Hi Ilene,

For a minute there, when I read the subject line, I thought you were channeling Winston Churchill and one of his many famous quotes: "Never, never, never give up." LOL

Sometimes it is amazing to see seeds sprout months after you originally planted them....or to have plants sprout that you KNOW you never planted (thank the birds for those) or just to see how volunteers move around the property. For example, I've had poppies come up a 400 or 500' away from where I planted them.....and with the woods, house, barn, shrubs, etc. between the place they were planted and the place they "magically" appeared. You have to wonder how tiny poppy seeds travel so far on the wind, but clearly they do.

I also love getting accidental crosses. My favorite "cross" was a pink (instead of red) Texas Red Star Hibiscus. I also had white swamp mallow in the area and the pink probably was a cross of the two. The pink-flowered one survived for several years and I never saved seed from it and now I wish I had.

Actually, I did know that sweet potatoes bloom. (smile) And, after all, why shouldn't they? Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are, after all, members of the morning glory family and you can see the resemblance in their flowers, can't you? It is the flowers that allowed plant breeders to cross different heirloom varieties back in the "old days" (before gene-splicing and other genetic manipulation) to create new hybrid varieties.

I've grown quite a few different varieties of sweet potatoes and some of them have had pink or purple or white (or bicolor) flowers, and I think at least one had reddish colored flowers. In last year's cool and rainy weather, even my ornamental sweet potatoes bloomed. Their flowers, though, weren't quite as large or as showy as the flowers on most agricultural sweet potatoes.

Here in my part of Oklahoma, the sweet potatoes don't usually bloom until September or October, and they bloom best as the daylight hours shorten and the periods of nighttime darkness increase.

Four o'clocks are one of my favorites because they are so tough and can survive incredible drought. I have tons of the common, everyday hot pink ones and also some very pale pink ones that I didn't plant, so they must be from a cross or a mutations. I have quite a lot of the really deep fuschia-flowered ones, and a few with white and yellow flowers. Clearly the white-flowered and yellow-flowered ones are much less vigorous because I only have a handful of them every year whereas I have dozens of the pink and fuschia-flowered ones. And, as much as I love the speckled and splotched "Broken Colors" four o'clocks, they do not come back reliably at all here at our house.

Wherever I have a compost pile, I end up with 4 o'clocks sprouting and growing in the pile even though I do not put 4 o'clock plant debris in the pile (because seeds will sprout and take over the pile!). So, I guess plants will do what they're going to do!

I like to plant sweet potatoes in the sandy soil underneath the pecan tree where they grow into a lovely seasonal ground cover...and they can spead to their heart's content and NOT take over the whole veggie garden. Under that pecan tree, the 4 o'clocks and sweet potatoes can slug it out and fight for control and it seems to be a draw. At first it seems like the four o'clocks are winning, but then the sweet potatoes come on strong from mid-summer on.

I haven't been doing much gardening at all, but lots of yard work (pruning, mowing, weedeating, cleaning up fallen debris from trees from earlier storm damage). Still dry here, so I have been out watering today....there are still some pumpkins, okra, peppers and tomatoes producing and since the wind (with no accompanying rain) from the remnants of Gustav blew hard here for a couple of days, everything wilted and was in desperate need of a good soaking.

The dog yard is the most successful "garden" at the current time. They've grown several gourd plants, and dozens of gourds, from last year's gourds that they got to tear up and bury in early winter. The dogs have harvested several kinds of gourds all summer and use the gourds to play ball or to chew. I get to keep the surviving gourds for fall decorations. Their sunflower forest (about 100 large plants with multiple flowers) is about dead and all the flowers have gone to seed. Small birds harvest the seeds constantly, so the dogs are doing their part to "feed the birds".

By far the toughest flower we grow that volunteers and survives on its' own with no water other than natural rainfall is gomphrena (globe amaranth) "Strawberry Fields". I had it in the garden border one year, and I guess seed either blew downhill to the spot where the driveway meets the road, or maybe it washed downhill. Now we have a couple of patches of "Strawberry Fields" alongside the driveway near the mailbox, and it looks really good despite DH repeatedly mowing it down. (Turn him loose on the riding mower and nothing is safe.) Even in this year's drought the plants never died, although they wilted and dropped leaves. Since it rained a couple of weeks ago, they've really perked up.

I'm seeing a lot of color change in the foliage here.....and it is too early for autumn, so I can only assume that the leaves are yellowing and browning because of the drought, even though the rain we had in August put a stop to that for a while.

Dawn

There are a number of things I'd have done differently this year, looking back. We're only starting, now, to get a good crop of okra. My wife and I realize that we REALLY miss that giant bumper crop we usually have. I didn't get in as much corn (Indian/field) as normal. Now, we're sorry. It has done great.

