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Plant more Radishes and Salad Turnips next spring
For next spring, we could plant both Tomato beds with Salad Turnips and substitute Radishes in the Sweet Potato bed (because they're faster). We might also try to get all four of the cucurbit (Cucumber, Watermelon, Winter Squash & Pumpkin) beds dug for the early May planting. That way, we can plant twice as long a row of each early crop.
I guess we shoudn’t complain about it being a little wet & chilly…
The Great Sweet Potato Experiment
Last year we grew sweet potatoes for the very first time, and had a very successful crop. Sweet potatoes grow from "slips", which are small stems that root from sweet potato tubers. Last year we ordered our slips from Burpee over the web, but the year before we had difficulty acquiring viable slips and didn't end up planting any sweet potatoes. For this year, we resolved to grow our own slips.
Over the winter, I went in search of organic sweet potatoes that had not been treated with a growth retardant. I also wanted to know what kind of sweet potatoes we would be planting. I went to several winter farmers' markets and talked to several farmers. They all tried to talk me out of our plan- they did not grow their own slips and believed it to be very difficult. I finally was able to buy 10 Covington sweet potatoes at the Somerville Winter Farmers' Market from North Star Farm in North Dartmouth. These sweet potatoes were extremely large, and might not have been the ideal sweet potatoes for our experiment.
There were many recommended ways to grow sweet potato slips that I found, and we decided to experiment and try several different growing techniques. The one constant was the recommendation that sweet propagation was helped by heat, so those of us who had heat sources used them. 3 of us took sweet potatoes and attempted to grow them in water, and I took 6 sweet potatoes and grew them in a variety of materials: 3 in potting soil, 2 in coir, and 1 in sand, all on a heating pad. The one thing we didn't try was to cut the sweet potatoes in half before putting them in a planting medium- I didn't discover this recommendation until after the experiment started. I planted the sweet potatoes sideways with the planting medium about halfway up the sweet potato, and the people who suspended the sweet potatoes in water tried to make sure that the root end was down.
At first, it seemed like the experiment was a complete failure. The sweet potatoes did nothing, for weeks on end. I kept them watered, and made sure that they didn't get too much water that would cause them to rot. The people who had them in water reported that there was something of a white fuzz on the sweet potato, but it didn't lead to anything.
Finally, one of the sweet potatoes in potting soil started showing signs of life.
Once the sweet potatoes started sprouting, they just took off. 2 of the 3 that were potted in potting soil sent up small forests of sprouts, and then the 2 potatoes in coir started sprouting. The sweet potato in sand was next, and finally, the last sweet potato in potting soil started sending up sprouts. It seemed pretty clear that the sweet potatoes in potting soil sent up the most sprouts in the shortest amount of time.
The slips got big enough that it became time to twist them off and root them in water. This seemed like a terrifying task that could easily destroy all my hard work, but it was actually really easy. The slips weren't that hard to detach, and if they were (mostly because I had let them grow too tall) yanking them off didn't seem to have any serious side effects. I soon had many slips sprouting in water.
Meanwhile, most the the sweet potatoes sprouting in water were still not showing any growth. Elisabeth transferred her sweet potato to potting soil, and finally had some success.
Michael was the only one who managed to have success with sweet potatoes in water.
Another beautiful day at the garden
We had another beautiful day for planting yesterday. We planted a second-round of radish seeds, added a few more lettuce and cabbage seedlings to what we had put in before, and planted first rounds of parsnips, soybeans, salad turnips, and parsley.
Steven watered. Dick weeded. Corinna and Martha thinned our early radish shoots, always a difficult task for tender-hearted gardeners. Susan cleared a plot of winter rye, then planted soybeans at one end, with the help of a young visitor. Elizabeth put in parsley seedlings and a screen to shelter them from too much sun. Several of the guys started in on a watering homunculus that will ring the garden, reduce hose dragging, and bring more flexibility to our watering routines.
The deadline has now passed for signing on for this year’s garden. For the 20 slots available, 15 people paid their $75 and signed up. We’re 10 returnees from last year and 5 new members. If things work out as before, that means we’ll usually have 8 to 12 people working in the garden each Saturday morning and one evening during the week, yet to be decided. Members will also drop by individually when extra watering needs doing or sometimes just to hang out. We welcome visitors whenever one of us is there.
A week of watering
It looks like no rain this week. With seeds and seedlings for 2 dozen different veggies now settling in, that means we’ll be watering every day.
Some plants will be fine with a dousing every second day, but some need a daily slug. These include carrots, beets, arugula, cilantro, basil, kale, collard greens, Swiss chard, book chi, salad turnips, scallions, spinach, mesclun and radishes.
The cycle time for hand watering is roughly 3.5 minutes per 2 gallon watering can (Fill from tap: .5 min, Carry to plot: .5 min, Sprinkle: 2.0 min, Return to tap: .5 min). That’s about 2 hours for the 32 gallons needed for the water-every-day veggies.
Left to one’s self, watering becomes almost a meditation. But when supervisors join in from the playground next door, it shifts to a different realm.
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