The Garden Project: The end
It’s been awhile since I blogged about the Garden Project. What happened? Well, as I mentioned in my last post about the garden, we were getting pretty busy and not making time for it. Then, the end of August and most of September were pretty awful for us. Steven wasn’t even here most of September. I visited the garden once in September, and today was the first time we have gone back since then. It was time to clean it up and dig up the sweet potatoes!
So, here is what the garden looked like when we got there:
Yeah, I know it looks bad, but not as bad as the gardens around ours:
I am not sure if those people ever used their garden at all!
We picked as many weeds as we could felt like and hauled them to the designated weed area:
All done!
Yeah. I am kind of doubting we will get our $10 deposit back.
Enough about the stupid weeds. The fun part was the first thing we did when we got to the garden – dig up the sweet potatoes!
Remember that we started them from slips in our home? We started growing them indoors on May 8th and planted them on June 22nd.
I hope we did not dig them up too late (they only survive one frost, I think)! They look good!
I was squinting because the sun was so bright!
It was fun digging around in the dirt looking for them – like finding treasure!
And we dug up a lot of them!
I hope they taste okay. I’m not that familiar with sweet potatoes, so I am not sure what they should taste like. I’ll let you know if they turn out any good!
If we still live in the same area next year, we will probably grow a garden again, but be smarter about it. We’ll start crops earlier in our house, and only plant the things we really liked from this year – cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, peppers (if they’ll grow) and maybe sweet potatoes. We’ll probably use some sort of fertilizer and put something down (newspaper, etc.) to keep the weeds from growing.
If you could have one type of produce fresh all year round, what would you choose?
I think it would have to be green beans. I am still disappointed we didn’t yield a very big crop!
Would you be interested in seeing a break-down of the cost of the garden?
We saved all of our receipts to keep track of the cost, but I haven’t compiled it yet. I can if you guys are interested!
For fun, here are links to all of the other Garden Project posts:
Getting Started
It’s Alive (I think)
I’ll do that tomorrow
We never have to weed again, right?
It’s Edible!
Can we grow anything other than cucumber and zucchini (and sometimes green beans)?
We have tomatoes!
We specialize in miniature food!
Themocracy
Wow, you sure did get a lot of sweet potatoes! I hope they are good and you enjoy them. I really love sweet potatoes! I like them baked, as fries (baked in the oven), and mashed with a little cinnamon. 🙂
Hahaha, those sweet potatoes make me laugh. They’re so wrinkly. I like the one of you squinting. It looks like you’re cracking up about it.
Hmm, I think I’d like to have good tomatoes all year. Winter tomatoes are so gross.
I love sweet potatoes!! I go on binges in the fall where I eat them for a snack all the time. Yum. They are SO good for you.
And yes, absolutely delicious in butter and brown sugar with a little cinnamon but…uh, not so healthy that way. 😉 They are good for making roast sweet potato fries too!
Love,love,love sweet potatoes. How are you going to cook them. I love roasted or baked like a regular potatoe. Add some plain yogurt and blk beans if you bake them…delish!`
I am not sure how we will cook them yet! I have heard they are good with baked beans and I am anxious to try them that way!
Haha! I love that almost everyone’s garden was overgrown. Did anyone actually have one that looked worked on?
I’m kind of jealous about your sweet potato stash. I eat them like crazy so.. you know.. if you decide you don’t like them you could always send them my way. 😉
Yeah, a few people had very nice gardens. But I think at least 50% of the people never worked on theirs at all!
I could live on raspberries!
Sweet potatoes are the best. Kandi and Diane are right on about ways to eat them.
I would love to see the cost breakdown. Sweet taters would actually be what I would try to grow– if I had a garden OR a green thumb 🙂
Yay! Your potatoes look great!! Try making some fries or making a baked potato. They are super tasty 🙂
Nice taters! They are very versatile and, as Paula above says, “super tasty”, in addition to being very healthy. I think that you can do almost anything with them that you would do with a regular potato – fry the, roast them, bake them, mash them. I even have a really good lentil recipe that calls for them.
What is the lentil recipe? We love lentils!
I used to hate sweet potatoes but recently discovered that I actually like them now! I don’t have any good recipes but they’re good just baked.
Doesn’t look like most people will get their $10 back!
If I could have anything all year I think it would bell peppers (red or yellow). Or avocados 🙂
Either green beans or lemon boy tomatoes. Good job with the potatoes! I didn’t grow any of those this year!