I’m always in pursuit of practical knowledge and always prefer using my existing natural resources from our land when possible.

This post might sound like it’s all about my sweet potato patch. But it’s really about using local natural resources where possible, experimenting to find solutions, and working with nature where possible to make the changes you need made.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a garden, though, aside from my art, I do have a lot more opportunities to try things out in my garden than any other situation.

This post is available as a podcast if you’d rather listen:

Removing the limb

 Sunday afternoon I cut up the oak limb that had fallen on the far end of my garden. It wasn’t very heavy, but it fell from a pretty high distance, so it broke the bamboo across the top of one of my rows on the ground level. I patched that soon after it fell but left the limb there until I had more time to work on it.

While it wasn’t very heavy, it was too heavy to simply pick up and throw over the fence.

The limb was blocking my access to the sweet potato bed, but I’ve been climbing around it to take a tuber or two for the past couple of weeks.

Raiding the Sweet Potatoes

When I went out there to get another on on Sunday, I saw that some critter had found my sweet potatoes and had eaten half of a nice one. So it was time to take them all up before they all fell to hungry voles, mice, or squirrels. I’m not sure what was eating it, or even whether or not we have voles here. But if it was a small critter, it sure had a big appetite.

So that’s what sparked my motivation to get the limb out sooner rather than later. I finished that and now the garden is ready for me to do the sweet potato hunt.

Monday I went out there while it was still early, after breakfast and my morning jog/walk. I’m up to half a mile on that, by the way. One mile is the goal.

A Little About growing Sweet Potatoes

Anway, If you’ve never grown sweet potatoes before, just know they have long vines that travel far from the spot where the potatoes will be. I had never planted them before, but I knew they made vines and wasn’t sure how far they’d go or how many potatoes I could expect from each slip.

So I only planted six slips. A slip is a rooted piece of a single vine… and I’m not real sure yet how to make the ‘slips’, but it’s on my list of things to figure out before winter is over. I bought these first ones from our local hardware store so I could experiment with growing sweet potatoes this year. I’ll learn how it’s done before it’s time to get them started for next year’s planting.

Pursuit of Practical Knowledge

This is one of the symptoms of the topic I mentioned at the beginning… less buying inputs and more using what’s on hand. I’m on a quest in pursuit of practical knowledge, and have been most of my life.

Here’s my stance on enlisting on-site natural resources in general. I like to use natural resources abundantly available already here on our land whenever possible. Rocks are our absolute most abundant resource, lol. And I’ve enlisted them to serve in a few very important roles here.

They are the source of most of the pigments that I use in my paintings. Secondly, they’re also a product, if you can believe that. I actually do sell boxes of rocks for other people who want to use them for making paint.

A 1lb Box of Rocks

And third, they are the foundation of my garden framework.

If it’s just not feasible because of time, effort, or raw materials to do or make something for myself, then I will buy whatever needs to be bought. It’s not so much about being a PURIST. It’s about keeping my options open, and knowledge about how to do things is one way of keeping my ability to choose one way or the other.

Hermit-nerd Experiments

While I wanted the harvest, the main reason behind growing these this time was to do a couple of experiments. For most of my adult life I’ve had a career in the sciences, so I love transferring my interests from laboratory work over into my current life as a nature observer, gardener, and artist. I’m always doing experiments, mostly to see what works and what doesn’t in looking for solutions to problems.

In this case the first problem was with the spot where I planted the sweet potatoes. Nothing else had grown long in that location before it died. The ground was hard-pack, full of rocks, and dries out very easily. It’s the hottest spot in summer with a clay embankment running around the backside to a height of about five feet.

And the second wasn’t so much a problem as a curiosity I wanted to satisfy. Would the vines make potatoes in the mulch if I built the mound higher as the vine grew longer? I know some regular potatoes can do that.

The Growing Environment

So let me describe the bed as it was made before I got started with planting. Then I’ll talk about how I went about planting them, and finally reveal the results to both of those experiments!

We have very little flat ground for a garden near the house. All of the terrain is arranged in benches. A bench is a narrow flat area on each level of the mountain. What is flat is hard-pan clay with rocks, except in precious few locations but none of those are near the house. So I build raised beds instead of trying to dig in the ground.

My garden area is a little cutout behind the house. My husband made it to park his tractor when we first got it before he had a shop down on the next level area below the house. So there’s a flat area of about twenty feet with a clay and rock embankment surrounding it. It’s also in the middle of the forest that grows right down the backside of the house.

This isn’t an ideal garden spot for many reasons, but here’s a few: poor soil, unlevel ground aside from the bottom, tree roots everywhere, and lots of critters that appreciate access to variety in their diets.

Rocks are a Useful Resource

And rocks came to my rescue! First I used all of the on-site rocks to begin the retaining walls for a terraced garden. I wasn’t very good at stacking rocks in the beginning and made a lot of mistakes that are costing me now in tumbling walls.