Tomatoes have performed like champs, here, this year. Even temperamental varieties did well. Our Baker Family Heirloom tomatoes look like they not only never slowed down, but they're actually revving up for fall.

But sweet potatoes, well, they make a person smile! All summer they have survived neglect and everything that nature could throw at them. The hills are pushing up, as I imagine they are growing at a good pace. I even put in a row on July 18, just to see what would happen. That row is looking WONDERFUL! Now, I'm starting to weed the sweet potatoes. They are a weedy mess. But it's obvious that the weeds didn't gain the upper hand; the sweet potatoes have done that!

Right now is the time I need to take, in order to make notes about better ways to do things, for next year.

George
in waterlogged Tahlequah OK

George,

As much rain as you've had, you'll probably have a huge crop of sweet potatoes! They are a breeze to grow, aren't they, as long as you have good loose soil for them. I think sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas grow better in hot, dry weather than anything else. Even okra, which is pretty tough, will wilt more than they do in the heat of the day (esp. if little rain is falling).

A surprising number of our tomato and pepper plants survived the drought and our "no-watering" policy in August, and are blooming and setting new fruit for fall, so I broke down and watered them yesterday.

Still hot and dry here, so in my "notes" for next year, I'll remind myself to plant as early as possible to try to beat the heat and drought. Of course, planting early didn't work out well this year with the cold nights into early May, but there's always a chance next year will be better.

Dawn

Well, I can agree, this has been a summer of lessons for me too, for sure!

Next summer will be even more interesting. We just signed a contract to buy the house next door. We'll use it as a rental property. The back yard is pretty deep, and the fence goes out probably four feet further toward the park than ours does, so we plan to fence off part of that back yard and use it for extra garden space. It still leaves enough yard in the back for renters.

I am toying with planting corn, beans and squash over there. I'm not sure what kind of dirt it's going to be, as there used to be a lot of trees in that back yard before the previous owners cut them all down. They only lived there about two years, and previous to that it was owned by their grandmother, who lived there for most of the years while raising their dad and aunt, and who, incidentally, planted all those trees. Knowing the family to not be a very "energetic" bunch, I can imagine that they never raked the yard of leaves and grass clippings. I'm hoping not, because that will make the soil pretty decent. I'm on a quest for cow manure or chicken litter, as I figure I'll need a bunch.

I might even grow tomatoes over there next year, depending on the soil condition, as my raised beds don't give me much opportunity to rotate things over here.

Another advantage to owning that house is that we can control who lives there. Having bad neighbors to the south of us is motivation enough to want to buy every house around us. We certainly don't want to be the peanut butter in the sandwich, and we were for a little while with the previous owners, who owned a huge basset hound for awhile, put him in a small pen out in the back yard not far from where we sit on our back porch in the evening. They never cleaned up after him, and he stunk. He was constantly tipping over his water dish. He bayed CONSTANTLY, day and night. Under the same conditions, I would have, too, so I really couldn't be mad at the dog. The neighbors on the other side of them had a new baby and they complained so much about the noise at night that finally they gave the dog away -- and GUESS who they gave it to???? MY NEIGHBORS ON THE SOUTH, THAT'S WHO!! Thankfully, he didn't get along with their other dogs and they eventually turned him over to the SPCA. At that point, those people had about nine dogs when the City ordinances sets a limit at three.

Oh, but I got off track!

I always have volunteers of one kind or another come up in my compost bin. Usually I'll scoop them out and plant them somewhere and see what I get. I always seem to have volunteer sunflowers and tomatoes. Last year, we had probably ten very delicious cantaloupe from volunteer plants that came up after I put all my compost in the new raised bed. I just let them grow where they came up. This spring there were three or four plants that looked promising that I transplanted from the compost to a better location. One was a spaghetti squash and I actually got three squash before the squash bugs overwhelmed the plant. The other two were yard long bean that I have no idea how they got there. I had planted all the yard long beans I was given in a trade in the raised bed, probably 30 feet away. Is it possible a bird ate a few of the beans from where I planted them and then "deposited" them into the compost? Totally strange.

I've been trying to keep a journal of sorts, but I'm not very good about remembering to write in it. Invariably, I'll lose a plant marker and look back to find out what I planted "there", and I won't know because I failed to write that down.

Dawn, maybe you'll be getting some of that rain that's forecast in a few days, I hope. George, I think you're getting more rain in Tahlequah than we are here right now. We had enough rain yesterday morning that I didn't have to do any watering, but for the most part I've been having to water a few things every now and then.

