
Sweet potato flowers
One of our sweet potato plants started
blooming last week, clearly illustrating the plant's relationship to
morning glories. I'd never seen sweet potato flowers before, so I
poked around on the web to see if I should cut off the blooms
the way you do with garlic.
It turns out that sweet potato flowers are extremely unusual, and are
actually in pretty high demand. Since sweet
potatoes are propagated vegetatively, it's hard to develop new
varieties. Blooms add an element of randomness to the plant's
reproduction --- a lot of the seeds will probably turn into shoddy or
mediocre plants, but one of the seeds might just turn out to be the
next best thing in sweet potato land.
Scientists have tried a lot of tricks to get sweet potatoes to flower,
and one of the most effective seems to be high humidity combined with
damp soil. Check! Another method they've tried involves
clipping off the ends of sweet potato vines, hoping to stimulate apical
bud growth. Since the deer got in and nibbled our sweet potatoes
once before we added a deer deterrent to that part of the garden, we
accidentally used that method too.
I plan to collect the seeds from our sweet potato flowers and give them
a shot next year. Maybe we'll develop a new variety of sweet
potato and name it after Huckleberry!
Shame-faced plug: To me, the best part of
the Avian Aqua Miser is that it's an automatic chicken waterer.
If you put a couple in a small tractor, you won't have to worry about
water for days on end.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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