One Potato, Two

This time of year in New Jersey everything wants to grow. The April rains are soaking the ground, and the longer days are coaxing dormant plants to life. Some plants don’t even need that encouragement, however. We’ve all had onions sprout in our vegetable bins and noticed the eyes of stored potatoes beginning to bud. On a visit to my mother some years ago, I opened a cupboard to find three sweet potatoes that had sprouted leaves.

My parents lived in southern California, so the planting season could be a year-round affair as far as my mom’s collection of patio plants was concerned. I took the sweet potatoes outside and tucked them just as they were into random pots.

I had been back home in New Jersey for a few weeks when I got an email from my sister. She included a photo that showed the pots where I had tucked the sweet potatoes now wreathed in cascades of potato vines, and she kept me updated on their progress. Eventually the new plants got so big she divided them and took some clumps back to her yard in LA. A subsequent photo showed a good-sized patch of garden covered with sprawling sweet-potato vines. The vines eventually created more sweet potatoes, and she reported that she and her husband ate many meals featuring baked sweet potatoes from the patch.

At last they decided they had eaten enough sweet potatoes and the garden plot could be used for something else, so they dug up the remaining sweet potatoes to let the soil rest for a bit. But it didn’t rest! Somehow enough sweet-potato bits remained underground that new plants formed and vines re-emerged and she had a sweet-potato patch once again.

I was so inspired by this tale of vegetal resilience that I decided sweet potatoes were an easy and inexpensive cure for the bare spots in my yard. I bought a few sweet potatoes at the grocery store, cut them into quarters, and planted them in likely, sunny spots.

A few weeks later sprouts began to appear, and then little leaves. The foliage is quite pretty and in fact ornamental plants from the same species, batatas, can be purchased at the garden center purely for their decorative properties.

Eagerly anticipating both the landscaping possibilities of my sweet potatoes and the eventual day when I could harvest dinner from my front yard, I checked on my crop every morning—until one day the leaves and most of the vines were gone! They had been nibbled away, leaving only nubbins.

I knew that look, because I had sadly inspected the remains of lilies, hosta, poppies, pansies, and any number of other plants that had fallen prey to the neighborhood deer. (My sister’s neighborhood doesn’t have deer—though raccoons have been known to raid people’s koi ponds.) So it appears that my experiment growing sweet potatoes in New Jersey proved only that I had added yet another plant to the all-you-can-eat deer buffet that is the suburban New Jersey yard.