Most impacted are the very front of the garden that were meant to give me some space to backfill to create the walkpath in front of the first bed. It’s like the very foundation of that part of the garden and so I’ve had to make some fixes that aren’t pretty just to prevent having to let it all come tumbling down. I put large ‘propping’ rocks actually in the ditch, because there was no other way to do it.

Back to the Sweet Potato Bed

Let’s skip over everything else I could talk about on this topic and get back to the sweet potato bed. It is a semi-circular shaped bed with a rock retaining wall all around it. But I never had enough compost or didn’t want to buy enough good potting soil to fill it, so the wall isn’t backfilled with anything. It just stands there about a foot high to separate that bed from the rest of the garden.

In spring this year I added a woven willow retaining wall to another bed and loved that use of abundant local resources. I didn’t have time to make another fence like that to bring the wall up higher. A foot of height is all this rock wall can muster because it also is one of my earlier builds, but I needed more height for deeper good soil and drainage out of the clay ground level. So I resorted to stakes and some plastic netting I had on hand but hate.

I put the slips directly onto the clay bottom and covered them with a little of my nice coconut coir slash earthworm castings mix, and then covered that with straw. Unfortunately the straw is NOT a local resource and I had to buy it at ridiculous prices per bale.

Layering on the Mulch

As the vines began to poke up through the first layer and grew a few inches, I added more of the soil mix and topped it off with more straw. Eventually the entire bed was filled and covered with straw. Most of the bulk was straw and as that decomposed over the months I added more straw.

Toward the middle of the growing season I quit adding more because I didn’t want to buy another bale and it settled down to right about the top of the rock wall height. The vines were happy and wandered all over the far end of the garden, climbing up the embankment and spreading far and wide.

When I went in to harvest the potatoes, first I moved all of the straw I could lift and put it aside.

Unexpected Benefits

When I got to the bottom where the potatoes were growing, I was so pleased and downright amazed to see the difference in the soil quality. It wasn’t just yellow clay and rocks anymore. The true test came when I got out my garden fork to loosen the soil around each set of tubers. I could actually get the fork in the ground to about 6”.

That’s a huge improvement in one season and I was excited. Don’t get me wrong, there were still a lot of rocks, but I was able to get them out easily. I just added them to my wall. Some were palm-sized and many were smaller. There’s still one very large rock that is just going to stay because it doesn’t budge.

So. This experiment showed me that sweet potatoes layered with straw does not increase the amount of tubers per plant. They didn’t grow all the way up, just at the bottom where the slips were first placed. But the good thing was how much they improved the soil in my bed while mulched that way. I consider the whole experiment a resounding success with a happy outcome.

Round 2 on the Bed

Now I have the rocks sifted out, fresh organic fertilizer amendments applied, and covered with cardboard and paper feed sacks, two other of my abundant on-site resources. I’m going to plant garlic in that bed next month and add tomatoes to it in May next year.

Cardboard and paper feed sacks do make my garden look messy, I admit. But not as messy as it would look with all of the weeds that would be growing everywhere in it if I didn’t use them. I just don’t have time to pull weeds every day and this helps. Not only that, wherever I put them, the soil becomes nicer and soft because of earthworm activity.

There is a drawback, though. The armadillo that keeps getting into my garden LOVES to flip them over and dig up the paths.

And snakes like to live under them too. So I’m always vigilant on the watch for snakes and don’t pick the bags up and move them unless I lift away from myself so any hiding snake can run away.

Experiment #2-How to use the vines

The next experiment was what to do with all those vines I pulled up in the process? Well, my willow fence had a broken spot on it that I haven’t had a chance to repair. A dead persimmon tree fell on it this past spring, but the fence was still holding in the regular potatoes that were planted there.

I’ve long since taken those up, so the bed has been empty for a while with the broken fence. I tried using the sweet potato vines to see if they’d weave without breaking. They were excellent. Far stronger than I thought they’d be and not one broke while I tugged and pulled them into place. They’ll probably be brittle once they dry, but in the meantime they’re performing nicely as a temporary fix. I’ll put garlic in that bed next month, too.

More Willow

Later this winter I’ll cut new willow rods to give it a permanent fix. Willow is one of the other of my favorite on-site abundant natural resources. I’m looking forward to learning how to do better weaving and make sturdier structures for the kitchen garden by the house and for my future herb and native plant garden that I’ll be making down by my studio.

The End

And that’s it for this week’s adventures with the hermit of Wild Ozark! I hope you found it interesting. Give this podcast a follow and if you really want to help me make it successful, leave me a good review. And leave comments if you have questions or your own experiments to share. Talk to you next week!

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My most abundant local resources: Rocks, Willow, paper feed sacks, cardboard, and sweet potato vines

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