who likes what you have planted in the garden.
Hi Kim, my garden beds are now fully enclosed – a spiral of weldmesh structural frame, with sparrow wire 40cm underground to foil the bandicoots, then chicken wire up to 2 metres high to foil the wallabies etc, then bird netting over the top to foil the possums, bush turkeys and bower birds. Fence maintenance is now my biggest garden job. I now use the enclosures though for multiple purposes – as chook runs (in sequence – I move the chooks around them), as trellises (I now prefer the climbing variety of anything that will climb) and as support for anything that needs staking (tomatoes, broad beans etc). I could probably just about try goats again!
I’m not having much luck with sweet potato either unfortunately . Was hopeful as it is the current fav veg around here with the toddlers! Your place sounds like fort knox and i certainly understand why as i just noticed my beans, carrots and corn have dissapeared overnight…have you still got those wallaby recipes??
Jode x
I don’t think I gave my sweet potatoes enough room last year and they are quite my most favorite veggie to grow. this year i have doubled the amount of room assigned to them. gosh you do seem to have lots of creatures after your veggies. Luckily for us it is just the bandicoots. I don’t want to tempt fate by saying that we have it well fenced, but I am continually checking the fences.
Mmmm! I can’t grow them here..too cold. I was wondering about the greenhouse though.
Careful. They do go rampant.
Sweet potatoes at my place work so well that last year they took over everything. My mango tree dissappeared. My fences were green and my perennials vanished in the dark shade of sweetpotato vines.
I love sweet potatoes but this year i am not prepared to sacrifice everything else for them. Rampant is an understatement. Thank goodness for chooks and bush turkeys who cleared the garden for a fresh start.