Good morning friends! I hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving weekend.
I have something very exciting to share with you...on November 18th, I spied a couple of purple flowers on my sweet potato plants. I knew they weren't the potatoes because they grow underground, so I immediately started researching. Turns out, these purple flowers are somewhat rare. :) How cool is that?!
Scientists have discovered that these flowers bloom best when there is high humidity combined with damp soil. Trimming the vines back seem to help stimulate bud and flower growth as well. We did receive a ton of rain two weeks ago, and I have been trimming back the potato vines. There are little hairs every few inches on the vine that will implant themselves in the ground and start growing new potatoes. If I didn't trim them, they would just keep growing and overtake everything.
This is the very first sweet potato, picked on November 20th.
These two sweet potatoes were picked on November 22nd. The potato on the left was very large! I couldn't believe how big it was. They tasted pretty good too. There are still quite a few plants in the garden, so I suspect I'll be picking more sweet potatoes in the next couple months. :)
Have you ever grown sweet potatoes? If so, did they sprout flowers?
The flowers are very pretty! Yes, we've grown a lot of sweet potatoes. I'm pretty sure we have had flowers too, but I'm not sure. Sweet potatoes are an awesome plant to grow in my opinion because they are so low-maintenance. We used to grow a lot--and had plenty of sweet potato pies! How did you cook your sweet potatoes?
ReplyDeleteI love how low maintenance they are, too! That's awesome you grew them. To cook ours, we just microwaved them until they were soft. We also put them in the toaster oven. How do you cook yours? Have you made candied sweet potatoes?
DeleteI love sweet potatoes. My husband doesn't so I rarely buy them. I have never grown any but would like too. Hugs and blessings, Cindy
ReplyDeleteThey are such an easy, low maintenance plant to grow. If you don't have much yard to grow them in, you could try growing one in a deep pot. :)
DeleteI was so delighted to read about your sweet potato experience, because we have had a similar one here! A few weeks ago, I noticed some beautiful purple flowers on Elizabeth's sweet potato plants. Maybe it's because of all the rain we've had recently. Then when I read your post, I showed Elizabeth, and she went out and started harvesting sweet potatoes. Like you said, there are so many and all so close together! Most of the ones she harvested don't look very good unfortunately. They are plenty big, but something has damaged the surface, maybe mold. Frank thinks they may be too old. We may find good ones yet though, but there are a lot more out there.
ReplyDeleteBecky G.