A memorable autumn harvest
An ample crop of sweet potatoes was a welcome holiday gift. Here’s how to grow tubers over our tricky Canadian summers
I will never forget Thanksgiving Monday, 2016.
I didn’t get together with family or friends, but I did harvest my sweet potatoes. And that proved to be far more memorable than any turkey dinner.
For there they were, after a bit of digging, an astonishing number of big, fat, reddish tubers. Some proved to be incredibly long and were twisted into weird shapes, like balloon animals or strings of sausages. As I kept prying them from the soil, I couldn’t quite believe it.
In fact, the sight on that brilliantly sunny morning last Oct. 10, made this gratified gardener want to jump for joy.
Why? Because I never expected it to happen. Up where I live, northwest of Toronto, summer crawls in like a turtle. We often get late wet snow in mid-May and the soil doesn’t really warm up until the end of June. Knowing that sweet potatoes traditionally demand balmy climes like South Carolina’s, I figured I didn’t have a hope.
Yet all keen gardeners like the challenge of growing something new. And sweet potatoes (simply baked in the oven and served with butter and salt), have become a fave of mine. So, also knowing Canadian farmers are now successfully cultivating this relatively new crop near Lake Erie, I decided: why not give it a go?
And wow. Perhaps it was our long, sizzling summer. Perhaps I simply got the procedure right this time (because I’ve failed before).
Whatever the reason, I wound up with a whole bundle of reasons to give thanks on Thanksgiving weekend.
However, there’s a definite technique to growing sweet potatoes. And it’s tricky. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Don’t treat them like conventional spuds. Sweet potatoes belong to the Ipomoea plant family, while regular potatoes are a kind of Solanum. So their growing requirements are quite different.
Cutting sweet potatoes into pieces, then just planting them in the ground like potatoes, won’t work. (I made this mistake once.)
You need sweet potato cuttings (or slips). Some pros start their own slips indoors, in late winter, from a saved sweet potato. But being a novice, I ordered mine from Vesey’s in Prince Edward Island.
The slips arrived in the mail in early June. They looked dead — a disconcerting bunch of dead, brown sticks. But, as Veseys instructed, I stood them in a jam jar of water and within a week or so the sticks developed healthy-looking root hairs.
They were now apparently ready to plant. But the weather was still pretty cool here, so I waited until nearly July.
Next up: a sheet of black plastic. Vesey’s says that sweet potatoes do best growing under this and mine sure did. (My neighbour, Ann, didn’t use plastic and got poor results from the slips I gave her, which were planted in bare soil.)
After making several minimounds for the slips in my veggie plot, I spread the black plastic over the top and cut holes.
Then I just planted and waited. All summer. The sweet potato plants kept cheerfully churning out long tentacles of leaves ornamented with a few pretty pink flowers. They eventually covered the plastic.
But, ah, were the tubers developing down below? I had no idea. I waited on tenterhooks until the morning after our first mild frost (again on the advice of Veseys). Then — eureka — I made my thrilling discovery.
I’m still waiting to taste this exciting haul. That’s because sweet potatoes must cure for about 10 days in a warm space before being eaten. Mine are spread out on racks in the greenhouse — unlike regular potatoes, they don’t have be kept in the dark.
But my mouth is already watering. soniaday.com