First Sweet Potato of the Season

The deer have been getting in my garden and eating the sweet potato vines at night. They jump a four and a half foot fence to do this. All of the vines have been completely defoliated, but amazingly, the roots seem ok. I dug one up the other day and ate it. I guess it had had enough time to get big before the munching started.

I have spent the last few days increasing security around my garden, because shortly after they ate all the sweet potato vines, the deer started in on the okra plants. Who would have thought that they'd eat hairy old okra leaves? I looked up deer and okra, and found out that, lo and behold, people actually plant okra to LURE deer!  And to make them grow big for hunting season!

At first I tried the easy way to "increase security": putting pieces of Irish Spring soap in panty hose legs and hanging them around the garden. (I buy the knee-high panty hose boxes at Walmart especially for this purpose, and no other purpose.) This worked for one night. The next night, they were back in the garden, bad smell or no. And the soap truly does smell horrible.

So then I had to resort to a more labor-intensive strategy:  I wired long pieces of bamboo to the posts of the fence. Now the posts were sticking up about 2 feet higher than the top of the fence. So I could take some 20 gauge tie-wire and put two strands of that above the top of the wire mesh fence. Now the fence is effectively about 6 1/2 feet tall. This seems to be working: there was no deer snacking last night. As a further deterrent, I took a page out of my friend Wendy Williams's book and tied some aluminum pie pans to the two strands of wire above the old fence. They move in the breeze and make clacking sounds, which is supposed to scare the deer.

Deer are interesting. Keeping them out is kind of a psy-ops situation: you have to make the fence look scary to jump over, as if they might become entangled in it if they try. It doesn't have to actually be a strong fence, just a wiggly, stringy, high fence. Very light nylon mesh fences that are about 7 feet tall, and practically invisible in the landscape, apparently keep deer out pretty effectively. Deer aren't like cows, horses, or pigs, which would go right through a fence like that.

I think these deer are invading the garden for the first time in years because of several factors:  it is very dry, and there is very little lush vegetation around the neighborhood. There was a pasture full of Johnson grass hay growing all summer nearby, but two weeks ago it was all cut down and baled, and because there has been no rain, it hasn't grown back at all. So suddenly the deer became very hungry, and they saw a buffet full of their favorite foods--beans, sweet potatoes, and okra--on the other side of the garden fence.  Another factor might be the fact that deer populations were very low a few years ago when I built this fence. There had been an epidemic that killed a lot of them. But slowly their populations have been rebounding.  That's good, but to paraphrase Marie Antoinette:  let them eat grass!  There's plenty of that around my garden too.

Sweet Potatoes in the Snow

My tiny garden in Houston did a pretty good job this fall of growing nutritious food. Two of the most vitamin-packed crops one can grow are sweet potatoes and collards, and my two little raised beds grew both, well.

The sweet potatoes are Garnets.  I planted a whole potato in one of the beds last spring, and it sprouted little plants, which I moved to 12" spacings.  They grew there all summer, completely unattended by me, through a long drought and very hot temperatures.  I dug them right before an unusual frost, in early December. Some winters, the temperature in Houston never goes below freezing, but this time, it not only got cold; it also snowed!  You can see the snow on the collard greens here.

I planted the collard greens in October; they don't do well in hot weather, so I waited until it cooled off some.  At first they had a few problems with bugs, but as the weather cooled, the bugs went away.  They love frost; it  makes them sweeter.

Sweet Potatoes in Houston

I flew back to Houston yesterday. One of the first things I did when I got home was to check the condition of the sweet potatoes I had planted in May. They were doing fine!



I started these plants from a sweet potato that I bought in a grocery store. I kept it on the counter for a few days, and little sprouts began to appear at one end of it. So I put it in this raised bed, and pretty soon there were baby sweet potato plants, or slips as they are called, poking up in the bed. I pulled them loose from the potato and planted them about a foot apart in the bed.

The bed was not watered all summer, and Houston is experiencing a drought; we are down ten inches for the year. The bed received no care at all. In fact, at one point it was seriously disrupted: my partner and his son dumped all the dirt out, moved the frame over about two feet and simply replaced the plants in the bed. They went on growing as if nothing had happened! Sweet potatoes are tough plants.

I poked around in the soil and found a small sweet potato, which I put in the soupe du jour for tonight, with some ramen noodles and white potatoes. I used to think that sweet potatoes and white potatoes couldn't go in the same recipe, but guess what: they can.

In Houston there's an organization called Urban Harvest that teaches people how to grow food in Houston. It's not easy to grow food here: the soil is very hard and clayey, and torrential rains alternate with long droughts and very hot weather. On the positive side, beginning in early November we have several months of cool nights, moderately warm days and gentle rains, perfect for growing greens. But summers are tough on food plants. Urban Harvest sponsors a lot of school gardens, and it advocates sweet potatoes as a sort of ground cover for the garden beds during the summer. I can see why: the sweet potatoes seem to compete well with weeds, and are happy without much water.

I used to work in the demonstration garden at Urban Harvest, and Dr. Bob Randall, the director at the time, gave me some slips of a variety that he grows in the summer as a ground cover. I planted them in my old garden in another part of Houston. They grew prolifically and even bloomed! The bloom looked a bit like a morning glory. I dug them up and was astonished to find that the underground tubers were long and slender, almost a foot and a half long by two inches in diameter. And there were a lot of them. But they were not very tasty by modern standards: they had a dry, white flesh that was not very sweet. So I didn't plant them again, but they kept cropping up in my garden for years afterwards.

Sweet potatoes are an important source of calories in much of the tropical world. Along with the Irish potato and rice, they are one of the best crops for producing a lot of calories in a small space. In the post-petroleum future, we may be eating a lot more of them, and growing more of them in our yards. In Tennessee, I plant Irish potatoes in March to harvest in July. When I have eaten all the Irish potatoes, it is time to dig the sweet potatoes. So between those two crops, I could grow all the calories I need. John Jeavons's plan for food self-sufficiency relies heavily on these two carbohydrate-rich tubers.

This particular variety in the picture here is Garnet, a variety commonly available in grocery stores but for some reason not listed by the sweet potato plant growers that I buy plants from for my larger sweet potato plantings in Tennessee. There, I grow Beauregard and Centennial, reliable varieties for Tennessee. But maybe in the spring I will try starting some Garnet plants in Houston, to take with me to Tennessee next May.