sustainable scraps: vegetable gardening with *17 Apart* { SWEET POTATOES }

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Hey there! We are Tim and Mary from 17 Apart — our little corner of the blog world where we love to share the things that make us tick, diy projects, recipes, the antics of our 2 year old weimaraner puppy, and a few surprises from time to time. We hope you’ll stop by and join our adventure.

tim & mary of 17 apart

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about the sustainable scraps series: In our constant quest to live and eat in a more sustainable fashion, we have become big fans of learning to grow many different types of foods organically. After moving from a home with a big yard and lots of ground space for our garden, we then moved into a house in the heart of the city (Hey there, fellow Richmonders!) with no yard. Since then, we’ve been forced to think creatively to find vertical solutions in order to grow the same vegetables we once grew in the ground — and now find ourselves with a thriving container garden.

Through this creative gardening challenge, we’ve come across several other ways to grow vegetables both indoors and out right from the scraps of their previous counterparts. We’ve learned how resilient plants can be and we’re really amazed at how all they want to do is thrive to grow. Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing examples of the vegetables we’ve been able to successfully re-grow into new food and beautiful houseplants.

visit

{part 1} : regrowing celery

& 

{part 2} : regrowing green onions 

& 

today: {part 3} : regrowing sweet potatoes 

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How to Grow Sweet Potatoes Anywhere

Did you know you can grow sweet potatoes virtually anywhere with a few key ingredients? It’s true — whether you have a big backyard or a tiny fire escape, you can take on this growing project! It’s a great learning process to try with your kids, and can yield a bountiful crop should you want to grow them for food or simple have as a beautiful vined house plant to keep along your windowsill just for looks. Today we’re going to show you how to get them started and lay out the steps we’ve taken in order to plant our own first backyard container crop of sweet potatoes.

After picking up 3 large sweet potatoes one weekend to make more of our own sweet potato dog chews, we decided to see if we couldn't try to grow some of our own. 

 

To get potatoes started, it's not quite as simple as planting a seed. Begin by cutting the potato in half, inserting 3 toothpicks midway into one half of the sweet potato and rest it in a shallow vase of water.

 

With the cut portion of the potato resting in water and the upper half exposed to the air in a sunny window, roots will begin to grow from the bottom and stem sprouts from the top. Multiple shoots can sprout from the top, all of which could become their own potato plant.

 

After a few weeks of growing time in your sunny window, the sweet potato should sprout both roots and stems (called slips) similar to below:

 

Continue to water the potato base and let your slip sprouts grow.

 

Once the slips reach about 5 inches long, twist them off from the base and set them stem side down in a shallow bowl of water to promote root growth directly from these slip vines:

 

Within as soon as 24 hours, you’ll begin to notice little white roots growing all around the lower portion of your sweet potato slips. What surprised us most was how they shot out from all over the stems of the slips instead of down through the bottom where we'd twisted them off the mother sweet potato.

 

We let the new root growth get about 1 inch long in the water dish (about 1 week) and then took them on outside to plant. You can plant them directly into the ground or choose a container system that works for you.

As for how we planted them — we had to go with an above ground container system since we don't have enough ground space to contain the potatoes or vines. We decided to use one of our large burlap coffee sacks we'd gotten from Blanchard's Coffee, our local source for roasted beans here in RVA, and got to it

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We filled up the base of the bag with a mixture of loose dirt and organic potting soil — sweet potatoes prefer very loose soil or ground as opposed to packed in dirt. Once we filled the bag about 1/3 full we rolled down the sides of the sack to just above the dirt and planted both root slips directly into the soil.

We placed the rooted stems into the dirt and loosely packed soil to the tops of the remaining leaves. As the slips grow into longer vines, we can easily roll up the sides of the sack and fill in more dirt if need be. Btw, that's our supervisor performing quality control up there :)

Since we planted our first slips, the roots have taken hold and they continue to slowly thrive. Here’s a shot of what they look like today:

 

Indoors, we’ve also continued to sprout the original sweet potato base with new slips. As you can see below, one of them has taken off into a full fledged vine. We like the idea of nurturing it as a houseplant but may decide at some point to transfer over to its own bag of soil.

 

Sweet potatoes take a really long time to grow, but we're excited to see if we are able to do it. We hear the actual potatoes don't really start forming until their beautiful purple flowers begin to bud, which could be as long as August. We should be able to harvest these sweet potatoes in early September and also hear the longer you leave them in before the first frost, the larger they will grow. Oh, and by harvest, I mean turn this potato sack over and dump out multiple pounds worth of sweet potatoes!

Should be an interesting adventure from here on out! Keep up with the ongoing progress of our sweet potato growing project here and we’d love to know in the comments section of this post if you plan to try it yourself! 

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thanks ever-so-much, tim & mary! 

thrilled at how very much all of you nicies ADORED their 1st fabulous post on regrowing celery & the 2nd wonderful post on regrowing green onions!

so delighted to have you nicies on the blog (we're all such fans of your fabulous DIY & handcrafted lives.) peek at tim & mary's  beautiful new home, their gorgeous doggie Basil, & an abundance of mouth-watering recipes as a wee little intro to these inspiring handmaking superstars.

