The orange sweet potatoes and the harvest of colours

More than a year ago, I bought some orange coloured sweet potatoes from a local supermarket. Although we had a stock of homegrown sweet potatoes, the unusual colour of those in the supermarket appealed to me. The colours of the different varieties of vegetables always appeals to me. They evoke a desire within to plant and eat them.

I decided to keep four for planting when they ran out. Our homegrown sweet potatoes always run out spectacularly. Neglected, they can turn the cellar into a scene out of the movie “The Little Shop of Horrors”. Particularly as the tubers make long ghostly runners in the dark cellar. There is no mistaking a sweet potato that wants to go back underground.

With this experience of sweet potato tubers, I decided to simply let the four orange tubers lie in a protected spot in the garden office, to encourage the inevitable. After months of waiting and with nothing happening to them, I had to accept that whatever is sprayed on supermarket vegetables to make them last longer on the shelf, is obviously inhibiting the natural development of runners in the tubers.

I did not know what to do.  I could not plant them without any sign that they want to go back to their roots and by now they were no longer fresh enough to eat. Although they looked as good as the day, I bought them. The chemicals sprayed on the food we buy at supermarkets, must contain remarkable preservatives. The thought alone of what the tubers were treated with, dampened my appetite for them.

I re-discovered that one can encourage root formation in sweet potatoes by cutting them in half and suspending them in a jar of water with the cut part barely submerged. Much as one does with an avocado pip when wanting to encourage it to sprout. I decided to cut the four tubers in half and with the support of toothpicks, I suspended them in eight glass jars on a sunny windowsill. I topped up the water as it evaporated.

After two weeks, I noticed spindly white roots dangling in the water of some of the jars. I was so excited. Soon they all had roots and leaves. When the leaves were big and strong enough, we planted them in one half of a vegetable bed.

They took longer than usual to make proper tubers and in the first week of March, we decided they were ready to be harvested. Fungai started harvesting and exclaimed in surprise that the plants were bearing orange and purple sweet potatoes. I could not believe my eyes when I saw the clumps of intertwined orange and purple sweet potatoes on the same plants.

The question for me is, did the plant go back to the original purple tubers in some instances or did the treatment they received in the supermarket upset their DNA. I decided to see if the orange tubers that were homegrown, would make runners when they needed to be planted. They were grown organically and hopefully now will behave like normal vegetables in future.

In the end, the purple and orange harvest was quite special. I prefer to imagine that the enchantment of the Towerwater garden had a hand in the mystery.

Sweet Pepper seeds that my cousin gave me, surprised by making quite healthy plants. Normally, I struggle to grow Sweet Peppers. I believed it was because the pH of the soil in the vegetable garden was not acidic enough for them. However, thanks to these seeds, this year I could proudly harvest black, red, orange and green Sweet Peppers.

Our garden seems to be in a colourful mood, and I am really enjoying it. I feel like a child with all the surprises in the garden adding to a very colourful harvest.