While we wait for the sap to start flowing, we’re not just sitting around twiddling our thumbs. Just because the snow’s not melted off the garden yet doesn’t mean we can’t go ahead and start growing this summer’s veggies! Did anyone else try the sprouting sweet potato experiment in their elementary school science class? You take a sweet potato, stick toothpicks into the sides so it can rest suspended in a jar of water, put it in a sunny window, and wait for it to sprout. Well, we’re reliving our childhoods! Sweet potato plants are expensive (relatively speaking), and we still have several of last summer’s sweet potatoes nicely preserved in a five-gallon bucket full of dry sand in the cellar. So we took two of them and put them in wide-mouth canning jars full of water. Minus the toothpicks. Toothpicks? We don’t need no stinkin’ toothpicks. And just like in school, the potatoes are sprouting roots & leaves and fascinating the youngsters in the house. Every morning when Amanda wakes up, she checks on the “Seet Taytoes” to see how they’re growing. If the leaves of the latest shoot are big enough, she helps Daddy clip them to start another plant. We’ve already started fifteen plants this way, which should produce enough sweet potatoes to keep Baby Rachel in pureed sweet potatoes until…oh, her sophomore year of college.