& be sure to tune in soon for the next installment of the 17 apart series: 

sustainable scraps!

what are you growing these days, nicies? 

we'd love to hear!

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sustainable scraps: vegetable gardening with *17 apart* {CELERY}

................

Hey there! We are Tim and Mary from 17 Apart — our little corner of the blog world where we love to share the things that make us tick, diy projects, recipes, the antics of our 2 year old weimaraner puppy, and a few surprises from time to time. We hope you’ll stop by and join our adventure.

tim & mary of 17 apart

................

about the sustainable scraps series: In our constant quest to live and eat in a more sustainable fashion, we have become big fans of learning to grow many different types of foods organically. After moving from a home with a big yard and lots of ground space for our garden, we then moved into a house in the heart of the city (Hey there, fellow Richmonders!) with no yard. Since then, we’ve been forced to think creatively to find vertical solutions in order to grow the same vegetables we once grew in the ground — and now find ourselves with a thriving container garden.

Through this creative gardening challenge, we’ve come across several other ways to grow vegetables both indoors and out right from the scraps of their previous counterparts. We’ve learned how resilient plants can be and we’re really amazed at how all they want to do is thrive to grow. Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing examples of the vegetables we’ve been able to successfully re-grow into new food and beautiful houseplants.

................

Did you know you can actually regrow many plants from their scraps? Well, it’s true and today we’re excited to share with you how easy it can be to regrow celery you’ve bought from the grocery store in your own home. 

To get started, simply chop the celery stalks from the base of the celery bunch you bought from the store and use them as you normally would. In our case, we had a particular homemade bean dip that needed sampling right away :)

Instead of tossing the celery base, rinse it off and place it in a small saucer or bowl of warm water on or near a sunny windowsill — base side down and cut stalks facing upright. 

We let our celery base hang out in the saucer of water for right around one week, give or take. Over the course of the week, the surrounding stalks began to dry out significantly, but the tiny little yellow leaves from the center of the base began thickening, growing up and out from the center, and turned a dark green. 

The growth was slow, but steady and evident.

After the 5-7 days were complete, we transferred our celery base to a planter and covered it completely save for the leaf tips with a mixture of dirt and potting soil.

For the container, we decided to recycle a tin of steel cut oats we had on hand into a planter by essentially punching holes in the bottom of tin and fitting the top onto the base to allow for and catch drainage. 

Find full instructions for turning tins into a planter here, and keep in mind you can really use anything you have on hand for a planter so long as you create holes for drainage.

We placed a thin layer of mulch at the base to help with drainage, followed by a thick layer of dirt/potting soil mixture. After placing the celery base snugly in the planter, we filled the remaining space with more dirt/potting soil to completely cover the celery base. We kept the top to the oats tin and flipped it over to place the new planter on top of it — the lid is a perfect custom fit to the base and catches any runoff from regular watering.

We watered it generously and after planting in the soil, the overall growth really took off. Not only did the celery leaves regenerate themselves from the base, but you could see clear stalks making their way up and out. 

Here’s what our progress looked like not even a week after planting the celery base in the container:

After a few more weeks of growing time in our sunny window, our celery has continued to thrive. The leaves have grown out generously and bushy and the celery stalks underneath have really taken shape:

 

We are now at right around the 2 month mark from planting our little celery base and here’s what we’re currently looking like:

 

While not at the point where Tim can slather some pimento cheese on a thick stalk of celery, we’ve definitely got some steady progress along with a pretty little house plant. When planting celery from seed, the growing process can take 5 or more months to reach desired stalk size, so it’s a slow process that takes a little patience.

A few notes:

• Change out the water every couple of days while in the "saucer" phase of the project. We also used a spray bottle to spray water directly onto the base of the celery where the leaves were growing out.
• Some people have had luck planting their celery bases directly into the ground soil outside after the saucer phase — you may want to go this route if you live in a temperate area or want to be able to harvest outdoors. We went with an indoor planter since it's still pretty cold here in VA, we have limited outdoor space in the city, and the space we do have is currently unprotected from our curious puppy.
• Continue to generously water the celery after planting to keep it thriving.

After seeing just how easy it can be to regrow celery, we hope you’ll give it a try and come back to let us all know how it’s going. Find our original blog post about re-growing celery from the base on our blog, 17 Apart, along with other gardening and DIY projects to try out.

We are now at right around the 2 month mark from planting our little celery base and here’s what we’re currently looking like:

 

................

thanks ever-so-much, tim & mary! 

so delighted to have you nicies on the blog (we're all such fans of your fabulous DIY & handcrafted lives.) peek at tim & mary's  beautiful new home, their gorgeous doggie Basil, & an abundance of mouth-watering recipes as a wee little intro to these inspiring handmaking superstars.

& be sure to tune in soon for the next installment of the 17 apart series: 

sustainable scraps!

what are you growing these days, nicies? 

we'd love to hear!

Pin It