People, Plants, Landscapes: A sea of Sweet Potatoes. The aim here is to create a stock plant area of around eight different types of sweet potatoes. This means that most of the time these won’t be harvested, instead used for cutting material by community groups interested in cultivating SPs beyond the ‘normal’ orange one (although that’s in there too). Cuttings can be taken now up until early June for organising next season’s planting (if you’re set up to overwinter anything grown now) or taken in late November or early December for plonking straight in the ground. That’s the idea anyway. Over the years Sweet Potatoes reliably re-shoot down here at the bottom of the Burnley Field Station despite getting quite frosty. The key is the free draining soil which means the tubers mostly don’t rot even in a relatively wet winter. We’ll see how it goes 🤔. If it works I won’t have to go through the annual ritual of forcing slips from stored tubers on glasshouse bottom heat in the Burnley Nursery. And the stock material will have to be monitored for quality too in case of disease build-up. So far Sweet Potatoes in Melbourne are free of many of the things that attack them in the tropics, especially borers - one of the advantages sometimes of growing plants in a ‘sub-optimal’ environment. Thanks to @georgiemoyes @botanybits @plant.nerd.melbourne @dwiiiijjj @jimjamsgems and @hui_annetan for getting all this in the ground before last Christmas! #growingsweetpotatoes #ipomoeabatatas #motherplants #stockplants #seaofplants #groundcoverplants #beautifulfoliage #weedmat #volunteersrock #outreach #communityoutreach #urbanagriculture #novelcrops #panc #plantasalimenticiasnaoconvencionais #burnleynursery #burnleyfieldstation #urbanhorticulture