Sweet potato update

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It’s been about two months since I talked about my attempts at growing sweet potatoes, so I thought I’d give them the spotlight today.

First, there’s Mama Sweet Potato’s Place – the plant/patch that provided me with cuttings to grow more plants. Several bunches of sprouts erupted from that one potato, and being a first-time “parent”, I decided to protect the spot with an old flowerpot stand.

Rising to the challenge - but a bit too high, perhaps!

Good sense finally kicked in and I had to let Mama SP off my apron strings and let her spread out as she’s supposed to. The stand went away, but I marked the spot with a couple of sticks, just to make sure the dogs didn’t trample the main stems. As I’ve said before, my dogs have the knack of doing just that, so I play safe rather than sorry!

Mama SP marking her increasing territory day by day (at 9 weeks old). All I need to do is keep making sure the stems don't grow into the drain that I unwisely planted next to.

Mama’s “Place” keeps growing, but thankfully not as voraciously as I’d feared. That patch is about two square metres at the moment, and I’m hoping it smothers the grass that’s growing there. Go, Mama, go! :D

Then there’s the other sweet potato patch that was started from cuttings from Mama SP. I put in five of them in early April and was supposed to do more successive plantings, but I guess I got lazy. Heh. :)

Sweet potato growing from a cutting - again, well protected with stakes and an old, unused flower pot. I am protective of my babies!

I have to admit that I was somewhat sceptical about actually getting a harvest from cuttings – but that’s my Doubting Thomas Syndrome acting up as per normal. People do it all the time so why can’t I? If the potatoes form from the energy accumulated by the leaves, then there should be lots of growing happening underground right now! It’s probably too early to dig and take a look, isn’t it? But I may be curious enough to try that sometime soon… ;)

Not as advanced as the grown-from-potato patch - but then it's about 3 weeks behind.

So, let me refresh my memory again… It takes 3 to 6 months for the sweet potatoes to develop, so I still have a wait of another month or four to go. Good thing I have a bunch of other plants that keep me entertained, because there isn’t much excitement in watching sweet potato leaves growing…

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Lotta loofah ’bout nuthin’

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Remember the song Morning Side of the Mountain by Donny and Marie?

There was a girl, there was a boy
If they had met they might have found a world of joy
But he lived on the morning side of the mountain
And she lived on the twilight side of the hill

This calls to mind my loofah plants.

There was a female flower.

She blooms singly.

There was a male flower.

He has buddies to hang out with.

She bloomed first (and died within an evening).

He bloomed 3 days later (and died within the evening).

Two more male flowers bloomed, but no female was in sight.

Then another him, that died all alone.

Then a her…

Are you starting to get the picture?

Almost 2 months and still no sign of pollination. I wish they’d get themselves in sync and meet halfway on the darned afternoon foothill! >:-(

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Growing long beans

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An appropriate name - the "snake bean"

The long bean has quite a number of interesting names. Here in Singapore, we also call it by it’s Malay name, kachang panjang, but it’s also known as the snake bean, yardlong bean, dau gok in Cantonese, jiang dou in Mandarin, and the “chopstick bean” in Vietnamese.

Sidenote: I wonder about the “yard long” term, because it’s barely half that length. Whoever came up with that name must have enjoyed exaggerating a lot! Anyway we probably dropped the “yard” from the name because we use the metric system here… :P

Long beans are a good source of protein, vitamin A, thiamin, riboflavin, iron, phosphorus and potassium. They are an even better source for vitamin C, folate, magnesium and manganese. They can be eaten raw (best when they’re slim and young) or cooked. Yum!

Here’s my journey growing long beans:

Set up your trellis.

Sow seeds directly and wait about 3 days for sprouts to appear.

The plants will wind their way up your trellis and keep searching for more place to grow when they reach the top. Remember to fertilize regularly to give them all the help they need.

Flowers form between 6 to 7 weeks from sowing ... and the ants start going nuts.

It takes the flowers a day or two to open.

The day after the flower opens, the petals will dry up and drop off, leaving a tiny bean behind.

Beans will take about a week to mature. Harvest before they get too wrinkled and knobbly.

They can range from 30 to almost 50 cm.

The long bean attempt has been a success! :D

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Corn trials and tribulations

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When I first decided to start growing corn, I did what most first-timers do – I went out and bought a packet of seeds. It looked so exciting – a F1 “super sweet” Sweet Corn hybrid. I couldn’t wait to get started.

F1 hybrid sweet corn at 8 weeks

Before I did, though, I tried to plan ahead and stagger my planting so that we wouldn’t have a glut of corn all at one time. Whether that was a wise idea, I don’t know, because after I did 3 plantings, I read about how you need a whole cluster of plants so they get a better chance at pollination – which the wind helps with. I’ll have to try hand pollination when the time comes, I guess. Live and learn.

Anyway, the planting instructions were straightforward – how deep to plant the seeds, how long they would take to germinate, and how far apart to space out the plants. No problems.

Then I realized the leaves were being attacked by something when they were about a foot tall. I believe I mentioned in an earlier post how I hated that the leaves looked like long grass, right? Now couple that with how dogs eat grass when they’re not feeling well and that our dogs enjoy chewing corn cobs… Yup, the dogs were responsible – partly or in full, I don’t know – for the eaten leaves. So a barrier had to go up around the corn plants.

Top of the corn plant - can it be pollen developing?

So now it’s been 8 weeks since I planted the seeds. That’s almost 60 days, and the instructions on the packet say it’s 75 days to maturity. So it was with some excitement that I noticed something different happening at the top of one of the first plants. Some sort of stringy thing had grown out, followed a few days later by what looked like green grains forming. Those developed into what looked like long, yellowish grains hanging on by a thin stem. Pollen? I thought excitedly.

I was so focused on those developments, and visiting the plant daily to take photos that I later realized from the photos that something else was happening at the base of the plant. A bit of swelling that eventually separated from the main stem and has now started sprouting silky tassels. A cob? I thought in great excitement.

Cob forming - at the base of the plant?? Something's not right here...

Again, I was so focused on these developments that it took a few days to hit me that the plant was kinda short. Less than half a metre short, to be exact. It hit me that it was very odd, but after all the trauma the plants have been through with the dogs and other (if any) unidentified pests, I have no idea how they’re going to be affected in the long run – which is actually not all that far away. For now, I think of them as my mutant, guinea pig corn plants. If they can fruit, that would be great (but I don’t have my hopes up). If not, then I’ll start again with different seeds in a new location and hope for the best. But it really bothers me that they’re so short. I’m going to grow sunflowers to have tall plants… just for the heck of it! :)

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