Planting A Sweet Potato

Karins Grandmother gave us an old piece of sweet potato she found in the back of her cupboard. It had started to sprout so she thought we could do something with it. "Well", I thought, "Why not?"

The first thing I did was check to see if it was still viable. I used the incredibly scientific method of chucking it in the old compost heap (the one the pumpkin vine is growing out of) and then checking on it a week later to see if there was any new growth. When I checked it this morning, there were new buds, so onto the next stage.

Planting the Potato

I have a few old tyres left over from setting up the herbs, cherry tomatos and potatos so I grabbed one and set it up next to the lemon tree:

I layered old newspaper underneath to prevent any of the grass underneath from getting into the tyre. Next I needed to fill it up with soil/compost:

Next up I built a layer of mulch using week old grass clippings that had been sitting in the now fallow middle garden bed. This will not only help to retain moisture in the soil, but should help to kill off any weeds:

Now that we have the bed setup, we need the actual sweet potato. I dug a hole in the middle of the bed, down about ten centimetres and put the potato in with the new buds pointing up:

Before I covered it back up with the grass and soil I applied a very liberal dose of diluted liquid manure:

So that's it. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. Would be nice to have some sweet potato to go with our zuchinni slice :)