Trying a New Variety

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that for the last 20 years we have sweet potatoes that come up volunteer each and every year.  We never have to plant them and yet receive a nice harvest every fall.  It all started from composting one Beauregard Sweet Potato.  That one sweet potato expanded and multiplied.  To that, we added an heirloom variety called Golden Wonder, that we picked up from a guy called "The Barefoot Gardener" in Tennessee.  The Golden Wonders were prolific, producing a nice tasting sweet potato, but not as rich of a color and flavor as the Beauregard.  To add insult to injury, the Golden Wonder's crowded out the Beauregards.

Just to the east and north of us in a community between Evangeline and Iota is a farming family named Garber.  Everyone else around here grows rice.  They grow sweet potatoes.  I picked up a box of a variety they grow called Evangeline from our local feed store.  Admittedly, I purchased them to eat.  We made sweet potato fries, and I'll vouch for the flavor.  Yum!  But the other reason I bought the box was to attempt to get a local variety growing in our garden again.

No matter how thorough you are when digging sweet potatoes, you always miss a root.  From that root comes new sweet potato plants.  Here is a Golden Wonder growing up this spring.  My idea this year is to pull up 2/3's of these to allow room for the Evangeline's to get a foothold.

I picked out eight sweet potatoes from the box that were on the smaller side - we want to eat the big ones!  I also picked the ones that had "slips" or sprouts growing out from one end.

This sprout will grow out a vine.  Now you can put the sweet potato in water and the slips will grow out.  You can then clip them and they'll develop roots and grow.  I think I'm just going to plant the potato whole.  That's what we did with the Beauregard a long time ago and it grew without planting individual slips.  We'll see if this works.

I dug a shallow hole in the north part of the garden and planted the potatoes with the sprouts sticking up.

I watered them in and marked where I planted them with blue flags.

I'll keep a close eye on them.  We will hopefully experience a good growth of the Evangeline variety of sweet potato in our garden, allowing them to establish themselves so we can enjoy them year after year.