Sweet potatoes - slips, planting, harvesting and curing

I LOVE sweet potatoes! And I've grown them every year since we moved in, with tepid results. The slips always arrived stressed and in some cases dead, and my best efforts to revive them were less than what was required. So we decided to grow our own - from scratch.

Here's how we did this year.

In late February, we brought up the rest of our mediocre haul of sweet potatoes from the basement and put them on a seed heating mat on the kitchen windowsill. Here's what they looked like after a few weeks:

I changed the water every couple of days, and this is what they looked like a couple of weeks later:

The roots grew down and the slips grew up. Once the slips were about 12" long, I broke them off and put them in jars of clean water to root. Interestingly, because some of the slips started close to the water line, they already had vigorous roots. As with the sweet potatoes, I changed the water every couple of days, and by the time planting rolled around, we had about two dozen slips.

I wish I'd taken some pictures of the sweet potato vines taking over my garden, but I didn't. So beautiful! The leaves are a lovely shiny dark green.

I did, however, take a picture of our harvest:

Half a bushel - our best haul ever! And some of the biggest sweet potatoes we've ever grown, too.

Sweet potatoes are supposed to be left on the ground for 2-3 hours to begin curing, and then put in a warm, humid, dark environment (unwashed) for 7-14 days to cure properly. This heals up any cuts or scrapes on the sweet potatoes and thickens up the skin a little for better storage. This is also when the starches in the sweet potatoes are converted to sugar. Yummy!

This year, unwashed was out of the question. The sweet potatoes had to be harvested because we'd had a couple of good frosts and the leaves were dead. (If left too long, the potatoes can be damaged.) But we'd also had a lot of rain and the garden was muddy, muddy, muddy. So Mike took the hose to them and got the worst of the muck off before we put them to bed.

For curing, sweet potatoes prefer 75-85 F with high humidity. Not sure where we'd find that in our house at this time of year, but Mike had a brilliant idea. We put the sweet potatoes in two plastic crates, and put them on 3 seed heating mats with a bowl of water between them for humidity:

 We'd already checked, and the crates fit perfectly under our coffee table!

Cover with a nice heavy quilt, and voila, a micro-environment for sweet potato curing!

 After 2 days, the temperature was about 80 F, and I had to fill up the water bowl after 4 days, so looks like we've given them perfect curing conditions: hot, humid, and dark. We'll get back to you when it time to store them for the winter.

Autumn - the view from here

The view from the front porch:

The view from the back:

Takes my breath away...

Eat local!

This whole area is a farming paradox.

On the one hand, you have factory farms, confined feed lots (chicken and pigs), cash crops, and probably Monsanto seeds.

On the other hand, you have grass-fed, pastured beef and pork, free-range chickens and eggs, and loads of inexpensive organic produce - if you know where to look.

Farmer Jim was out first meat supplier: beef and pork.

I don't know how long Jim's been raising cattle and pigs, but it's been a while. He's not from around here, though. I knew he was in Caledon for a long time before moving here, but I'm not sure where he was before that.

I made a beef stew for the family shortly after we moved here with beef I got from Jim, and you'd have thought they were eating in a five-star restaurant the way they carried on. It was exceptional, like nothing any of us had ever tasted before.

Other than a bit of sausage or bacon, Mike won't eat pork. Never has. But he'll eat Farmer Jim's pork. He says it tastes "clean".

We get out chickens and CSA from Tarrah and Nathan at Green Being Farm. Tarrah went to university to study farming, and I feel like I have a vested interest in their success.

The first two years, we got 30 chickens a year (that's when we had other family living here). Now we're down to 15 a year. I couldn't go back to store-bought meat again - partly for ethical reasons, and partly for taste. Those chickens taste the way chickens tasted when I was a kid: delectable.

And the CSA that we got from them the first two winters was a delight for so many reasons. The price was great, the vegetables were gorgeous and delicious - and the bonus was the 4-page newsletter, complete with recipes, that accompanied every bag of produce. Awesome!

Winter of 2013 and 2014, we got a side of beef from Mary and Dennis Starkey at Hillview Farm. Mary and Dennis are true Torontonians. Dennis worked at the school board, and Mary had her own business at Yonge and Eglinton. When retirement loomed on the horizon, Dennis said, "I want a cattle farm," and Mary said, "Go for it" - never believing he would. But he did! (Having been in education, he knew how to research, and that must have helped!)

Mary continued to work in Toronto during the first year, then moved up here, fully expecting to get a Wife of the Year award for ditching her career to support her husband's dream. But she said that after six months, she realized she could never live in the city again.

Ever generous, Mary threw in organs and lots of soup bones full of marrow - oh, and a bottle of maple syrup. Best soups and stews ever! Again, when the kids left and it was just Mike and I, a side of beef no longer made sense.

Then there's Sugar Sweet Farms - technically local (they're within a 100-mile radius). I get all my veggies from Carla and Brian at the farmers' market near here, and we swap stories and compare "farming" successes and disasters. This year, we got hit with blight, and it wiped out our tomatoes. They got hit with a deluge of rain at the beginning of August that drowned their bok choy. It was Carla who advised me not to use summer cabbage for sauerkraut, but to use winter cabbage after a couple of good frosts. I didn't even know there was a summer and winter cabbage!

Everyone in the "eat local" community seems to know everyone else - and I'm sure we'll make new connections every year!

Shine on, shine on, harvest moon

It was a warm September evening, and my son-in-law, Matt, was wandering the property, phone in hand, talking to his mom. when he noticed an increasing brightness in the east.

"Mom, it's just after sunset, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"But the sun sets in the west, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Something's happening. Gotta go."

That's when he bolted in the side door and yelled, "Sue, come quick! Moon's coming up!"

I never take moonrises for granted - especially a full harvest moon - so I grabbed my camera and joined him outside.

I've seen dozens of moonrises since moving here, but they still awe and delight me. They're quite spectacular, even when they're a relatively common sight. This, though, was the first moonrise Matt had ever seen, and he was dumbfounded by the majesty and beauty of it. Here's what he was able to capture on film: