Black and Blue, What to do.

I still haven't found my camera, and I'm too cheap to buy a new one till I'm sure it's gone for good. But anyway, Happy July.

I've been tending my garden, haphazardly, but finally got the last tire planter planted with it's trellis. My hope of having them all crawling with morning glories has fizzled out along with the dying sprouts, but I haven't given up. I've soaked and planted a few more of the remaining MG seeds and tucked them into various planters to play catch up .

So I've already been harvesting round cherry tomatoes, and a few peas before they went to seed. Now the rest of the tomatoes are catching up and setting fruit, and I have no idea what to look for. I have planted out some volunteer yellow grape, a couple of green grape, a plain stocky cherry tomato, and a couple of roma and some My mother gave me I have no idea what they are. They are probably slicing tomatoes since that is what she likes.I'm woefully low on orange tomatoes as none of those seed took. 

Also, I have out there Great Whites, Black Seaman, and Indigo Rose. I've plucked a few split tomatoes that were cherry size and kinda brown and assumed they were indigo rose, since they are kinda rose colored, but I also have some tomatoes with super dark purple shoulders, as dark as blueberries, and assumed those were Black Seaman ( I labelled them but though maybe I made a mistake since I think Black is darker than indigo. Turns out Indigo Rose is the Dark purple one, and Black Seaman is only slightly dusky brown. The picture on Amazon is a lie ( it showed a very dark skinned brown tomato with gradations inside the fruit.  Below are what my fruit looks like.

This is the Indigo Rose, image is from Blackgold.bz

Below is what my other fruit looks like, this is Black Seaman, Image is from HeirloomSeeds.com

And this is what the Amazon.com image said it would look like...Not even reality.

But it's still tasty and It's still fun to grow them. 

It seems that the indigo Rose will have some of the same vitamins as the blueberries I love to eat. So Yay! 

As far as the sweet potatoes, unfortuanatly, mine took a long time to take off, and I've planted other things in their place, and now I have a bunch of runners and no broken ground suitable for them. The upper part of my walkway is too dry, and lower moister part is already planted out with other veggies. I guess I'll have to pot them up and see if they'll run. Happy Independence Day, Tomorrow!

Sweet Potato Vines- Hit the Ground, Running

Hey all,
If you are planning to grow sweet potato vines from scratch, here are a few tips that might help them get a good start.

You'll need to have gotten some viable sweet potatoes at least a few weeks to a month before you want to plant them out. It's up to you to decide whether you believe organic tuber might sprout faster than typical regular store tubers, I've had sporadic results, so,...start with whatever you can get you mitts on.

I personally have a hard time telling the top from the bottom. Last year I tried laying it horizontally and that seemed to work wonderfully, if taking up more space.  This year I tried cutting the tuber in half and sticking both halves in the water figuring, at least one half will grow roots.

Sweet potatoes make NASTY water and you have to refresh it regularly. I tried something new:

I got a plastic shoe box and a mesh basket drawer divider, I cut 2 potatoes in half and suspended each half with toothpicks on the mesh divider, then I put this into the center of the plastic shoe box and added water till the potatoes were submerged 1/2 - 1 inch or so.   Then I put a air stone attached to an air pump to keep the water moving, and added a bit of peroxide.

They started to rot on the bottom immediately, but I continued to change the water and when the slime got to be too much, changed the water out completely and scrubbed the shoe box and rinsed the potatoes before replacing the water. 

What I ended up with was 3 halves that didn't rot completely before they started making roots from the slimy end. then those roots spread out into the water, and about a week or two after the roots came out , they started sprouting.

So. If you've gotten that far, congratulations, you got through the stinkiest, most annoying part of starting sweet potato slips.  

However, now you have to get those slips to make their own roots so you can plant them out.  You do that by plucking them off and sticking them into a cup of water for afew days. You end up with a tall lanky slip with a few roots on the bottom.   But this plant is a VINE. 

Try This. Before you actually detach the slip from the potato, just bend it down at the base without detaching it completely, and leave it for another day or two.  the leave will want to grow up so they will turn perpendicular to the now horizontal slip. Let them grow a little bit taller and then remove the slip, and instead of placing it in water as you would a rose stem, place it into water in a shallow pan, or even back into the shoe box, horizontally with the leaves up and the stem down in the water.  This will result in the stem making roots all along the stem in each place you have a leaf. 

You will get MORE roots in MORE places ALL ALONG THE STEM, which will help reduce transplant shock since it will have more places to attach itself to the soil and more spots to pull water into itself. Also, it will start to run faster since it's already in the position to move laterally as it naturally does, instead of the tall stem having to grow and fall over or you having to weigh it down to the soil with a stone.

I'm being OCD about it. I've got a tray that I used for watering the base of my potted plants. Now that my plants are outside, I've takes strips of styrofoam and floated these in the tray, and use the stryrofoam to hold the potato vine leaves above the water while the stem is submerged beneath. This ensures that the leaves don't rot from being in the water while the roots are trying to form.

Sorry I don't have a photos, but you can use your imagination.

Happy Planting!