by Noel | Oct 3, 2012 | CobraHead, Gardening
With frost forecast for later this week and knowing that I would be out of town, I decided to harvest my sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes cannot tolerate frost, so I did not want to take a chance on losing any of my crop. I had previously put a clear plastic cover over the bed as we had some nippy temperatures a week ago. The leaves under the plastic were already showing black from the previous frost and wilting badly, so I didn’t think I would lose anything...
by Noel | Jan 30, 2012 | CobraHead, Gardening
Geoff posted last week about the heat mat set up he is using to start some pepper plants, here. I use a heat mat and grow-lights as well to start peppers, tomatoes, and other vegetable seedlings that need a jump start, and I’ve also found the set up useful to give some bottom heat to my sweet potato starts well ahead of the time I need to get my peppers started. Since I don’t need very much space for the sweet potatoes, I use the mat and lights to...
by Noel | Oct 15, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
With several nights of frost predicted for this coming week, it was time to harvest the sweet potatoes. They will not tolerate frost. Here’s the bed of potatoes, thick with foliage. The plants are grown through a cover of black plastic which heats the bed up quickly in the spring and pretty much eliminates any weeds. Harvesting is much easier if all the foliage is cut away and removed first. This is the second year I used this sheet of plastic and it...