Sweet Potato Invasion

Could not help but to brag... Here they are...

The best thing about these sweet potatoes is that I did not plant them. They grew from the remnants of the last year's harvest. I always leave the smallest roots in the ground when I harvest sweet potatoes, and the ones that survive frost start vining and fruiting once again. Another good thing about this amazing vegetable is that it breaks down hard soils. Sweet potatoes are relatively easy to care for, just water when they are young and make sure the soil has at least some nutrients in it. That's about it. 

Now, part of my Thanksgiving dinner is covered, for free. :)

Improve garden soil with legumes

John Jeavons calls beans "the givers" of the garden. And yes, they are; in more ways than one.

Just picked my second crop of green beans today, what a beautiful bounty.

This season I planted my all-time favorite Kentucky wonder (pole bean), as well as two types of bush beans - Italian and Nash. All of the beans are doing very well and are producing heavily. Beans and other legumes are the givers that improve the soil by binding nitrogen in the air to the soil. After the harvest is done we dig the stalks and leaves into the garden adding to the humus content of the soil. 

The good thing about Florida is that we can grow legumes year round. Maybe that is a gift from mother nature to compensate for our poor soils. But literally, there is not a time when we cannot plant or harvest some sort of legume. 

Right now it is too late, at least in Central Florida, to plant beans, but we can plant peas and Fava beans. That is in fact what I am planning to do this week - plant me some peas and Fava beans. I have about ten Fava seeds that I had for about four years or so, but never gotten around to planting. Hopefully they come up. And peas - we can plant them now, and all the way till March. 

All in all, looks like my Thanksgiving dinner is covered - I am going to try a new recipe this year for the green beans, and the main ingredient in that recipe will be the beans from my garden.

Harvesting Sweet Potatoes

The time to clean and prepare the beds for the cool season planting is here. But there are other things still growing in the garden, our summer favorites - sweet potatoes, okra, and cow peas. So it is time to start harvesting sweet potatoes. The harvesting process in itself is fairly simple, just pull the vines (and oh, yes, they can be very long), and then feel the ground with your hands for the tubers. Alternately, you can use a shovel to just turn the soil, but I prefer to use my hands (with the disposable gloves to protect from ant bites). Sweet potatoes do not normally sit deep in the ground, and often you can even see the tip of the potato above the ground. Finally, even if some potatoes are missed and overwinter, the better. I have so many volunteer potatoes in my garden that I don't even plant the slips anymore and always have plenty of sweet potato to harvest; once you have them, you will always have them.

This bowl of potatoes was harvested just from one partial bed, I would say 4 feet by 10 feet, all volunteers. Free food, what can be better! Now I am facing the task of preserving the harvest.

Depending on the amount of sweet potatoes you harvest, no preservation could be needed at all. If you only have a few pounds, then just brush off the dirt, lay them on a cardboard in the sun for a few hours to harden, and you can store them in the pantry. Usually, that's all I do with the harvest.

On the other hand, if you have a large harvest, then it probably would not fit into a regular pantry. Authoritative sources, such as University of Florida, advise to store sweet potatoes in "cool storage" - between 55 to 65 degrees. Well, that's great, but we don't exactly have root cellars in Florida, and the average house garage is far from being "cool" storage, even in the winter. Indigenous people throughout the ages stored sweet potatoes either in sand, or in ash, or in hay. These methods would work even in a hot garage or other storage, but the potatoes themselves should be absolutely perfect, with no nicks or damage; otherwise they will certainly start to rot, and infect their neighbors in the storage bins.

This year I decided to can my sweet potato harvest, and here's why: canning is a sure way to preserve these root vegetables with little risk of spoilage, and the subsequent cooking is practically non-existent, just heat up and eat. I don't care for "sweet" sweet potatoes, such as pies, but like them in a way of home fries with salt and cayenne. Canned sweet potatoes can be perfect for either scenario.

So, to can sweet potatoes all you need is a pressure canner (I have a cheapo Presto from WalMart), some canning jars and other paraphernalia related to canning. All that can be easily obtained from WalMart or Tractor Supply.

