Not your average tuber

Although I may get exasperated at it at times, sweet potato is one of the most valuable plants I grow. It’s a living mulch, food source, chicken hole disguiser and lush green ambiance provider. My front garden is a food garden, not really for your typical annual veggies (although I have tried to squeeze some in on occasion with varying levels of success), but more of a ‘food forest’ type perennial garden. I have citrus, paw paw, cassava and grumichama trees. In amongst them I have the odd pineapple, chilli bush and a variety of herbs and self seeding flowers. It sounds full but if that was all there was, there’d be a lot of mulch to see, and subsequently a lot of chicken holes. Enter the humble sweet potato.

Originally added because it is a ‘food forest’ classic, sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a vine that forms sweet starchy tubers on its roots. I planted it as an understory ground cover and had visions of popping out for sweet potatoes when I needed some dinner. Hmm well. The tubers can grow much deeper than I thought and aren’t always super easy to find. “Follow the stem back to the earth” they say. Well sure, but sometimes that gives you roots, sometimes that gives you a tiny ridiculously useless tuber and sometimes that gives you giant half rotten slug eaten thing. And regardless of your tuber success you are dirty. So I kind of gave up. Occasionally I would dig the whole garden up and get a harvest but that went by the by because it was a lot of work and am not a successful glut user. Plus I lost the lush green ground cover I loved!

Now we eat the leaves (high in calcium and vitamins and delicious stir fried) and my sweet potatoes are left to their own devices. Every so often I pull the vine off the smaller plants, or back from the path (hence the exasperation because they can grow fast in summer!) - but what you don’t eat makes good compost. I thoroughly enjoy the look it gives the garden, the protection it gives the soil, and the endless joy it gives my chooks. For more info check out my sweet potato plant profile.

Cherry digging a hole under the sweet potato.