Queenacres Family Living: Sweet Potatoes, Rosemary, and Ginger Oh My!

I got an earlier-than-usual start on things this morning. The heat has made it nearly impossible to work in the gardens more than about 30 minutes at a time in the afternoon (full sun = great garden but also = heatstroke!)

A friend had given us a big sack of sweet potatoes from her garden. I got a bit distracted with other projects and they began to sprout.

I decided not to let the slips go to waste and found a spot for them in the herb bed in the front yard. I call it the herb bed, but it is a flowerbed along the front of the house that contains our Rosemary hedge, a lavendar bush, some sage, peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes. One end of the bed had been used this spring for our onions and is now vacant (except of course for weeds). Nothing has ever grown very well on that end, except the Rosemary, so I had decided to hand dig and ammend the soil on that end. In order to survive the procedure, I started very early this morning. Grace wanted to "help", so I put one of the goat collars on her (which I was barely able to get over her head) and we headed outside.

Before I could start on the bed, I had to do a serious pruning of the Rosemary hedge. It has grown so much this year, and I haven't pruned it at all. I trimmed a 32qt Rubbermaid tote worth of rosemary just off the front of the hedge!

Next I did a lot of digging and weeding. The spot that I've chosen for the sweet potatoes is about 6X4 feet. Once weeded, I mixed 1 part topsoil with 2 parts compost and dug it into the bed. I mulched an area between the sweet potato bed and the rosemary using feed sacks and hay. This creates a path to the middle of the bed (soon to be planted with green beans), and allows me to work on the sweet potato area from all 4 sides.

I cut the sprouted area off of each sweet potato and saved the rest for canning. I'm not sure that keeping the chunk of tuber is needed for them to grow, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

I planted about half of these in that spot, and gave the other half to a friend. I planted the spot pretty intensively, about 30 slips in about 24 square feet. I will add a trellis if they all grow well. I've got the rest of the sweet spuds in the fridge waiting to be canned. I should be able to get these done in the next few days.

In the midst of removing the potatoes from the sack, and cutting off the slips....I slipped and knocked a few off. I placed all of them in a jar with some water and will see if they root.

Here's a shot of the other end of that flower bed. As you can tell, it needs a LOT of work. Not today though, it's almost milking time and Grace is bored.

After finishing barn chores, I came in to cool off and started web surfing for a minute while I cooled off. I stumbled across this website that gave me an idea for drying all that rosemary. I made the flower drying rack on that site for drying the rosemary. I rinsed the rosemary, tied it in bundles, and hung it on the rack by S hooks I fashioned from bailing wire. The rack holds about half of the rosemary that I cut this morning; I sent the rest to a friend. It is hanging in the dining room and it smells SO good.

Speaking of sprouting...I bought a nice piece of ginger root a while back, and it had started to sprout. I have found varying opinions on how to root it, so I cut it into 3 pieces, planted one in a pot of soil and suspended the other two over water. This will be an interesting project, and with the amount of ginger we use, it will be nice to have some that we've grown ourselves.