by Noel | Oct 28, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
As the garden season winds down, we’re happy to report that we’ve had another great sweet potato harvest. I like to remind people that it’s easy to grow sweet potatoes even up north, here in Wisconsin. Here are the potato vines, about two weeks ago. We already had a light frost and the leaves were pretty moth eaten from Japanese beetles. I decided not to wait longer to get them out of the ground. I stacked all the vines up in the center of the...
by Noel | May 23, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
It’s May 23rd here near Madison, Wisconsin. This morning, I planted 17 sweet potato slips into a raised bed covered with a sheet of black polyethylene. Memorial Day weekend has always been my target planting date for sweet potatoes, and this year I’m right on time. I used this black poly sheet last year. I’ve gotten three years from a single sheet, but usually after two seasons they get torn and brittle and have to be trashed. The white rings are cut from PVC...
by Noel | Jan 29, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
Sweet potatoes store well, but they don’t keep forever. Above are the last of our 2012 harvest. These were dug up 15 months ago. They will still be edible, but we need to use them up as soon as possible. They’ve begun to sprout and that’s a good thing. For the last two years I’ve grown my sweet potatoes using sprouts like this, rather than starting new sprouts on a whole potato. This method is much easier. Vine cuttings would work nearly as well. The sprouts...
by Judy | Nov 16, 2013 | CobraHead, Recipes
Noel harvested almost 80 pounds of sweet potatoes last month – another record crop for us from 18 starts. And guess what? We’re still eating sweet potatoes from last year’s harvest. I haven’t been cooking them often enough so we’re scrambling to find new ways to serve them – though you just can’t beat them simply baked and buttered. Here’s an adaptation of a recipe I must have found online a while ago, though I don’t know who authored it. I’ve already changed...
by Noel | Jan 13, 2013 | CobraHead, Gardening
I had two sweet potatoes left over from last year. I had used them to grow cuttings for last year’s garden. They were starting to shrivel up but both had put out numerous long sprouts. The sprouts were rather anemic and one plant had an aphid infestation, but I thought I’d give a try to saving cuttings from both to get a real head start on having lots of good rooted slips ready to go into the ground in late May. Sweet potatoes are tenacious at...
