greens
fall planting
Lady In Red salvia
basil
future sweet potato
collards
Lacinato (Black Tuscan) kale
Winterbor kale
Ruby Red chard
cabbage plant
Chinese Cabbage
young Hakurei turnip
eggplant blossom
Welcome to Happy Acres!
Hi, I'm Dave and thanks for visiting. I garden in Zone 6b in southern Indiana, and I blog here about gardening, nature and food.
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A beautiful selection of greens! That Winterbor kale looks so good, and the basil is a good reminder that I have a bed full that needs to be turned into pesto, and frozen!
Looking good….really good. Will you wait until after the first frost to harvest those sweet potatoes? We have a small patch growing under cover this year, I have no idea if they are producing any potatoes but the vines look good…I was going to wait until frost took the vines before harvesting. This is only my second attempt at growing sweet potatoes so I really don’t know what I am doing and will be surprised if there are really potatoes under all those vines.:)
I ‘m of to look up Lady In Red salvia.
We will harvest all our sweet potatoes before first frost. Since we have a long frost-free season, the potatoes will size up before it frosts. Digging sweet potatoes or potatoes is always a surprise for me. I had to scrape away some soil to make sure we had some sweet taters under all those vines!
Hmm, there is a perennial Salvia variety called Hot Lips that I just added to my wish list for next season…salvia sounds like a very interesting plant.
We grew it in the community garden to attract some bees. I grow it at home because the butterflies and hummingbirds like it too.
The brassicas and greens would be impressive in late spring, but in autumn – wow! Very nice and healthy. Are you at the northern limit of the range for sweet potatoes? I’m about 100 miles north of you and wondering if they can be grown here. Harvesting sweet potatoes must be a lot like parsnips – you really don’t know how it’s going to turn out until you harvest them.
The gardeners at the community garden have done a great job of keeping the plants watered while we were waiting for rain.
You should definitely be able to grow sweet potatoes there. Our favorite is Beauregard, which is good for short season areas, also Centennial is good.
Another novice sweet potato grower here – what sort of area do the vines take up? Ive got some plants that I will plant out in the next month or so (in Australia) and I’m not sure how much space to give them. The variety looks like your tubers.
Sweet potatoes will vine quite a bit. I grow mine in rows 4 feet apart, with the plants 1 to 2 feet apart.