written by Alan R Hickman
It was an item in a 2010 seed catalogue for one potted short-season sweet potato for
$8.30, that got it all started.
The listing promised a harvest of 2 to 5 kilos per plant, so, with sweet potatoes costing $2,84 a kilo at Fortino's, it didn't seem much of a money maker, and who grows sweet potatoes in Canada anyway?
There is an old saying "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."
After seven decades, I should have known better and just turned the page, but no, I had to go poking around on the internet to see what this sweet potato thing was all about.
It didn't take long to discover the Weldon, NB based Mapple Farm website, www.mapplefarm.com, and the answers to all the questions someone who knows nothing about sweet potatoes might ask.
To quote from the website introduction, "For the adventurous gardener with a 100-day frost-free season, shor tseason sweet potatoes are certainly worth a try. At Mapple Farm (Zone 5) we consider them to be an easy and dependable crop."
The introduction also notes "We are proud to be the first and longest serving mail order sweet potato stock supplier in Canada."
Although there isn't a history of sustained commercial production, in 'good' years at least, sweet potatoes certainly can be grown successfully in southern Ontario.
A rule of thumb might be that if a location will produce a decent crop of mid-season tomatoes, it likely can produce a worthwhile yield of sweet potatoes.
Unlike regular potatoes, sweet potatoes are not grown from the tubers but from rooted sprouts taken from the tubers in spring.
From a mail order point of view this is a real advantage because slips weigh bery little and consequently shipping costs are relatively small.
As well as being economical to ship, sweet potato slips in small quantities are about $1.25 each.
Assuming even a minimum of two kilos per plant, $0.63/kg home-grown versus store-bought at $2.84/kg is looking good.
At the other extreme, if you can get five kilos per plant, the cost is a quarter per kilo and you can go to Bermuda on the savings.
But wait, as they say on the worst TV channels, there's more.
Because properly cured sweet potatoes store for months at ordinary household temperatures, it is practical for home gardeners to produce their own slips.
Having started with good commercial stock and raised a first crop, it should be possible to select small tubers from the most productive plants and to sprout those the following year.
I can almost feel the sun and smell the salt in the air.
Mapple has seven different cultivars on offer.
As well as the copper-skinned orange-fleshed types familiar in the grocery store, there are cultivars with burgundy skins and cream-coloured flesh, others with red or pink skins, and 'Frazier White' - no prize for guessing the colour of that one, but it is described as being very sweet.
Now, it just happens that Peel Teaching Garden has a nice, sloping, south-facing plot, sheltered from the wind and seemingly ideal for sweet potatoes.
Just one problem: last year it was planted to tomatoes and, when late blight swept the area and destroyed the vines, the soil likely became a huge reservoir of fungal spores.
Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are not in the same family as tomatoes and potatoes, but are they susceptible to late blight?
An e-mail from Greg Wingate, proprietor of Mapple Farms, was quite categorical; no, sweet potatoes are not affected by the fungus.
In fact, being a tropical plant - grocery store produce comes from Honduras, among other places - Ipomoea's native predators can't survive the winters here and the plant is relatively pest free.
As the whole purpose of a teaching garden is to teach, Mapple got an order for 60 slips, some of each cultivar, for a demonstration project.
If this is a 'good' year, and if we get things right, there should be enough crop to supply the volunteers and to send a couple of hundred kilos to the food bank.
If the weather is not cooperative and if we get things all screwed up, there is just as much to be learned - perhaps even more - from failure.
Although the web information was pretty comprehensive, Mapple offered a book on the subject written by one Ken Allan of Kingston.
A quick Google search produced Ken Allan's web site and a postal address, so I put a twenty dollar bill in an envelope and a few days later; 'Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden with Special Techniques for Northern Growers'showed up in my letterbox.
The 204 page book, self-published in 1998, is a definitive treatment of subject, and it is well worth the price, even if the reader ends up deciding not to attempt growing sweet potatoes.
There are no secret techniques, no magic formulas and no cutting-edge technologies, not even any miracle fertilizers.
Sweet potatoes will make do with clay or with sandy soils, they'll put up with drought and floods, and they will get by with high or low levels of nutrition.
The only thing sweets demand is that their roots be kept warm and toasty, and that can be achieved with nothing more hi-tech than a sheet of clear plastic stretched tightly over the soil.
High Temperature:
Actual: -6°C cloudy flurries Wind NNW30km/h P.O.P.70%
Average: 1°C
Record: 11°C in 2000
Low Temperature:
Actual: -14°C cloudy flurries 6.10cm Wind NNW25km/h P.O.p.40%
Average: -8°C
Record: -23°C in 1940
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