molokai sweet potatoes

This is my first year at attempting to grow purple sweet potatoes.  I bought 3 slips from Baker Rare Seeds and they were teeny tiny when they arrived.  I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I plopped them into a pot and pretty much forgot about them in the frenzy of the summer gardening.  That’s why I hate companies that do delayed shipping, by the way.  Sometimes you completely forget that you ordered something by the time you finally get it.

In any case, the slips slowly grew into short vines and I’m going to now transplant them into their own individual pots.  I’m still figuring out the sunlight situation in the yard, so I’m going to keep them in containers for this first year so I don’t inadvertently start a sweet potato jungle by not digging them all up properly.  Sweet potatoes are notorious or coming back every year if you don’t dig up every single one.

Here’s a short video of how they looked in their original pot:

figgy

This is our fig tree, Figgy.  I’m not very imaginative with the names, I know.  He was a wedding gift from a dear friend, Amy, whose son had purchased a cutting years ago from Monticello.  History claims that this green variety, the Marseilles fig, was one of Jefferson’s favorites after he received it from a French diplomat.

The care of a fig tree is definitely a labor of love.  Figgy spent his first winter indoors with us, dropping all his leaves and somehow coming back in the spring.  Over-wintering a fig is not for the faint of heart.  I planted him in the front yard as a single branching trunk and he completely died back with the snow each year.  He is now a big bushy octopus of a plant, with four little green figs.  We haven’t gotten much rain this summer, so I’m a little worried.  Fingers crossed!

I’m also working on rooting a branch for my sister to celebrate her new house in Maryland.  One of the best things about fig trees is how easy they are to share!

an indoor garden

As fall settles in, I’m busily planning an indoor oasis.  It gets very blah outside during winter in northern Virginia, with very little color unless you’re lucky enough to have evergreens in your yard.  I’m sticking with the tried-and-true houseplants that are very difficult to kill.

On a recent trip to Ikea, I found a beautiful little golden pothos crammed into a 4″ pot.  Sadly, I forgot to take a “before” picture, but I managed to gently separate it into 4 pretty little pots of 2-3 stems each.  What looked like a big flourishing plant was actually a collection of many clippings, closely grouped.

If you’ve never tried to propagate pothos, it’s amazingly easy.  You just snip it off at a 2-node section and stick the stem back into the soil.  They start to air root naturally, as they are climbing vines, so you can multiply your plants many times in one growing season.  I kept back two of the smallest clippings and will be documenting their growth over the next few months.

Here are the bare root clippings:

And here is the baby plant we’ll be following:

Not bad for a morning’s work and $2.50!