From hero to zero with sweet potato experiment

By 
Erin Schanen

I enjoy a good garden experiment. It’s fun to grow something that you know isn’t necessarily meant to grow where you garden and see if you can make it work. And part of that fun is that there’s no shame in failure because that plant was never really meant to grow there in the first place.

Which makes what is perhaps my biggest garden failure ever so gut wrenching, because it’s hardly unheard of to grow sweet potatoes in Wisconsin.

I’ve been holding off on digging in the raised bed where I planted slips — seedlings, basically — way back in June because sweet potatoes need a lot of time in the ground. And although I could have left them there until after frost, my curiosity got the best of me and I just had to do a little digging to see what I’d grown.

Thanks to previous experiments, I went into this sweet potato attempt with a lot of confidence. I grew excellent crops of ginger and turmeric for a couple years, and I delight in surprising visitors with the two enormous red Abyssinian bananas (Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelli’) that you can’t miss in the garden. I’ve had good luck with figs, bromeliads and, so far, a gorgeous chartreuse jasmine called ‘Fiona Sunrise.’ None of these plants are “supposed” to grow in Wisconsin, but I’ve coaxed them into performing well.

So as I walked over to the vegetable garden last weekend with my mini spade and garden hod — the big one, so as to fit my harvest in one load — I was already envisioning being the hero of Thanksgiving dinner. “Why yes, I did grow these delicious sweet potatoes that are clearly the star of this meal.”

Peeling back the very healthy looking vines that overflowed the 4-by-8-foot raised bed (have I mentioned that I rarely dedicate an entire raised bed to experimental plants?), I carefully plunged my spade into the soil, far from the base of the vine. I didn’t want to accidentally spear any potatoes. The rich soil gave way and as I pried it up, the spade came up empty. So I moved a little closer and dug a little deeper. Still nothing.

Finally, I plunged my hands into the soil to root around. Surely my spade was missing something. Nothing. Not even a small potato was lurking. I repeated this over and over again, at one point digging out a root that was maybe a half-inch thick. And that was as close as I got to a potato.

One garden bed, $24 in plants and four months, and the only thing I had to show for it was dirt up to my elbows and an empty garden hod.

A cool summer and a bit more shade than I expected from the tomatoes planted to the south of the potato bed probably contributed the problems but can hardly be entirely blamed for this epic failure.

Experiments are called that for a reason; sometimes they just don’t work.

I’ll still be licking my wounds on this failure come Thanksgiving, when there will be no heroic sweet potato moment. But I’ll stick to bringing pies. The person who provides dessert is always a hero.

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Wisconsin’s largest paid circulation community weekly newspaper. Serving Port Washington, Saukville, Grafton, Fredonia, Belgium, as well as Ozaukee County government. Locally owned and printed in Port Washington, Wisconsin.

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