sweet potato-greens-sage soup, adapted with love

Sweet Potato Flowers are not only beautiful to look at, but also offer many uses! Let’s have a look at them in detail!

The harvest video was on Hudson Valley Seed’s Instagram account, and one of that New York-based organic seed company’s co-founders, K Greene, talked with me about growing shallots and their more commonly grown cousin, garlic. He also shared some other ideas for succession sowing of edibles whose planting time still lies ahead—whether for fall harvest or to over-winter and enjoying in the year ahead. Read along as you listen to the Aug. 7, 2023 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) o

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A happy and pleasant surprise has just arrived through the post at home.

The sweet potato is a starchy, sweet-tasting root vegetable. They have a thin, brown skin on the outside with colored flesh inside, typically orange in color, but other varieties are white, purple or yellow. You can eat sweet potatoes whole or peeled; the leaves of the plant are also edible. While called ‘potatoes’, sweet and white potatoes are not actually related. Botanically, the sweet potato belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, whereas the white potato is part of the nightshade family.

As temperatures drop and summer leaves change colors, outdoor physical activity becomes enjoyable. There are many ways you and your family can get active during the fall season.

Sweet potatoes, any way you serve them, are yummy and very nutritious. They are one thing that you can plant in the garden from April until the first of July, so you still have time to get them in the ground. I received some slips of ‘Bradshaw’ sweet potato recently and am looking forward to growing them in the garden at the Clemson Extension office. David Bradshaw was one of the most beloved professors in the Horticulture Department, and he was very involved with organic and heirloom plants at the South Carolina Botanical Garden. The sweet potato was developed from the Mahon Yam (which is really a sweet potato) by Dr. Bradshaw and given to one of my classmates who has grown it for many years, saving a few each year to grow out the slips.

2 packages frozen phyllo dough tartlet shells 1 small package instant vanilla pudding 1 cup milk ½ cup canned pumpkin or sweet potatoes (pureed) 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice (½ tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp nutmeg and ¼ tsp ginger) ¹⁄3 cup whipped topping (optional)

Unlike white potatoes, where you plant a “seed potato” whose eyes are starting to sprout, with sweet potatoes you start with bits of vine called slips. Glenn Drowns of Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa, who lists more than 100 sweet-potato varieties in his amazing catalog, explains the origin of the word slip:“A slip is a single plant (with small roots) that is sprouted on the sweet potato root and then slipped off so that you may plant it in the garden to grow a sweet potato plant.”Each slip doesn’t look like much when it arrives—a piece of vine with some roots and maybe a leaf or two, usually a little pale and worse for the wear after days in transit. But it will quickly rebound if planted promptly according to some basic guidelines (that’s the above-ground bit of one a day or two after planting,

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT.Andre Jordan seems to keep hoping for the best, despite a few well-documented cases of rejection (as in, loc. cit., The Girl I Love With All My Heart. Caveat emptor: Deliciously not PG!).

Colocasia ‘Mojito’ (Zone 7b-10), like all its cousins that we call elephant ears or taro, is a heat-loving plant that’s also hungry and thirsty. I grew it in a bright spot in a potting soil with lots of compost, and stood a big, deep saucer underneath—something I wouldn’t do with most other plants outdoors for fear of rotting them off. I don’t use chemical fertilizers, but I mixed in some all-natural organic formulation at planting time and occasionally added fish and seaweed emulsion to the water I gave it.In food production, prevalent in Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean, it’s the starchy tubers that are the thing—bigger is better. In ornamental horticulture, the above-ground portion is where it’s at, and here’s where the tricky part comes in about overwintering some of the most spectacular new taros—including ‘Mojito,’ and the better known ‘Black Magic.’ They don’t produce big tubers that can be lifted, like you might a canna or some of the elephant ears, and stashed dry in the cellar.

First, of course, you want to make sure the crop you’re considering saving seed from is open-pollinated, not a hybrid. Hybrids won’t “come true” from saved seed one generation to the next.“Start with the super-easy things,” said Ken, “like anything with a perfect flower and a pod—beans, and peas, for instance.” Perfect flowers contain both male and female parts, or stamens and pistils, such as lettuce, tomatoes, brassicas, beans; in imperfect ones, such as on squash and cucumbers, there are separate male and female flowers.“Before you even transplant your first seedling, you can start thinking about seed saving,” Ken said, and also wrote in a new article on the Seed Library blog.For beginning seed-