Sunday, October 11, 2009

Harvesting Okinawan Sweet Potatoes

It's been 23 weeks since I planted my Okinawan Sweet Potato cuttings (see this blog entry).

A couple of months ago, I tried to harvest some Sweet Potatoes (see this blog entry). Unfortunately, it was too soon and the Okinawan Sweet Potatoes were too small.

That is the one problem with growing Sweet Potatoes: you don't know if any are growing or if they are big enough to harvest without cutting away the leaves and digging. Doing this effectively commits you to harvesting even if it is too soon.

The recommended maturity period for Okinawan Sweet Potatoes is 5 to 6 months, which is right about now.

I am growing Okinawan Sweet Potatoes in several different areas in my garden. So, I decided to go ahead and dig up one area and see what's there.

This picture shows the Okinawan Sweet Potato part of the garden that I choose to dig up.

There were a lot of leaves!!

The leaves and stems are edible. My mother-in-law eats them all of the time. She actually used to buy them from an Asian Supermarket before I started growing Sweet Potatoes. I have tried eating Okinawan Sweet Potato leaves myself and they are quite good.

I filled up an entire 30 gallon trash bag with the Okinawan Sweet Potato leaves and stems!

This picture shows what it looks like under all of the leaves. The planting area is a 3 feet in diameter circular Raised Bed. The Raised Bed is about 6 inches off of the ground.






This picture shows what I found after removing the top 4 inches of soil. Sure enough, there were Okinawan Sweet Potatoes!










This picture shows the Okinawan Sweet Potatoes that I harvested from the garden area.

The Okinawan Sweet Potatoes were good size.

But, I was a little disappointed that the yield was not more. I only got around 5 or 6 pounds.

I have another area of my garden that I am also growing Okinawan Sweet Potatoes. I'll dig up that area in about 6 weeks.

Update: See this blog entry for growing Okinawan Sweet Potatoes in a Container
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Saturday, October 10, 2009

Pruning Strawberry Plants

Now that Summer's over, it is time to prune the Albion Strawberry plants growing in my Strawberry Tower.

After almost 2 months of intense heat (with temperatures approaching 100 degrees), the temperatures have dropped dramatically. The plants are producing more Strawberries and Strawberry flowers with the drop in temperature.

Albion Strawberry plants are of the day neutral variety, so they are very temperature sensitive. They will not flower if it gets too hot (above 85 degrees).

Unfortunately, it is getting very hard to see the ripe strawberries with all of the strawberry leaves in the Strawberry Tower (see picture to the right). I have had to throw several Strawberries out because they were too ripe by the time I noticed them.

Many of the Strawberry leaves are very old and the branches are turning woody. You can see many of the leaves are turning or have turned brown in the picture. These old leaves also block the sun from reaching the new leaves that are starting to grow from the Strawberry plants.

I grabbed my pruning shears and starting cutting away at all of the dead and old leaves. The picture to the right shows some of the leaves that I cut away.










This picture shows the Strawberry Tower after I finished pruning.
























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Strawberry Plants Multiplying

After I had removed the dead and old leaves from my Albion Strawberry plants, I noticed that I had more Strawberry plants than I had when I started 7 months ago!

This picture shows one of the Strawberry pockets in my Strawberry Tower. I had planted only 1 Strawberry plant in the pocket, but now there are 3 Strawberry plants in the pocket.

I had been cutting off runners whenever I saw them, but I could not see what was happening behind all of the leaves.

It is too late to try to remove any of the plants. The roots have probably intermingled and it would be a mess to try to separate them.

Despite the crowding, all 3 plants appear to be doing well.

There are several other pockets with more than 1 Strawberry plant, but this is the only pocket with 3.

This picture shows what this pocket looked like in March. Notice that there is only 1 Strawberry plant in there.












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