A Salad Garden Followed by Sweet Potatoes

The southernmost bed D begins as one row of cabbage transplants planted early in April, one row of leaf lettuce planted at the beginning of March and a row of German Giant radishes planted mid March. By mid May the lettuce and radishes will have been eaten as spring salads and the cabbage row covered with rock anchored floating row cover to protect it from white cabbage butterflies and their offspring.

In mid May in the space vacated by lettuce and radishes, I will plant a row of a dozen Beauregard or Georgia Jet sweet potato slips. The traditional way to plant sweet potato slips is to hoe up a 10” ridge and use a hoe handle to poke holes into the ridge about a foot apart; the slips are put in the holes, the holes are filled with water and smashed down tight around the slip to form a shallow basin. This bowl basin is watered every day for a week until the slip takes root and then it is pretty well left on its own. The slips are kept cultivated and weed free until they begin to vine and spread. The sweet potato is a poor soil crop and probably can get by on what fertility the lettuce and radishes left behind. When the sweet potato plant begins to vine, I put down a newspaper and leaf mulch for the vines to grow over. This mulch is mostly for weed control. I will allow the vines to spread right over the top of the cabbages and reach under when I need one.

As I said planting slips vertically into ridges is standard practice and has its advantages, especially when it comes time to dig sweet potato roots before the first fall frost. But I am tempted to try something different and plant the slips horizontally, in shallow troughs a couple inches deep and running north and south. The slightly raised bed will still run 12’ east and west and the plants will still be about one foot apart in the row but the actual slip will be buried in a shallow north-south trench with only a few leaves showing. This is very similar to the way some gardeners plant tomatoes. Like tomato stems, sweet potato stems have the ability to put down roots from buried horizontal stem. I am experimenting to see if this type of planting will significantly increase root yields.  The seed catalogs claim that both Beauregard and Georgia Jet varieties grow in the north and yield up to 10 pounds per plant. I would be happy to get half of that.

Whatever sweet potatoes I get can be used to replace white potato French fries, baked potatoes and hash browns during the winter and also substitute in recipes for the winter squash and pumpkins which take too much room to grow in a small garden. I have really had good luck storing sweet potatoes all winter in baskets in our cool back room. They are good keepers.

Except for a couple rhubarb plants to make spring pies and a couple chard plants tucked in somewhere for summer greens and a celery substitute, that pretty well describes my small 200 square foot garden plan. It is small enough to work with hand tools but large enough to put a dent in a grocery budget.