Sweet potatoes must be one of my most favourite vegetables. This was the first year I’d had a chance to grow them; Sow True Seed kindly provided a selection of slips – All Purple Organic, O’Henry and Beauregard. The vines quickly took over the garden, sending out runners like Triffads. I didn’t realise until late on that you can sauté the leaves for a mid-summer stir-fry.

My main potato crop had rotted away with Noah-like rains, so I was a little worried for the sweet potato tubers. But from 9 small slips (three of each) I pulled about 20lbs of sweet potatoes. The best crop being the Beauregard, but the biggest single potato being an All Purple Organic:

Now here comes the apocalypse…

It was a disaster: sun flares took out my humidifier and Zombie-Groundhogs destroyed my temperature controlled sweet potato curing room.

Belle: Those Whistle-Pig Swines!

Faced with an immediate post-apocalyptic existence of starchy sweet potatoes, and a long-term post-apocalyptic existence of no sweet potatoes (they need to store through the winter to sprout slips for replanting), I decided to improvise with a weather-controlled homemade sweet potato curing tent!

I kept it in the sun, zipped in up at night and placed jars of water between the scattered crop. No, I couldn’t maintain a constant temperature or humidity, but it was hotter and more humid in there than everywhere else and the netting allowed airflow during the day.

I think it was a pretty adequate PA-Solution, but the proof is in the potato.

1) they are as sweet as their name suggests – TICK

2) so far they’re surviving the winter – Optimistic TICK

I figure supermarket sellers may justify the fancy curing techniques, but for us home-growers, we have to make do with what we have and most of the time it’s more than enough!