So when can I dig my sweet potatoes? George you mentioned them hilling up. Do they try to push themselves up out of the ground when they're ready to dig? I am SOOO looking forward to my first baked sweet potato with real butter, salt and pepper. Yum..

Ilene,

What a great idea.....buying the house next door! A great solution to the "bad neighbor" problem, since you'll get to choose your own tenant! And I'm glad you'll have more gardening space. I'm assuming the part you'll be gardening on has quite a bit of sunlight since they cut down a lot of the trees?

I like living on acreage in the country precisely because we don't have irritating neighbors just a few yards from the house. However, we lucked out when we bought this place because we have the BEST neighbors in the world! Of course, in rural areas there are many other challenges, including poachers who hunt on your land without permission (it is scarey to have a bullet whiz by your head just a couple of inches from you when you're out in your own yard) and people who dump pets "in the country" as if the poor things can survive on their own out here. Still, I love rural life and could never go back to living in a neighborhood with standard-sized lots.

Ilene, our chances of rain are very, very, very slim. For a while we had some hope that the remains of Gustav would dump rain on us, but it all stayed east of us, although we had very high winds--into the upper 30s--and clouds for a couple of days. During the next week, I think our highest chance of rain is about 30% and I'm betting we get no rain at all. The weather patterns this year just seem to carry all the rain east of us most of the time, and occasionally west of us, but it just doesn't fall here. I keep hoping, but the rain keeps missing us.

Unlike many other crops, sweet potatoes don't actually reach a "ripe" stage when you can harvest them. You can harvest them whenever you want once the potatoes have sized up and attained a decent size. To check and see if they are large enough to harvest, just gently dig away the soil from around a plant or two and look to see how large the sweet potatoes are. If they are large enough, harvest them or, if not quite large enough yet, you can leave them in the ground until they achieve the right size.

You should dig your sweet potatoes before your soil temperature drops to 50 degrees because temps below 50 degrees damages the sweet potatoes. Currently, soil temperatures are still mostly in the 70s and even in the 80s, so I think you can leave them in the ground for a while longer if you want them to get bigger.

In general, most sweet potatoes produce harvest-sized potatoes at or after 110 to 120 days from the time they were planted. In rainier years, the potatoes may be large enough to harvest quite a bit earlier than that though.

Both in southern OK and in many parts of Texas, harvesting generally starts in October. You're further north, though, so you may be able to harvest earlier.

Dawn

Yes, I agree with all that Dawn just wrote. I plant my sweet potatoes in raised hills (ridges) about 18" high. But when the roots are really growing I can often see the bulges in the ridges. Sometimes a sweet potato will even pop up out of the ground. They really are easy to grow. Probably the thing they need most is heat. So, Oklahoma is a good place to raise them!

I got Nemagold and Oklahoma Red, two new varieties (for me) from Sandhill Preservation Center, this summer. They went in on July 18. I'll be happy if I just get roots for starting sprouts next spring. But I believe I may well get eating size roots.

George

OK, thanks you two. I may just go out there and take a closer look. I had planned to take my kitchen shears out and trim off all the vines that are out into the walk ways but then I saw the flower and, well, A.D.D. took over.

Will it hurt anything if I cut the vines back so I can actually walk between the beds again?

Ilene,

I don't think it will hurt that much as long as you leave enough foliage that the plants continue to grow without a setback. I love the way sweet potato foliage can run all over the place, but when you get lots of rainfall, you certainly can see extreme amounts of excess foliage.

If you don't want to chop off the foliage, you can just move it around with your hands to clear a path, assuming it hasn't rooted into the ground or mulch. In Dr.Cotner's book on growing veggies in Texas, he recommends moving around the foliage every 7 to 10 days to keep it from rooting into the ground or mulch, by the way. Why? Because if the runners root into the ground, new sweet potatoes can begin to grow there. This ought to be considered a "plus" but Dr. Cotner cautions that if this happens, the newer potatoes could take reduce the size of the primary crop, which may or may not be an issue for a home gardener. Personally, I've grown them both ways....letting the runners root into the ground and also NOT letting them root into the ground, and I think I get about the same amount of potatoes per plant no matter what.

Dawn

I always try to do it Dr.Cotner's way. But usually I end up too busy and the weeds get in there. I'm doing good to turn the vines two or three times per season.

Ilene, if you just toss those vines back on the plants and out of the way, inside of half a week they'll right themselves and look just great. But trimming some doesn't hurt either. One of my friends had his sweet potatoes eaten to the ground, by deer, in August I believe, and it didn't seem to hurt the harvest at all. They just bounced back and kept growing!

George