Peel and slice sweet potatoes in about 1/2 to 1/4 inch slices, and put in water. They would turn dark immediately if left in the open air that oxidizes them. As you can see, the water in this basin is quite murky, that's because sweet potatoes have a lot of starch in them:

Once all potatoes are cut up, sterilize canning jars (I use quarts) and stuff raw potato slices into the jars. This is called "raw packing". Shake the jars as you stuff the potatoes to minimize dead space. Add a tea spoon of coarse salt (a preservative), and fill with boiling water. Then, can at 10 pounds pressure for about an hour to an hour and a half.

Pressure canned like that, the potatoes can store for a long time at room temperature, and used whenever you have a hankering for some Thanksgiving-tasting side dish.

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How to build a garden - Part 3

Finally, my garden building project is coming to a completion. The beds are all built and I filled some of them with the grass clippings just to hold the landscape fabric down, although this step is not necessary.

Now, what's left is covering the fabric between the beds with mulch, hauling in the soil, and of course, the most important part - planting.

With the help of a vigorous 24-year old I had my beds loaded with nice soil, and even started transplanting tomatoes and parsley. Mulch is partially laid out, and the paving stones are placed on the top of the mulch - for stability and preservation of the landscape fabric.

I am not yet completely done with this project, still have mulching to do, and arranging the stones, but the planting work can be completed even without the mulching part. In fact, we are in the middle of transplanting tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant seedlings right now, in our second warm season of the gardening year.

Now, for the cost.

In addition to the landscape fabric, I used:
47 landscape timbers @3.59, to the total of $169
I will use approximately 40 stones for this garden, $1.24 = $50
Hauled in bulk soil from a nursery - 6 cubic yards, $270
And 1 cubic yard of mulch, $23 (bulk)

So far total is $548.

Yes, it is a lot of money. My total growing space in this 12x22 foot garden equals to 176 square feet (not counting walkways). What can I grow in a 176 square feet? You can run calculations based on the vegetable spacing requirements, but just for this season I will fit these vegetables into this garden:

50 tomato plants
30 pepper plants
20 dinosaur kale
10 parsley
10 dill
and maybe some other greens tucked in here and there.

And the minimum yield will be (that is if I totally suck as a gardener - usually you should get much more that these estimates):
50 pounds of tomatoes
30 pounds of peppers
20 pounds of kale
2 pounds of parsley and dill

Think about it. How much would you pay for a pound of organic tomatoes? I have an answer - $4.99/pound. Even more so for the organic peppers. Quite frankly, Publix or WinnDixie do not sell organic kale, period, so I cannot even run a comparison.

Well, my point is - if you can afford building a garden space like that, this is a fast and least effort consuming method of jump-starting a garden in a previously unused lawn space. If you cannot afford to have a garden built like that, you can always revert to a free (but labor-intensive) double-digging method.

Update 9/14/2012: All planted and ready to enjoy:

Update 10/23/2012: In full bloom and starting fruiting:

How to build a garden - Part 2

How to build a garden - Part 1

How to build a garden - Part 2

The raised bed garden building continues. Today I started laying landscape fabric over the grass. Prior to that step I gave the lawn a good tight cut, and laid the fabric overlapping about six inches on the seams.

Why did I go with the landscape fabric and not the cardboard, or newspapers, a popular choice in building raised beds? I did not want to give crabgrass and Bermuda grass any chance of surviving; and these two are my biggest enemies in the garden. Granted, the package said that "no landscape fabric will stop Bermuda grass and crabgrass", as it grows even through asphalt, but I am taking my chances because the fabric will be covered with a foot of soil, and secondly, I have a row of raised beds that is built on top of the grass, and it survived just fine, even  being only six inches tall. The only problem with this bed is that the grass creeps in through the sides; the problem that I am hoping to overcome by having the bare barrier around this new bed.

After the fabric was laid, the bed construction has begun. I am building this garden from landscape timbers so it will last a long time and not cost too much money.

The timbers are laid on the edge of the cut area where the sod was taken out, but leaving at least a six inch strip of bare land all around the bed area.

I am making my beds three timbers high, which will give me nine inches of height from the ground. From there, I plan on filling the beds with soil, tapering three inches over the edge of the bed, which will give me a total of a foot of growing depth. This depth will be totally sufficient for most vegetables, including tomatoes, peppers, short carrots, all kinds of greens, like kale or lettuce, all herbs, cucumbers, beans, beets, and so on. The only vegetables that might need a deeper soil would be squash, daikon radish, and maybe the vegetables that need deep sturdy staking (as I cannot drive stakes through the landscape fabric). All in all, looks like I can grow practically anything in these beds.

And here we are, first bed is complete. I chose to go with an L-shape to make the square area more interesting, as well as space-saving.

It took two men three hours to build this bed. They used heavy duty landscape nails to connect the timbers together. 

So far, the cost of material is $36 in landscape fabric (I picked up two tubes of 3x100 at Walmart).

I already bought the timbers, nails, and paving stones, but do not know at this point how much of these will be used to build this garden space. Will calculate when the beds are complete.

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How to build a garden - Part 1

I was in need of more garden space, so instead of my usual endeavor of double-digging the beds, I decided to build a raised bed garden for a change. There were a few reasons for that decision.

First, the area that I was working with was kind of low laying, so the dug beds would have suffered from too much standing water.
Second, I wanted to build  a good size gardening space in a hurry; it needed to be ready for planting before the fall season.
And third, I wanted to experiment with the raised bed design where there is no grass in between the beds. I wanted to see what it would cost to build such an area, what kind of work would be involved, and how feasible the whole thing was going to be.

This is the area I started with:

The building wall is East facing. So, this area gets morning sun up until 2PM or so, and then gradually starts to shade. At around 5PM the whole area is shaded from the hot afternoon sun. This is actually perfect for our damaging Florida sun, as the plants will get their needed sunlight, but would not be burned by the heat of the afternoon rays.

To make it efficient and cost saving, I decided to make the garden area in multiples of 4, which is a half of a regular landscape timber. So, my garden area is going to be 12 foot wide and 23 feet long (1 foot subtracted for the entry), making it two beds, one bed 10 feet long, and the other 12 feet long.

Now, the measuring started:

After the measuring was complete, I started to take off the top layer of sod so I could prevent the weeds from creeping in to the garden beds. I decided to keep about 6 inches of a barrier around the beds, of bare ground that would be maintained bare by raking.

Certainly, it is difficult to take a precise measurement of sod on such a large area, so I gave myself some play room by taking about a foot of sod off around my measured perimeter.

While at it, I dug out a little apple tree that was growing in the area and brought it up eight inches so that its roots do not stay soggy when we have our summer rains. I have good hopes for this apple tree.

So, here it is, first step of how to build a garden. The whole process took me about ten hours of work.

How to build a garden - Part 2

Mulch Types

Normally, when people think of mulch types they recall the stuff that is sold in bags in box stores. After all that's what's called mulch. But behold, there are many more possibilities for mulching the garden.

Yesterday I was cleaning my garden beds in preparation for the fall planting season and instead of piling the weeds into the compost bin I put them aside, in a wheelbarrow. Why? Because weeds make excellent mulch. Note right here though, if the weeds have seeds on them, do not use them as mulch, but compost instead. I lucked out and picked the whole wheelbarrow of non-seeded weeds, such as grasses and small brush, as well as spent vegetable stems, including my beloved cowpea. To top off the pickings I cut the branches of some vegetation that was intruding through the chain link fence. So, here is what I ended up with:



Certainly, you cannot just pile that stuff into the garden beds and call it work well done. As I was talking to my mother on the phone (wearing the passive headset : Amazon link), I managed to chop all this stuff with my trusted Felco friend into small pieces within two hours. Now I have two bucket fulls of nice mulch:

So, now I have something to work with. I spread this mulch into the bed I was working on, about four inches thick. This amount was enough to cover about twelve square feet densely:



Unusual mulch type you say? Hang on just a second.

This mulch consists of mainly two types of material: Green (weed grasses and leaves) and Brown (dried spent vegetable stems such as cowpea, amaranth, and okra, as well as brush stems). This is a perfect composting combination. This mulch will serve a dual purpose up until I am ready to plant in September. It will keep the ground covered to protect it from drying out, it will decompose some on the bottom to provide nutrients, and it will encourage insect life which is needed for the garden ecosystem.

Whatever you do, mulching with any types of mulch is better than keeping the ground bare. Weeds are opportunists, they will propagate whenever they find a spot that is not covered. You might want to look around your yard to see if there anything that can be chopped up and used to improve your beds.

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